The Messianic Mirage
Everybody loves a parade. Every holiday has its parade; every championship, every inauguration, and every coronation of royalty has its parade. The excitement is contagious.
Maybe this helps us to understand the sense of excitement that was in the air as Jesus approached Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives that overlooks Jerusalem, riding on a borrowed colt. An adoring, exuberant crowd lined the way into Jerusalem with their garments and palm branches, signifying the reception of royalty. And they cried, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The Pharisees were so incensed by the crowd’s enthusiasm for Jesus that they demanded that he rebuke them. Instead, he replied, “I tell you, if they are silenced, the stones will cry out.” Jesus understood this coronation parade as a fulfilment of what God had said through the prophets, and nobody was going to stop it.
But Jesus’ mood and mindset did not match the crowd’s joyful, but shallow show of allegiance to him. From his vantage point on the road from the Mount of Olives, he gazed upon the city where the prophets before him were put to death one way or another, and he wept. He wept because he understood the people’s exuberance as a Messianic mirage. Jesus knows the difference between hero worship and holy worship.
He wept because he knew that so many in the adoring crowd believed in him because he had performed so many miracles that they concluded he must be the long-awaited messiah – the king who would deliver them from the dominion of Rome and give them peace, prosperity, and principality at last. He knew their hope in him was a false hope and the peace they longed for was a false peace. And he wept because he knew their future.
And Luke tells us that as Jesus wept, he said this: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another.” He was speaking in prophetic detail about what would happen in 70 AD – just a few decades into the future – when the Roman army would besiege and destroy Jerusalem, completely dismantle the Temple, pillage its treasures, and inflict so much suffering and death.
Jesus wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular, but in general terms to the populace of Jerusalem, to his own people – the Jewish people of his day – and his message was this: “You long for a Messiah, but the wrong kind of messiah; you desire to be saved, but the wrong salvation; you yearn for peace, but the wrong peace; and you crave for a kingdom, but the wrong kingdom. Why? Because you didn’t recognize the time of God’s coming to you. You didn’t recognize me, nor the reason I came to you.”
And for this reason, he knew that most of this adoring, cheerful Palm Sunday crowd, shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”, would soon be chanting, “Crucify him! Crucify Him!” on the following Friday that we know as Good Friday. Why? Because they didn’t recognize – in their own time – God’s coming to them in the person of his Only Begotten Son.
What we see on this first Palm Sunday, in fact, was false love, false faith, and false hope that would result in a lost opportunity to know and believe in him as the Son of God, the Savior of the world. And this is why he wept. On this first Palm Sunday, the crowd wanted to anoint him their earthly king and give him an earthly crown. But before the week was over, they became co-conspirators in acts of cruel savagery: thrusting on his head a crown of thorns, spitting in his face, mocking him, and the flogging that violently lacerated his flesh, and then cruelly nailing his body to a wooden cross to suffer and die between two criminals – because they didn’t recognize the time of God’s coming to them.
Every time people hear the Good News about Jesus, but do not recognize him as the Only Begotten Son of God and do not receive him through repentance of sin and faith in him as the Savior of the world – as their personal Savior – that is a tragic lost opportunity to become a child of God, and that is why Jesus wept even as the crowd cheered him as he rode into Jerusalem that fateful day.
Jesus knew all along that he would be misidentified, misunderstood, and mistaken for something or somebody other than the Son of God. The only title he ever gave himself was The Son of Man, in part because of his sincere humility and his genuine humanity, but also because most were not spiritually mature enough among the Jews to handle it if he should outright call himself The Son of God. He taught in parables for the same reason and relied on the Holy Spirit to reveal to his disciples and to others his true identity.
Remember that crucial conversation Jesus has with his disciples in Matthew 16? He asked them the question about what people were saying about his identity. This was the question: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” Their answer collectively was: “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Then Jesus makes it personal, and why shouldn’t he? He’s been bringing these guys along, living the Truth right before their eyes, teaching them about the Kingdom of God, and allowing them time to grow without forcing the issue. But it’s time to ask: “What about you? Who do you say I am?” And Peter was the first to answer: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” Notice carefully how Peter answers the question. He doesn’t just say, “You’re the Messiah.” He also says, “You are the Son of the Living God.” And that’s an incredibly important distinction because Peter had internally made the connection between Jesus as the Promised Messiah, which was more about his purpose, and Jesus the Son of the Living God, which was more about his identity.
And Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.”
And, so, Jesus was revealing to his disciples something about the unique relationship he had with his Father in heaven. It was Jesus who revealed the Father, the heavenly Kingdom, and the Father’s desire and plan to reconcile sinful man to himself. But it was the Father who revealed the Son as the Way the Truth and the Life – as the way to the Everlasting Kingdom. In other words, this wasn’t just an intellectual exercise on Peter’s part. It wasn’t that he figured it out on his own. What he said about Jesus came to him as a spiritual revelation that stirred his heart to a leap of faith.
Who do you say that Jesus is? That’s the question we must all must answer for ourselves.