Palm Sunday Sermon

The King Who Comes Down

A Palm Sunday Homily On Matthew 21:1-11 And Philippians 2:5-11

There is something in the human heart that loves a parade. We line the streets for returning heroes, for championship teams, for heads of state. We wave and cheer and press forward for a glimpse of greatness, and for a moment the ordinary world feels charged with something larger than itself. Jerusalem on that Sunday morning must have felt something like that, the air electric, cloaks spread across the road, branches cut from the fields, the crowd surging forward with a cry that had been waiting centuries to be spoken aloud.

Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest heaven.

And yet, if we look carefully at what Matthew tells us, the scene is stranger and more subversive than any ordinary triumph. The one at the center of this procession is not riding a war horse. He is riding a donkey. The whole city is shaken, Matthew says, and when the people ask who this is, the crowd answers: This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee. Not a general. Not a conqueror in the usual sense. A prophet. From Galilee, of all places.

The parade is real. The joy is real. But the king who enters is unlike any king the world had seen, and Holy Week will make that difference devastatingly clear.

This is the beginning of the homily I want to offer you today, on this Palm Sunday, as we stand at the threshold of the most sacred week in the Christian year. The question Matthew presses upon us is not simply who Jesus is, though that question is urgent enough. The deeper question is what kind of king he is, and what it means to follow him into Jerusalem.

The Deliberate Humility Of The Entry

Matthew is a careful writer, and he wants us to notice something. Before Jesus enters the city, he sends two disciples ahead to find a donkey and her colt. He gives them precise instructions. He tells them what to say if anyone questions them. And then Matthew pauses the narrative to quote the prophet Zechariah: Tell Daughter Zion, See, your King is coming to you, gentle, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

That word gentle carries enormous weight. In the Greek of the New Testament, it is the same word used in the Beatitudes when Jesus says, Blessed are the meek. It does not mean weak or passive. It means power held under discipline, strength that chooses not to overwhelm. Jesus could have entered Jerusalem in any manner he chose. He chose this one deliberately. He chose the animal of a working farmer, not the mount of a military commander. He chose the posture of a servant king, not a sovereign who demands tribute.

This is not accidental humility. It is not the humility of someone who has no other option. It is the humility of the one who, as Paul will tell the Philippians, though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. He chose to come down. He chose the road that leads through Jerusalem, through Gethsemane, through a Roman trial, through Golgotha.

The crowd sees a liberator. They are not entirely wrong. But they are imagining liberation in the familiar terms of political power, military victory, the restoration of a Davidic throne that would drive out Rome and restore national glory. What Jesus is actually doing is something far more radical and far more costly. He is entering the city to die, and in dying, to accomplish a liberation that no army could achieve.

The Hymn That Explains The King

This is where Paul's letter to the Philippians becomes not just a companion text but an interpretive key. The passage we read this morning, sometimes called the Christ hymn, is one of the most concentrated and beautiful pieces of theology in the entire New Testament. Paul quotes it, or perhaps composes it, in the context of urging the Philippians toward humility and unity. His argument is breathtaking in its simplicity: adopt the same way of thinking that was in Christ Jesus.

And then he describes what that way of thinking looks like. Christ Jesus, who existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

Read that slowly and let it settle. The one who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey is the one in whom the fullness of God dwells. And he chose to come down. He chose to empty himself, not of his divine nature, but of the privileges and prerogatives that nature might have claimed. He chose the form of a servant. He chose obedience. He chose the cross.

The movement of the Christ hymn is downward before it is upward. Humility before exaltation. The cross before the crown. And Paul's point is that this movement is not merely something to admire from a distance. It is the pattern of the Christian life. It is the shape of the community that gathers in Jesus's name.

What The Crowd Could Not Yet See

The crowd in Jerusalem was not wrong to celebrate. They were right to sense that something momentous was happening, that the one entering the city carried the weight of divine promise. Their Hosannas were not misplaced. But they could not yet see the whole picture. They could not see that the king they were welcoming was walking toward his own execution, and that his execution would be the very act of salvation they needed.

This is one of the great tensions of Palm Sunday. We hold branches and we sing, and we know what the crowd did not know. We know that by Friday the same city will be crying out for his crucifixion. We know that the triumphal entry leads to the upper room, to the garden, to the cross. We are not surprised by the turn the week will take. And that knowledge changes how we hear the Hosannas. They are not simply joyful. They are haunted by what is coming.

But they are also, for that very reason, more profound. Because the king who enters knowing what awaits him enters anyway. He does not turn back at the sight of Jerusalem. He does not recalculate when he sees the crowds who will soon scatter. He sets his face toward the cross because the cross is the means of our redemption, and he has come precisely for this.

The Anglican tradition has always held together what might seem like contradictions: the joy of Palm Sunday and the grief of Holy Week, the triumph of the entry and the desolation of the cross, the certainty of resurrection and the reality of suffering. We do not rush past the darkness to get to the light. We walk through it. That is what this week asks of us.

The Shape Of The Life We Are Called To

If the Christ hymn is not merely a description of Jesus but a pattern for his followers, then Palm Sunday is not only a celebration of what Jesus did. It is an invitation to consider how we live.

Paul says: Adopt the same way of thinking that was in Christ Jesus. This is not a call to self-destruction or to the erasure of our dignity. It is a call to the kind of love that does not insist on its own advantage, the kind of service that does not calculate its return, the kind of faithfulness that holds steady when the crowd turns away.

In our daily lives, this looks like choosing the harder and more honest path when the easier one is available. It looks like using whatever influence or position we hold in the service of others rather than for our own advancement. It looks like the willingness to be present with those who are suffering rather than retreating to comfort. It looks like the long obedience of a life shaped not by the world's definition of success but by the pattern of the one who came down.

None of this is easy. The way of the servant king is genuinely costly. We should not pretend otherwise. But it is also the way of life, because it is the way of the one who is himself the resurrection and the life.

Toward The Table

In a few moments we will come to the Table, and that movement is itself a kind of Palm Sunday procession. We come not because we have earned our place, not because our Hosannas have been sufficiently enthusiastic, but because the king who entered Jerusalem in humility invites us to his feast. At this Table we receive what the cross accomplished: forgiveness, reconciliation, the life of God given to us in bread and wine.

The Book of Common Prayer speaks of the Eucharist as a memorial of his precious death and resurrection, a continual remembrance of the sacrifice of himself. This is the heart of what Palm Sunday points toward. The parade leads to the altar. The branches lead to the cross. The Hosannas lead to the silence of Holy Saturday and then to the astonishing cry of Easter morning.

But we are not there yet. We are here, at the beginning of the week, holding our branches, watching the king come down. And the invitation is to follow him, not just in the singing, but in the living. To adopt the mind of Christ. To walk the way of humble love. To trust that the one who chose the cross is also the one in whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

That is the king who enters today. That is the king we follow. Thanks be to God.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Matthew 21:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11; Zechariah 9:9.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. The Collect for Palm Sunday; Eucharistic Prayers.

N. T. Wright. Matthew for Everyone, Part Two. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Gordon D. Fee. Paul's Letter to the Philippians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 1995.

Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Various editions. Book V, on the theology of the sacraments and the person of Christ.