The King, the Priest, and the Messiah

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, Palm Sunday, 4/13/25

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

There is no doubt that Palm Sunday, also known as Passion Sunday, is one of the most paradoxical liturgies in the Church year. We begin with the jubilant liturgy of the palms, rendering all glory, laud, and honor unto Jesus at his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. But then, before we have had a chance to settle into the joy of the occasion, Jesus is crucified.

Now there is a good and practical reason for this abrupt liturgical transition from triumph to sacrifice, but this was never actually the original intent of Palm Sunday. Historically, Palm Sunday, which is our entryway to Holy Week, was a day to dwell in the triumph of Christ our king and messiah and the telling of his Passion and death was not to come until Good Friday. However, as social norms changed and our schedules became busier, the clergy began to look around the pews and realize that not everyone was making it to Good Friday – and I ascribe no shame here, only gentle invitation. But this created a theological conundrum, because as we know you cannot have resurrection without passing through crucifixion. Without Christ’s death on the cross, the empty tomb is not only missing a body, it’s missing its meaning. And so to remedy this problem, churches gradually began to squeeze the Passion Gospel into Palm Sunday, leaving preachers, such as myself, scrambling to make sense of these two powerful images of Jesus’s triumphal arrival and gut-wrenching departure all in one fell swoop.

However practical this solution may have been, it also shortchanges us from basking in the theological richness of Christ’s arrival at the start of Holy Week. So today I would like to remedy that, by not preaching on the Passion. For that, I’d like to invite you to do one of two things. First, is to come to the service of Good Friday if you can. It will be right here at noon. But if you cannot do that, then I invite you to take home today’s bulletin, and carve out some time on Friday to read through the account of Jesus’s passion again. Make time to dwell with Jesus at the foot of the cross. I promise, that if you do this, your experience of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday will be all the more glorious.

So, back to these palms. What does Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem mean and why is it worth celebrating all these centuries later? The key to understanding Jesus’s triumphal entry is in the refrain of the crowd as he rides into town on a donkey:

"Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!

Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!"

Now what this proclamation is, is essentially a paraphrase of Psalm 118. And Psalm 118 is a prophetic psalm heralding the arrival of three things a king, a messiah, and a priest. These are the three titles that the crowd is thus conferring upon Jesus at his arrival. With the benefit of historical hindsight, this may seem obvious; Christians have been proclaiming Jesus as king, Messiah, and great high priest for centuries now, but it’s important to remember that at the time, to call someone, especially someone like Jesus, even one of those titles, was deeply scandalous. Scandalous even to the point of death, which we know is what happened. Why was that?

Let’s start with Jesus’s kingship. Well for one, crowning Jesus as king was a problem because there already was a king, King Herod who was deputized by an even higher ruler, the Roman Emperor, to oversee the region of Judea. So to welcome Jesus as a king and hail him with royal fanfare and palm fronds, the symbols of victory, was tantamount to insurrection. Not only that, the strangeness of this king Jesus would have been perceived as a mockery of Herod and of Caesar. And frankly, it was. The fact that Jesus was riding a lowly draft animal, a symbol of peace, and looking like a common shepherd signified God’s total inversion of what it meant to be powerful. It was a repudiation of violence and domination and a proclamation of humility and servanthood that were to be the instruments of Christ’s royal reign.

But what about Christ’s priesthood. In psalm 118 after the hailing of a heavenly king-figure, the text goes on to describe one who would “bind the festal procession with branches up to the horns of the altar” (v. 27). Now to contemporary listeners this would have been understood as a reference to only one altar – the altar in the holy temple in Jerusalem at which only one priest, the hereditary high priest of the house of Levi, had the privilege of offering sacrifice on behalf of the people before God. So to claim that this obscure, rabble rousing rabbi from the provincial region of Galilee (think Virginia Beach or Radford County) was going to assume the highest religious office of the land, was akin to heresy. And reversing expectations yet again, not only would Jesus become high priest, he would also become the sacrifice. The offering before God that would wipe the slate clean and open for us the gateway to heaven.

So at this point, Jesus, with the support of the people, has dethroned the king and defrocked the high priest and if all that were not enough, they have one more title to bestow upon him – the most dangerous and incredible one of all. Jesus is proclaimed as the Messiah. In Matthew’s Gospel the crowd cries out “Hosanna to the Son of David,” a title which could only mean one thing – the long-awaited anointed one of Israel (21:9). However, this time, instead of the emperor, instead of the high priest, it’s the people’s turn, even our turn, to be shocked. 

You see, the common expectation was that the Messiah was the one whom God would send to liberate the Israelites from hundreds of years of dominating powers. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and most recently, the Romans had all occupied Israel and her people and the Messiah was expected to be the one who would finally turn her shame to glory. But what the people of Jerusalem did not know that day, was that God had even loftier plans. For this Messiah had come not just to liberate the Israelites from their oppressors, but Christ Jesus had come to liberate each of us from sin and death. A messiah for the entire world.

The drama of Holy Week concludes in the way it begins today, with triumph. First a triumphal procession into Jerusalem, and finally, a triumphal resurrection of Christ our king, our high priest, and our Messiah, who wins for us redemption from death by his own death on the cross. And that is the story to be continued this week. Amen.