'And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come
to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus
two disciples, 2. Saying unto them, Go into the village
over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass
tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them
unto Me. 3. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall
say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he
will send them. 4. All this was done, that it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying,
5. Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King
cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a
colt the foal of an ass. 6. And the disciples went, and
did as Jesus commanded them, 7. And brought the ass,
and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they
set Him thereon. 8. And a very great multitude spread
their garments in the way; others cut down branches
from the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9. And the
multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried,
saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that
cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.
10. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city
was moved, saying, Who is this? 11. And the multitude
said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.
12. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out
all them that sold and bought in the temple, and
overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the
seats of them that sold doves, 13. And said unto them,
It is written, My house shall be called the house of
prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. 14. And
the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple; and
He healed them. 15. And when the chief priests and
scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the
children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to
the Son of David, they were sore displeased, 16. And
said unto Him, Hearest Thou what these say? And Jesus
saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the
mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise?'
--MATT. xxi. 1-16.
Jesus spent His last Sabbath in the quiet home at Bethany with
Lazarus and his sisters. Some sense of His approaching death tinged
the modest festivities of that evening with sadness, and spoke in
Mary's 'anointing of His body for the burying.' The pause was brief,
and, with the dawn of Sunday, He set Himself again to tread the road
to the cross. Who can doubt that He felt the relief of that
momentary relaxation of the strain on His spirit, and the
corresponding pressure of its renewed tightening? This passage shows
Him putting out from the quiet haven and facing the storm again. It
is in two main sections, dealing respectively with the royal
procession, and the acts of the King in the temple.
I. The procession of the King. The first noteworthy point is that
our Lord initiates the whole incident, and deliberately sets Himself
to evoke the popular enthusiasm, by a distinct voluntary fulfilment
of a Messianic prophecy. The allusion to the prophecy, in His
sending for the colt and mounting it, may have escaped the disciples
and the crowds of pilgrims; but they rightly caught His intention to
make a solemn triumphal entry into the city, and responded with a
burst of enthusiasm, which He expected and wished. The poor garments
flung hastily on the animals, the travel-stained cloaks cast on the
rocky path, the branches of olive and palm waved in the hands, and
the tumult of acclaim, which shrilly echoed the words of the psalm,
and proclaimed Him to be the Son of David, are all tokens that the
crowds hailed Him as their King, and were all permitted and welcomed
by Him. All this is in absolute opposition to His usual action,
which had been one long effort to damp down inflammable and
unspiritual Messianic hopes, and to avoid the very enthusiasm which
now surges round Him unchecked. Certainly that calm figure, sitting
on the slow-pacing ass, with the noisy multitude pressing round Him,
is strangely unlike Him, who hid Himself among the hills when they
sought to make Him a King. His action is the more remarkable, if it
be remembered that the roads were alive with pilgrims, most of whom
passing through Bethany would be Galileans; that they had seen
Lazarus walking about the village, and knew who had raised him; that
the Passover festival was _the_ time in all the year when
popular tumults were to be expected; and that the crowds going to
Jerusalem were met by a crowd coming from it, bent on seeing the
doer and the subject of the great miracle. Into this heap of
combustibles our Lord puts a light. He must have meant that it
should blaze as it did.
What is the reason for this contrast? The need for the former
reticence no longer existed. There was no fear now of His teaching
and ministry being interrupted by popular outburst. He knew that it
was finished, and that His hour had come. Therefore, the same motive
of filial obedience which had led Him to avoid what would prevent
His discharging His Father's commission, now impelled Him to draw
the attention of the nation and its rulers to the full extent of His
claims, and to put the plain issue of their acceptance or rejection
in the most unmistakable manner. A certain divine decorum, if we may
so call it, required that once He should enter the city as its King.
Some among the shouting crowds might have their enthusiasm purified
and spiritualised, if once it were directed to Him. It was for us,
no less than for them, that this one interruption of His ordinary
method was adopted by Him, that we too might ponder the fact that He
laid His hand on that magnificent prophecy, and said, 'It is mine. I
am the King.'
The royal procession is also a revelation of the character of the
King and the nature of His kingdom. A strange King this, indeed, who
has not even an ass of His own, and for followers, peasants with
palm branches instead of swords! What would a Roman soldier or one
of Herod's men have thought of that rustic procession of a pauper
prince on an ass, and a hundred or two of weaponless, penniless men?
Christ's one moment of royal pomp is as eloquent of His humiliation
as the long stretch of His lowly life is. And yet, as is always the
case, side by side with the lowliness there gleams the veiled
splendour. He had to borrow the colt, and the message in which He
asks for it is a strange paradox. 'The Lord hath need of him'--so
great was the poverty of so great a King. But it spoke, too, of a
more than human knowledge, and of an authority which had only to
require in order to receive. Some farming villager, no doubt, who
was a disciple but secretly, gladly yielded his beasts. The prophecy
which Matthew quotes, with the omission of some words, from
Zechariah, and the addition of the first clause from Isaiah, is
symbolic, and would have been amply fulfilled in the mission and
character of Christ, though this event had never taken place. But
just as it is symbolic, so this external fulfilment, which is
intended to point to the real fulfilment, is also symbolic. The
chariot and the horse are the emblems of conquerors. It is fitting
that the Prince of Peace should make His state entry on a colt,
unridden before, and saddled only with a garment. Zechariah meant
that Zion's King should not reign by the right of the strongest, and
that all His triumphs should be won by lowly meekness. Christ meant
the same by His remarkable act. And has not the picture of Him,
throned thus, stamped for ever on the imagination of the world a
profounder sense of the inmost nature of His kingdom than many words
would have done? Have we learned the lesson of the gentleness which
belongs to His kingdom, and of the unchristian character of war and
violence? Do we understand what the Psalmist meant when he sang, 'In
thy majesty ride on prosperously, because of ... meekness'? Let us
not forget the other picture, 'Behold, a white horse, and He that
sat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in righteousness He doth
judge and make war.'
The entry may remind us also of the worthlessness of mere enthusiastic
feeling in reference to Jesus Christ. The day was the Sunday. How many
of that crowd were shouting as loudly, 'Crucify Him!' and 'Not this
man, but Barabbas!' on the Friday? The palm-branches had not faded,
where they had been tossed, before the fickle crowd had swung round
to the opposite mood. Perhaps the very exuberance of feeling at the
beginning, had something to do with the bitterness of the execrations
at the end, of the week. He had not answered their expectations, but,
instead of heading a revolt, had simply taught in the temple, and
meekly let Himself be laid hold of. Nothing succeeds like success,
and no idol is so quickly forsaken as the idol of a popular rising.
All were eager to disclaim connection with Him, and to efface the
remembrance of their Sunday's hosannas by their groans round His
gibbet. But there is a wider lesson here. No enthusiasm can be too
intense which is based upon a true sense of our need of Christ, and
of His work for us; but it is easy to excite apparently religious
emotion by partial presentations of Him, and such excitement foams
itself away by its very violence, like some Eastern river that in
winter time dashes down the wady with irresistible force, and in
summer is bone dry. Unless we know Christ to be the Saviour of our
souls and the Lamb of God, we shall soon tire of singing hosannas in
His train, and want a king with more pretensions; but if we have
learned who and what He is to us, then let us open our mouths wide,
and not be afraid of letting the world hear our shout of praise.
II. The coming of the King in the temple. The discussion of the
accuracy of Matthew's arrangement of events here is unnecessary. He
has evidently grouped, as usual, incidents which have a common
bearing, and wishes to put these three, of the cleansing, the
healing, and the pleasure in the children's praise, as the
characteristic acts of the King in the temple. We can scarcely avoid
seeing in the first of the three a reference to Malachi's prophecy,
'The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple ... And
He shall purify the sons of Levi.' His first act, when in manhood He
visited the temple, had been to cleanse. His first act when He
enters it as its Lord is the same. The abuse had grown again apace.
Much could be said in its vindication, as convenient and harmless,
and it was too profitable to be lightly abandoned. But the altar of
Mammon so near the altar of God was sacrilege in His eyes, and
though He had passed the traders unmolested many times since that
first driving out, now that He solemnly comes to claim His rights,
He cannot but repeat it. It is perhaps significant that His words
now have both a more sovereign and a more severe tone than before.
Then He had spoken of 'My Father's house,' now it is 'My house,'
which are a part of His quotation indeed, but not therefore
necessarily void of reference to Himself. He is exercising the
authority of a son over His own house, and bears Himself as Lord of
the temple. Before, He charged them with making it a 'house of
merchandise'; now, with turning it into a robber's cave. Evil
rebuked and done again is worse than before. Trafficking in things
pertaining to the altar is even more likely than other trading to
cross the not always very well defined line which separates trade
from trickery and commerce from theft. That lesson needs to be laid
to heart in many quarters now. There is always a fringe of moneyed
interests round Christ's Church, seeking gain out of religious
institutions; and their stands have a wonderful tendency to creep
inwards from the court of the Gentiles to holier places. The
parasite grows very quickly, and Christ had to deal with it more
than once to keep down its growth. The sellers of doves and changers
of money into the sacred shekel were venial offenders compared with
many in the Church, and the race is not extinct. If Christ were to
come to His house to-day, in bodily form, who doubts that He would
begin, as He did before, by driving the traders out of His temple?
How many 'most respectable' usages and people would have to go, if
He did!
The second characteristic, or we might say symbolical, act is the
healing of the blind and lame. Royal state and cleansing severity
are wonderfully blended with tender pity and the gentle hand of
sovereign virtue to heal. The very manifestation of the former drew
the needy to Him; and the blind, though they could not see, and the
lame, though they could not walk, managed to grope and hobble their
way to Him, not afraid of His severity, nor daunted by His royalty.
No doubt they haunted the temple precincts as beggars, with perhaps
as little sense of its sacredness as the money-changers; but their
misery kindled a flicker of confidence and desire, to which He who
tends the dimmest wick till it breaks into clear flame could not but
respond. Though in His house He casts out the traders, He will heal
the cripples and the blind, who know their need, and faintly trust
His heart and power. Such a trait could not be wanting in this
typical representation of the acts of the King.
Finally, He encourages and casts the shield of His approval round
the children's praises. How natural it is that the children, pleased
with the stir and not yet drilled into conventionalism, should have
kept up their glad shouts, even inside the temple enclosure! How
their fresh treble voices ring yet through all these centuries! The
priests had, no doubt, been nursing their wrath at all that had been
going on, but they had not dared to interfere with the cleansing,
nor, for very shame, with the healings; but now they see their
opportunity. This is a clear breach of all propriety, and that is
the crime of crimes in the eyes of such people. They had kept quite
cool and serenely contemptuous, amid the stir of the glad
procession, and they did not much care though He healed some
beggars; but to have this unseemly noise, though it was praise, was
more than they could stand. Ecclesiastical martinets, and men whose
religion is mostly ceremony, are, of course, more 'moved with
indignation' at any breach of ceremonial regulations than at holes
made in graver laws. Nothing makes men more insensitive to the ring
of real worship than being accustomed to the dull decorum of formal
worship. Christ answers their 'hearest thou?' with a 'did ye never
read?' and shuts their mouths with words so apposite in their
plainest meaning that even they are silenced. To Him these young
ringing hosannas are 'perfect praise,' and worth any quantity of
rabbis' preachments. In their deeper sense, His words declare that
the ears of God and of His Son, the Lord of the temple, are more
gladly filled with the praises of the 'little ones,' who know their
weakness, and hymn His goodness with simple tongue, than with
heartless eloquence of words or pomp of worship. The psalm from
which the words are taken declares man's superiority over the
highest works of God's hands, and the perfecting of the divine
praise from his lips. We are but as the little children of creation,
but because we know sin and redemption, we lead the chorus of
heaven. As St. Bernard says, 'Something is wanting to the praise of
heaven, if those be wanting who can say, "We went through fire and
through water; and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place."' In
like manner, those praise Him most acceptably among men who know
their feebleness, and with stammering lips humbly try to breathe
their love, their need, and their trust.