The King Who Came to Serve

Power, but not as we know it

1. A pageant of power

The date is April 2, 774 AD – just six days after Palm Sunday. The great man himself is coming to Rome, the Eternal City, for the first time. Charlemagne – whose nickname itself means ‘Charles the Great’ – rides at the head of his mighty army and a train of dukes, counts, bishops, abbots, and other officials, both secular and sacred.

About a mile from the city, the general was met by a military guard and by young boys carrying palm and olive branches. Greeted by Pope Adrian at St Peter’s, he entered the church to the sound of a choir of monks singing the Palm Sunday anthem from Psalm 118: ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’.

It was a pageant of power, honouring the greatest leader that Europe had seen in four hundred years – the great man who would found the Holy Roman Empire, an Empire that would last until another strong man, Napoleon, ended it a thousand years later. Charlemagne made Europe great again by sheer force of will – converting whole nations to Christianity at the point of the sword.

There’s something deeply appealing about leaders like Charlemagne, even to us today. Troubled times make us long for a leader whom we can get behind—one who will stand up for us and get things done – who won’t be pushed around. We want strength, power, and decisive action. If anything, that's something that has intensified even in the last decade.

We live in an era of strong man rulers.

But was Jesus just another one of these? Did Charlemagne get the triumphal entry right when he re-enacted it as a symbol of his own glory? Or was he falling into the trap that the disciples themselves had fallen when they rebuked Jesus? Is today just another pageant of power to put beside the military parades of dictators, the coronations of kings and the inaugurations of presidents?

2. Jesus the deliberate king

Like so many other rulers, Jesus carefully orchestrated his entry into the royal city. The two disciples are sent off with precise instructions to find a young donkey that has never been ridden before.

Why? He could have just walked in, after all. He’s walked everywhere else. But Jesus is making a statement here. He’s enacting the prophesy from Zechariah 9:

“See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey.”

The message is: I am that king, the king come to save, the Messiah. I’ve come as the bringer of God’s eternal peace to the holy city.

Jesus has never denied who he is. He’s not engaging in a kind of false modesty. When Peter proclaimed him the Messiah, he didn’t deny it.

But he does challenge Peter – and James and John, and the other disciples, and ultimately you and me – about what treading the path of the Messiah would mean. He will be betrayed to the authorities, suffer and die – and only after that, rise from the dead.

Jesus will be crowned a king. He will be enthroned. Power and authority will belong to him. But the pathway is not via glory and victory, strength and honour – but through rejection, suffering, and disgrace.

Jesus is king, but a different kind of king. His authority does not come from the threat of violence and domination but from his weakness and suffering for our sake.

The nervous young donkey is the complete antithesis of the highly trained warhorse. Rather than sitting high above the crowd on a stallion, Jesus would’ve been tottering precariously on the back of the donkey. It’s hard to ride a donkey with a kingly dignity.

Jesus is a king, but he is a humble king.

3. Jesus the humble king

Despite that, the scene when Jesus enters Jerusalem, though, has all the atmosphere of a political rally. The crowd hails Jesus in the terms of Psalm 118, a Psalm of royal hope – the same psalm that greeted Charlemagne.

Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

They spread their cloaks on the road, which was a way of showing great honour. And they waved branches to welcome him – in John’s gospel, we read that they waved palm leaves as well. This was a symbol of rejoicing for the Jews and a symbol of triumph and victory for the Romans.

It looked like momentum was building. We know that Jesus had been the focus of the hope for the liberation of the Jewish people from the yoke of Roman power. The disciples were expecting the restoration of Israel.

But that’s not what we get here.

Jesus does not oblige our fantasies of power and victory. He subverts them.

He enters Jerusalem, but not to seize the reigns of power or to take over the temple.

He’s come to be our saviour, but not on our terms. He’s a king, yes – but he is frustratingly humble. He refuses to be the kind of Saviour we try to make him into.

He has come not to be served, but to serve – and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Perhaps we’re disappointed. We so want him to be the strong man who fixes everything right now – the crash-through leader who is decisive and who imposes his will on the situation. We haven’t got time for humility and gentleness.

It frustrated the disciples. And like them, we’re tempted to rewrite the part of Jesus in a way that we’d prefer. We make him look more like we want him to be: the great leader, the CEO, the billionaire entrepreneur, the celebrity. In the church, we even would prefer it if our ministers looked a little less like the guy who rides a donkey and a little more like a guy who drives a Bentley.

One of the classic critiques of Christianity in modern times is that it is too weak. The great atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche criticises Jesus for siding with slaves and outcasts and for celebrating the poor and lowly. It was precisely this that repelled him in Christianity.

We don’t want Jesus.

We want Superman.

Like James and John, we want to bask in the glory of the king, not share in the suffering and death of the messiah.

We want Jesus to look less like Jesus and more like Charlemagne.

But when we think like this, we do not have in mind the things of God.

4. The unsettling silence

Then what happens? Look at vs 11:

Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.

Do you remember where the story started? Jesus enters the city, is received with triumph and hope and then – an anticlimax. He looks around and walks back out again to Bethany, which is where he started. There’s no confrontation, no showdown, no storming of the town, no revolution.

There’s just a pause.

What will happen next is a calamity by the standards of those who wished for glory. Jesus will be subjected to shame and disgrace, treated as a guilty criminal, worthless and defiled. There will be lies, fear, cowardice, bloodlust, and murder.

But exactly this was Jesus’ victory. They declared him King of the Jews as a joke, but it was true. He came to cleanse Jerusalem, not of the Gentiles but of sin. This was his triumph: to conquer sin by dying in our place. The cross was his throne. This is how Jesus rules – by giving his life as a ransom for many.

5. What kind of leader do we want?

Photo by TS Sergey on Unsplash

In an election season, leadership is very much on our minds.

We live in anxious and uncertain times. What kind of leader do we want to lead us? What kind of kingdom do we want to live in?

You’ll have to make your decision about what name you tick at the ballot box.

But our real choice is whether to follow the King on a donkey into his very different Kingdom. This is a kingdom where victory does not look like the trappings of wealth and power that we normally expect. It’s the victory of the crucified Messiah. The path to his exaltation runs through the cross.

This will challenge us, warn us, and comfort us.

The way of King Jesus challenges our sense of entitlement and arrogance – our presumption that the world owes us. If Jesus especially confronts us in the Eastern Suburbs, it is here. When we talk down to other people and treat them like our slaves, then we are following the pattern of the world, not following the King riding the donkey.

I have, on occasion, heard Christians speak to our administrative staff in this way. I’ve read emails that lack basic politeness. If that’s how you lord it over others, then can I remind you that this is not the way of Jesus Christ. It should not be so with us, of all people. A sign of whether your heart is with Jesus will be how you treat those over whom you have power – the waitress, your employees, the tradesman, the person at the checkout.

From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Recall this stern word: in him those who humble themselves will be exalted and those who exalt themselves will be humbled.

We know that human glory and power last only for a moment. We know that wealth and influence are temporary. And so we do not revel in them. Rather, we make use of what we have for the true kingdom and its true king. We act like subjects of his realm and not the kingdom of earthly glory.

And we have here today a warning. Jesus’ humble victory is a warning not to side with earthly power against God. We don’t want to compromise with worldly power. We have no other Lord than Jesus.

That was Charlemagne’s blasphemy: to make his military triumph look like the triumph of Jesus, when it was the complete opposite.

In the Germany of the 1930s, the German Christian movement promoted allegiance to Hitler. Their slogan? "The swastika on our breasts, the cross in our hearts."

Some congregations were encouraged to add to their creeds statements like: Adolf Hitler is Germany’s saviour, the agent of God’s will.

Who doesn’t want to believe that a strong man will bring us what we want?

We’re so often tempted to pursue earthly power and influence as a means to God’s kingdom. But when we do, it is not God’s kingdom that we are really pursuing.

His Kingdom is a kingdom of the lowly and despised, of reconciled enemies, of forgiven sinners. It is a kingdom that the Rich Young ruler fails to enter and that blind Bartimaeus the beggar finds. There is only one Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. The arc of history ultimately bends his way – the way of the man who died to make peace with God.

But Palm Sunday also reminds us of the great comfort we have in the way of Jesus Christ. His way is, in fact, the path of victory. He overturns earthly power so that we need not ever be intimated by it again.

The mistake we can make in seeing Jesus as the humble Lord or as the Servant King is to divest him of all authority. He does not abdicate kingship on Palm Sunday. Rather, he shows us a different mode of rule and authority. He will rise again. He will triumph. But it will be a different kind of triumph - not a non-triumph.

In our anxious state, bewildered by the way that the actions of far-off leaders can change our lives at will, we can know that Jesus really IS the king. Even though he dies, he really does triumph. We aren’t simply accepting defeat when we follow him – or fatalistically trudging our way to the gallows. When we follow on his way we really do find the kingdom of peace, mercy, and love – a kingdom that lasts not for a few decades but for eternity.