What does First B Jackson teach about triumphal entry?

At First B Jackson, the teaching on the triumphal entry consistently starts with what the crowd actually expected when they poured out of Jerusalem waving palm branches. The palm branch was not ceremonial decoration. It was a nationalist symbol, visible on coins from the period and reaching back to the Maccabean revolt, and the people shouting 'Hosanna,' which means 'save us now,' were calling for a military king who would do to Rome what had been done to the Seleucids. The raising of Lazarus, just two miles away in Bethany only days earlier, had set the crowd on fire. For a people living under occupation, a man who could call the dead back to life looked like exactly the general you would want on your side. Pastor Mark has described Jesus in this moment as 'the king of peace, coming to save the nations rather than defeat them,' riding a donkey's colt rather than a war horse, fulfilling Zechariah's prophecy that the disciples themselves did not understand until after the resurrection.

The distance between 'Hosanna' and 'Crucify him' is something the teaching here does not soften. Within a week, the same city was calling for Jesus's execution. Pilate declared him innocent repeatedly, his own wife warned him away from it, and he handed Jesus over anyway because he was afraid of the politics. The word the teaching returns to is fickle. People applaud Jesus when he seems to be giving them what they want, and they turn when he does not. Luke records that as Jesus came near the city he wept over it, and Pastor Carl has pointed out that the Greek word for that weeping means an uncontainable, audible grief, not quiet tears. Jesus said Jerusalem did not know the things that make for peace. The things he warned would follow, enemies surrounding and leveling the city, came to pass in 70 AD exactly as he described, because Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation.

What the nationalist crowd with the palm branches missed, the teaching here argues, was the actual shape of the victory. The mystery Paul describes in Ephesians 3, that Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, not an afterthought but part of the plan from the beginning, was precisely what that crowd had no category for. God had told people ahead of time what was coming through Amos, Daniel, Psalm 118, and Zechariah, and they still missed it because they wanted something else. The disciples had to look back after the resurrection to see what had been in front of them all along. That pattern, God's faithfulness held against human fickleness, is the thread the teaching at First B draws through the whole passage.

Taught from John 12 · Psalm 118:25-26 · Zechariah 9:9 · Luke 19:28-44 · Ephesians 3