April 13 – John 12:12-19

This week begins our three-week Easter series in the Gospel of John, with texts that match Palm Sunday this week and Resurrection Sunday next week, followed by a post-Easter week looking at Jesus’s interaction with Thomas and his doubts. All three will focus on Jesus the King: the KIng who came to die, the risen King, and the King in whom we are invited to believe.

This week we’ll look at one of the texts for which Palm Sunday gets its name, but first, some explanatory points. When it says a large crowd came out to meet him, it’s not joking—scholars estimate that upwards of 2 million people would stream into Jerusalem from all over the Mediterranean to celebrate Passover at this time. Even if only a fraction came out to see Jesus, this would’ve been tens of thousands of people. Second, why palm branches? Passover was the biggest festival in the Jewish calendar, and the palm frond was a national symbol for Israel—for example, it was stamped on their coins in this era—so this was about as close as they could come to a Fourth of July parade with little American flags.

Third, that word, “hosanna” (Hebrew hoshiya na) is taken from the psalms, literally meaning “Save, I pray!” The way it was used was more like a “hooray!” but it certainly had a liberating, “God has saved us!” context to it. All of this clues us in: this is a massive group of people surrounding Jesus and welcoming him into the capital of Jerusalem as their king come to free them from Rome. Everyone was expecting Jesus to promptly unseat Roman occupation in Jerusalem, perhaps with some of those miracles he’d been practicing, and set up his Messianic Kingdom to establish an enduring Israel.

But that’s not how things go down, and all this helps us see how multiple groups in this passage totally misunderstood Jesus. The crowds expected him to be a conquering king, the Pharisees expected him to be a failed rebel (look back at John 11:45-53 for more), and the disciples just flat out didn’t get it (12:16). In discussing these various groups and their misunderstandings, we’ll begin building towards the ways we see ourselves in these groups, the ways we misunderstand Jesus or treat him similarly. And though we won’t directly discuss it, you can see how Jesus subtly repudiated each of these groups by riding a donkey, not a warhorse; by refusing to let his disciples fight (John 18:11); by informing the disciples of his coming death despite their inability to understand it (12:33; cf. 12:16).

The Triumphal Entry is sickly ironic compared to John 19, where the Jews go from proclaiming Jesus as their king to saying, “We have no king but Caesar,” and they go from chanting “Hosanna!” to “Crucify him!” Our third question will focus on this swing in public opinion, if only to help us see how often our own opinions of Jesus swing, particularly when he doesn’t conform to our expectations. We’ll move into asking how we see ourselves in the passage, as in, those ways in which the various groups and their misunderstandings mirror us.

After this we’ll focus on verse 16, which gives us hope. There, John is the only one who is honest about misunderstanding Jesus, and according to him, it’s only after Jesus’s death and resurrection that all this made sense for him. For us as well, we find hope in Jesus’s death and resurrection, that regardless of our misunderstandings of him, of the swings in our opinion of him or refusal of him, none of this kept him from dying on the cross in our place for our sins. It’s in Jesus’s death and resurrection for us that we find hope in the face of when we get it wrong.

And it’s in Jesus’s death and resurrection that we truly see Jesus and have our misunderstandings of him burned off like a morning fog. In his resurrection we see our king has come, and he has come with victory over our sin in his hand, and it is to this king that we give our lives daily.