Palm Sunday is a day of amazing contrasts. While we often approach God with what we want from Him, God is determined to instead give us what we desperately need for His glory and our eternal wellbeing. As Jesus rode into Jerusalem that Sunday, we see the expectations of Israel contrasting with what Jesus actually gave them five days later.

“The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!’” — John 12:12–13, ESV

This is happening during Passover, the celebration of God delivering Israel from slavery in Egypt. For almost 600 years the Jews had been enslaved by one nation after another, but at Passover they would long for God to send the Messiah, King David’s Son, to deliver them from their current oppressors.  Every year, when Passover was finished and the Messiah had not come, they would say, “Next year in Jerusalem…” — perhaps then he will come!

Now here was Jesus, and just like the prophets predicted, He fed the multitude and healed the sick, blind, lame, lepers, preached good news to the poor, and had even raised Lazarus from the dead!  It finally seemed like this was the year. “This year in Jerusalem!”  So as the word came that He was coming, thousands lined the road to usher Him in.

They were hailing Jesus as their King.  They didn’t care that Rome could view this as treason, they were offering Jesus the ancient throne of David to rule them as King.

But remember, these hopes were given to them by God! This crowd wanted a king because the Bible promised it to them! They were tired of injustice and oppression. They wanted God to rule them, and I do as well!  They wanted to have God’s Messiah among them.

But what did Jesus actually give them?

1. He gave them humility.

The Ruler is a Servant.  The Lion is a Lamb.  The leader washes the feet of His followers.  Instead of a war horse, the warrior enters on a donkey’s colt. That the body of Jesus sitting on this little donkey might have seemed somewhat comical: hope stirs in hearts — “The king is coming!” — and then, here He comes around the corner riding on a little donkey, with His legs dragging on the ground.  He has come to Jerusalem in a way that almost no one can possibly be expected to understand.

2. He gave them salvation.

Salvation is precisely what the crowd wanted, but the crowd and Jesus meant it in such different ways.  They wanted political freedom, freedom in external ways — the way so many of us want it.  Jesus saw a far more sinister oppressor than Rome or Babylon.  He saw back further than the last 600 years and He saw back all the way to that first oppressor, Satan himself, and the effects of our own sin and rebellion against God. As the Messiah, Jesus came to Jerusalem not to defeat the Romans, but to be killed by them — and in so doing, to defeat Satan.  This King came as the Passover Lamb, to die for us so that the angel of death would pass over us.

When the crowds tried to make Him king by force (John 6) or Satan tempted Him with kingdoms (Matthew 4), Jesus always refused.  Yes, He would be glorified — He would rule on David’s throne and be given a name above every name, but He would never receive that if He would attempt to avoid the Cross.

Do you know it is the same with us?

Jesus, on Palm Sunday, will forever teach us that He came to offer grace and salvation to all who would receive it.  But He also came to teach us that the way of God is not to live for the praises or the ideals of men, but to live for the glory of God and to submit to His plan.

Jesus refused to be the kind of king we desperately wanted, and instead came as the kind of king we desperately needed.  We wanted a king who would liberate us from our immediate problems; we needed a king who would liberate us from sin and Satan.  Thank God, Jesus gave us what we desperately needed! You can’t have the life you need without a cross.