Sermon For Palm Sunday

The King Who Comes Down

A Homily For Palm Sunday

We begin today in a kind of holy confusion. The liturgy itself holds it together in tension. We carry palms and sing hosannas, and yet if you have been following the lectionary through Lent, you know where this week is heading. The joy of this morning is real, but it is not simple. It is the joy of people who are beginning to understand, however dimly, that the one riding toward them is not the king they imagined, and that his kingdom will cost him everything.

Let us sit with the two readings appointed for this day, Matthew's account of the entry into Jerusalem and Paul's great hymn to Christ in his letter to the Philippians, and let them interpret one another. Together they offer us the central mystery of Holy Week: the humble King enters Jerusalem and reveals, by the very manner of his coming, the way of the cross.

The Entry: What Matthew Wants Us To See

Matthew 21 opens with careful, deliberate staging. Jesus is approaching Jerusalem from Bethphage, on the Mount of Olives, and he sends two disciples ahead with specific instructions. They are to find a donkey and her colt. They are to bring them. If anyone asks, they are to say, "The Lord needs them." And so it happens.

Matthew then 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." This is not a decorative footnote. Matthew is insisting that we understand the scene theologically before we feel it emotionally. This entry is a fulfillment. It is a declaration. Jesus is not simply traveling to the city for Passover. He is arriving as King.

And yet notice what kind of king. Zechariah's prophecy, which Matthew reaches back to retrieve, describes a king who is gentle. The word carries the sense of lowliness, of meekness, of one who does not come with the apparatus of conquest. He is not on a war horse. He is not preceded by a military escort. He comes on a young donkey, an animal of ordinary labor, the kind of beast that carried burdens and plowed fields.

The crowd spreads cloaks on the road. They cut branches from the trees. They cry out, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!" Hosanna is a word that means, at its root, save us now. It is a cry of longing. The crowd is not simply cheering a celebrity. They are voicing a hope that has been building for centuries. They want deliverance. They want the restoration of David's kingdom. They want Rome gone and Israel free and the promises of God finally, visibly, kept.

But then Matthew adds a quiet, devastating detail. When Jesus enters Jerusalem, the whole city was shaken, and they were asking, "Who is this?" And the crowds said, "This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee."

A prophet from Galilee. That is how the city receives him. Not as the Son of David. Not as the Messiah. Not even as the one who has just been hailed with royal acclamation outside the gates. The crowds who knew him named him one thing; the city that received him named him something smaller. And within days, even those who cried hosanna would fall silent, or worse.

This is the entry Matthew wants us to see clearly. A king who is genuine, whose claim is ancient and true, who fulfills the word of the prophets, and who is nonetheless misunderstood, underestimated, and ultimately rejected. He comes in humility, and humility is not what the world knows how to receive.

The Hymn: What Paul Wants Us To Understand

Now hold that image alongside Philippians 2. Paul is writing to a community he loves, urging them toward unity and mutual regard, and he reaches for what scholars believe may be an early Christian hymn, a piece of poetry or liturgy that the church was already singing. He sets it before the Philippians as both a theological statement and a pattern for living.

"Adopt the same attitude as that of 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."

This is the theological architecture behind what Matthew shows us on the road. The one riding the donkey is not a merely human teacher who happened to be humble by temperament. He is the one who existed in the form of God, who held equality with God not as a prize to be clutched but as a gift to be set aside for our sake. The emptying Paul describes is not a loss of divine nature. It is a voluntary laying down of divine privilege. He took on the form of a servant. He came in human likeness. He humbled himself.

And then Paul adds the phrase that should stop us entirely: obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

The cross was not an accident. It was not a tragedy that interrupted a more successful mission. It was the destination. The entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and the death on a Roman cross are not two separate stories. They are one continuous act of self-giving love, moving with terrible and beautiful consistency from the manger to the tomb.

Paul then turns the hymn: "For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

The exaltation follows the humiliation. The crown comes after the cross. But notice that Paul does not present this as a reversal of the humility, as though God said, well, you have suffered enough, now you may be glorious again. The exaltation is the vindication of the humility. It is God the Father declaring, before all creation, that the way of the servant is the way of the King, that the cross is not the defeat of the kingdom but its very foundation.

The Central Claim

Here, then, is what Palm Sunday asks us to hold: Jesus enters Jerusalem as the true King, and the manner of his entry reveals the nature of his kingship. He does not conquer by force. He does not seize power. He does not exploit his divine equality. He empties himself, serves, suffers, and dies, and in doing so he accomplishes what no army and no political program ever could. He reconciles humanity to God. He defeats the last enemy. He opens the kingdom to all who will receive him.

This is the king the crowd did not fully understand. This is the king the city did not recognize. And if we are honest with ourselves, gathered here this morning with our palms and our prayers, this is the king we too can find difficult to receive. We want a king who fixes things quickly, who removes our suffering, who vindicates us before our enemies, who makes the path smooth. And Jesus does not come that way. He comes gently, on a donkey, toward a cross.

Living In The Light Of The Humble King

What does this mean for those of us who follow him?

Paul's framing is instructive. He does not present Christ's humility as merely something to admire from a distance. He presents it as a pattern, an orientation of the soul. "Adopt the same attitude," he writes. The word translated attitude or mind in the Greek carries the sense of a settled disposition, a way of seeing and valuing. Paul is asking the Philippians, and asking us, to let the self-giving of Christ reshape the way we move through the world.

This does not mean a kind of passive self-erasure. Christian humility is not the absence of self but the right ordering of self. It means holding our own status, our own comfort, our own preferences loosely, the way Christ held his divine equality loosely, not because they have no value but because love sometimes calls us to set them down for the sake of another.

In the Anglican tradition, we speak often of the via media, the middle way, and in this season I think we might understand that phrase not only as a theological posture but as a spiritual one. We are called to walk between the triumphalism that wants a king without a cross and the despair that sees only the cross without the resurrection. Palm Sunday holds both. The hosannas are real. The suffering is real. The exaltation is real. We do not have to choose between joy and solemnity today. We are invited into the full arc of the story.

As we move through this Holy Week, the liturgy will carry us. On Thursday we will gather at the Table where he gave himself under the forms of bread and wine. On Friday we will stand at the foot of the cross. On Saturday we will wait in the silence of the tomb. And on Sunday morning, the first day of the new week, the stone will be rolled away.

But we are not there yet. Today we are on the road outside Jerusalem, watching a gentle king ride toward his death, and we are holding branches, and we are crying save us, and we mean it more than we know.

Come, Lord Jesus. Come in your humility. Come in your obedience. Come in your self-giving love. We receive you not as the king we imagined, but as the King you are.

Amen.

Sources Consulted

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

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. The Liturgy of the Palms and the Passion Sunday Collect.

Cranfield, C. E. B. On Romans and Other New Testament Essays. T and T Clark, 1998. Reflections on the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2.

Wright, N. T. Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Commentary on Philippians 2:5-11.

France, R. T. The Gospel of Matthew. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2007. Commentary on Matthew 21:1-11.

Hooker, Richard. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Various editions. On the nature of Christ's kingship and the church's participation in his humility.