The King Enters Jerusalem

Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus,

“Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”

“I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

Luke 19:39,40 (NIV-UK, 1984)

WHEN THE CROWDS cheered the Saviour as he entered the Holy City, perhaps the disciples imagined that the kingdom of heaven, which the Lord had preached, was just around the corner.

Surely now he had won over the unbelievers and the cynics and put to flight those who sought to kill him.

There seemed to be an element of inevitability about this boisterous reception.

Had not Jesus indicated as much when the Pharisees insisted he tell the crowds to shut up, and he told them that if the multitude did not proclaim him, then the inanimate stones would be constrained to cry out?

Had the disciples reflected deeply on what Jesus said to them during their conversations with him as they tramped along the ragged highways and byways of Judea, they might have understood why his kingdom could not come at that instant in time.

Sure enough, the euphoria of the multitude evaporated like the morning dew.

The same people who cheered, soon jeered, pressing Pilate to sentence him to death.

‘Here is the man!’ Pilate exclaimed, when he put the now bruised and battered Jesus on display before the gawking, squawking rabble which heaved with hatred on the Stone Pavement. Perhaps it was a last attempt to stir their compassion or save himself some trouble with Rome. ‘I find no basis for a charge against him.’ (John 19:4,5,13,14.)

‘Here is the man.’ So reads the Greek text. Here is a most unusual man. Pilate, despite his baser instincts, proclaims that most singular of truths: Jesus is no ordinary person. And as the dumb stones would have been compelled in the absence of human voice to hail Messiah’s arrival, so this tough officer of Rome was obliged, in spite of himself, to advertise the uniqueness of the One he would soon consign to the cross. ‘Here is your king’. They would have to decide what to do with him.

From this drama we learn that God sometimes chooses to relay truth through unwitting, unwilling and ungodly agencies. For had not even Caiaphas, high priest in Israel that year, already prophesied against his will that this one man, Jesus, must die in order that the whole nation of Israel be saved? (John 11:49-53).

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April 2017

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