Matthew Ch 21 Vs 1-11 - The Beginning of The Last Act. (Episode 500)

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The Beginning of The Final Act. (Matthew 21: 1-11)

21 Now when they drew near Jerusalem, and came to Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Loose them and bring them to Me. 3 And if anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord has need of them,’ and immediately he will send them.” 4 All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying:

5 “Tell the daughter of Zion,
 ‘Behold, your King is coming to you,
 Lowly, and sitting on a donkey,
 A colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

6 So the disciples went and did as Jesus commanded them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt, laid their clothes on them, and set Him on them. 8 And a very great multitude spread their clothes on the road; others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 Then the multitudes who went before and those who followed cried out, saying:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
 ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’
 Hosanna in the highest!”

10 And when He had come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, “Who is this?” 11 So the multitudes said, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth of Galilee.”

 The Triumphal Entry. 

The Intention of Jesus.

The Claim of Kingship

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction - The Triumphal Entry
• 3:46 Welcome
• 11:59 The Intention of Jesus.
• 19:34 The Claim of Kingship
• 23:42 Farewell and Outro

Transcript

The Beginning of The Final Act. (Matthew 21: 1-11)

 The Triumphal Entry

Now when they drew near Jerusalem, and came to Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Loose them and bring them to Me. And if anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord has need of them,’ and immediately he will send them.” 4 All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying:

 “Tell the daughter of Zion,
 ‘Behold, your King is coming to you,
 Lowly, and sitting on a donkey,
 A colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

 So the disciples went and did as Jesus commanded them.  They brought the donkey and the colt, laid their clothes on them, and set Him on them. And a very great multitude spread their clothes on the road; others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road. Then the multitudes who went before and those who followed cried out, saying:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
 ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’
 Hosanna in the highest!”

And when He had come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, “Who is this?” So the multitudes said, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth of Galilee.”

With this passage we embark on the last act in the great God ordained drama of the life of Jesus; and this indeed is a very dramatic moment. It is the Passover time, and Jerusalem and the whole surrounding area is crowded with pilgrims. Thirty years later a Roman governor would take a census of the lambs slain in Jerusalem during the Passover and find that the number was nearly a quarter of a million which speaks to the size of this annual event.

It was the Passover regulation that there must be a party of a minimum of ten for each lamb which means that at that Passover time at least two and a half million people would have crowded into Jerusalem.  The interpretation of the law of Moses required that every adult male Jew who lived within twenty miles of Jerusalem must come to the Passover; but not only the Jews from the Roman province of Palestine, Jews from every corner of the world made their way to the greatest of their annual festivals.

Jesus could not have chosen a more dramatic moment to make his appearance for it was into a city surging with people excited and expecting God to speak to them and with religious expectations of what God might be doing among his people. This visit was not a sudden spur of the moment decision that Jesus had taken; it was something which he had prepared himself for in advance. The whole tone of the story shows that every step of this journey in what would turn out to be the last week of his life on earth had been planned well in advance. He first sends his disciples into "the village of Bethany" to collect an ass, a donkey, and her young foal. Matthew calls the village Bethphage here, but Mark mentions Bethany in his account of these events. No doubt the village was Bethany, but Bible experts conclude that the village and the surrounding area was called Bethphage. Jesus had already arranged that the ass and her foal should be waiting for him, which suggest he must have had friends in Bethany; and the phrase, "The Master needs them," was a sort of a password by which their owner would know that the hour which Jesus had arranged to collect the animal had come. 

Jesus’ rides into Jerusalem and the fact that the donkey had never been ridden before made it especially suitable for sacred purposes. This mirrored the standard set by other Jewish religious atonement ceremonies. For example, the red heifer which was used in the ceremonies of cleansing must be a beast "upon which a yoke has never come" it said in both Numbers 19:2 and Deuteronomy 21:3. Furthermore the cart on which the ark of the Lord was carried had to be a vehicle which had never been used for any other purpose (1 Samuel 6:7). So, the special sacredness of the occasion was underlined by the fact that this young donkey had never been ridden before by any man or woman.

The crowd initially received Jesus like a king. They spread their cloaks in front of him. That is what people had done when Jehu was proclaimed king in the account of events seen in (2 Kings 9:13). They cut down and waved the palm branches.

This is also what they did between the Old and New Testaments when Simon Maccabaeus entered Jerusalem after one of his most notable victories. Documented in the book of 1 Maccabees 13:51. They greeted Simon Maccabaeus with the greeting: "Blessed be he who enters in the name of the Lord" a common greeting which thereafter was addressed to pilgrims as they came to the Feast. They shouted "Hosanna!" We must be careful to understand what this word means also. Hosanna means, Save us, save us now, and it was the cry for help which a people in distress addressed to their king or their god. It is really a reworking of a quotation from Psalms 118: 25: "Save us, we beseech Thee, O Lord." The phrase, "Hosanna in the highest!" must mean, "Let even the angels in the highest heights of heaven cry unto God, Save now!" It may be that the word hosanna had lost some of its original meaning; and that it had become to some extent represent only a cry of welcome and of acclamation, like "Hail!"; but essentially it is a people's cry for deliverance and for help in the day of their trouble; it is an oppressed people's cry to their saviour and their king. So that is who the welcomed him but what was Jesus’s intention when he rode into Jerusalem that day.

The Intention of Jesus.

We can be sure of the fact that Jesus' actions in this situation were planned and deliberate. He was following a method of awakening the peoples mind to the salvation and deliverance plans of God, a method that was deeply interwoven with the methods of the prophets and those who had gone before. Again and again in the religious history of Israel, when a prophet felt that his words were of no avail against a barrier of indifference or incomprehension, he put his message into a dramatic evidential act which men and women could not fail to see and to interpret as God moving among them. Out of many Old Testament instances I would like to take a brief segway and choose two of the most outstanding examples of this.

In the first book of Kings, we find the account of someone called Jeroboam who following a revolt against the ten northern Israelite tribes put an end to the United Monarchy. When it became clear that the kingdom could not stand the excesses and extravagances of Rehoboam, this guy called Jeroboam was marked out as the rising power and brought it to an end. The prophet Ahijah the Shilonite chose a dramatic way of revealing the future to him. He dressed himself in a new garment; he went out and he met Jeroboam alone; he took the new garment and tore it into twelve pieces; then of the pieces he gave to Jeroboam but one of the pieces he kept; and by this dramatic action he made it clear that ten of the twelve tribes were about to revolt in support of Jeroboam, while only two would remain faithful to Rehoboam (1 Kings 11:29-32). Here is the prophetic message delivered in dramatic action.

Another time was when Jeremiah was convinced that Babylon was about to conquer Palestine despite the optimism of the people, So, he made bonds and yokes and sent them to Edom, to Moab, to Ammon, to Tyre and to Sidon. He also put a yoke upon his own neck that all might see it. By this dramatic action he made it clear that, as he saw it, nothing but slavery and servitude lay ahead (Jeremiah 27:1-6 ); and when Hananiah, the false prophet the one with the false sense of optimism, wished to show that he thought of Jeremiah's gloomy prophecy was wrong, he took the yoke from Jeremiah's neck and broke it (Jeremiah 28:10-11).

So, it was often the custom of the prophets to express their message in dramatic action when they felt that words were not enough. And that is what Jesus is doing here by choosing to enter Jerusalem in this way.

Two pictures lie behind Jesus' dramatic action.

There is the picture from Zechariah 9:9, in which the prophet saw, I quote, “The king coming to Jerusalem, humble and riding upon an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass”. You see in this instance, Jesus' dramatic action by entering Jerusalem in this way was a deliberate Messianic claim. He was here offering himself to the people, at a time when Jerusalem was surging with Jews from all over the country and from all over the world, as the Anointed One of God. Exactly just what Jesus fully meant by that claim we shall go on to see shortly; but that he makes that claim here by his actions, of that there can be no doubt.

There may have been another intention in Jesus' mind.  One of the supreme disasters of Jewish history was the capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes about 175 B.C. Antiochus Epiphanes was a Greek Hellenistic king who ruled the Seleucid Empire from 175 BC until his death in 164 BC. Antiochus was also determined to stamp out Judaism and immediately after securing power he tried to forcefully introduce into Palestine the Greek ways of life and worship. He deliberately profaned the Temple, offering pigs flesh on the altar,(an absolute abomination to Jewish sensibility) and making sacrifices to the Olympian God Zeus. He even turned the Temple chambers into public brothels.  It was then that the Jewish people under the leadership of  Maccabees,  group of Jewish rebel warriors who took control of Judea, which at the time was part of the Seleucid Empire rose against him. They ultimately rescued their native land back to Jewish control for a while. Jerusalem was retaken and the desecrated Temple was restored and purified and rededicated. 

In 2 Maccabees 10:7 we read about the rejoicing of that great day described in this way: "Therefore they bare branches, and fair boughs, and palms also, and sang psalms unto Him that had given them good success in cleansing His place." On that day the people carried the palm branches and sung their psalms; it is an almost exact replication on that day of what had happened 200 years earlier by the actions of the crowd who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem.

It seems very likely that Jesus knew all this, and that he entered into Jerusalem with the deliberate intention of cleansing God's house just as Judas Maccabaeus had done two hundred years before and we shall soon see that that is indeed what Jesus in fact will do later that day. So, by entering Jerusalem this way He may well be saying in dramatic symbolic way, not only that he was the anointed one of God, but also that he had come to cleanse the House of God from the abuses which defiled it, and its worship. In the text of the main Old Testament as well we see prophesied that the Lord would indeed suddenly come to his Temple ( Malachi 3:1 ) And, in his vision of judgment in Ezekiel we are told that the judgment of God will begin in his sanctuary (Ezekiel 9:6).

The Claim of Kingship

To conclude our study of this opening incident, let us look at Jesus in its setting. I believe it shows us three things about him.

Firstly, it shows us his courage. Jesus knew full well that he was entering a hostile city. However enthusiastic the crowd might be, the authorities hated him and had already sworn to eliminate him. Almost anyone in such a case would have considered discretion the better part of valour; and most sensible people if they had come to Jerusalem at all, they would have slipped in under cover of night and kept discreetly to the back streets until they reached a safe place. But Jesus here enters Jerusalem in a way that deliberately sets himself at the centre of the stage and deliberately calls attention to himself. All through his last days there is in his every action a kind of glorious defiance; and here he begins this great last act with a flinging down of the gauntlet, a deliberate challenge to the authorities to do what the they feel they must

Secondly, it shows us his claim to God's Messiah, God's Anointed One. At the very least it shows us his claim to be the prophetic cleanser of the Temple. However, if Jesus had been content to claim to be a prophet only, then the probability is that he need never have died. But he could be satisfied with nothing less than stepping forward and claiming the highest place with the highest sacrifice, as Messiah the son and sacrificial lamb of God. With Jesus it is ways all or nothing. People must acknowledge him as king, or not receive him at all, and that is still true today.

Finally, it also shows us the nature of his appeal. It was not the claim of an earthly kingship of a worldly throne which he made; it was the kingship of a people who had surrendered their heart and wills to him. He came humbly and riding upon a donkey, not in kingly regalia or on a white horse. 

We must be careful to see the real meaning of the donkey as his arrival animal. At that time the donkey (the ass) could still be a royal animal. If a king came riding into a city upon a donkey, it was the sign that he came in peace. The horse was the mount of war; the donkey was the mount of peace. So, when Jesus claimed to be king, he claimed to be the king of peace. He showed that he came, not to destroy, but to love; not to condemn, but to help; not in the might of arms, but in the strength of love. Here, at one and the same time, we see the courage of Christ, the claim of Christ as Messiah, and a call he wished to make upon the lives of the people. This was fast approaching his last invitation to men and woman to open up, not their palaces, but their lives and hearts to him.