Sermons
March 29, 2026 (Palm Sunday)
Death by Expediency
John 11:45—12:19
In the Synoptic Gospels, the event that finally led the religious leaders to collaborate with Rome and have Jesus killed was the cleansing of the temple. But in John, that happens very early in the story. Instead, the last straw is Jesus’ raising of Lazarus.
The religious leaders called an emergency meeting, and the meeting was one big ball of fear and anxiety. “If he keeps this up, everybody is going to believe in him, and” (they don’t say this but it’s surely in the back of their minds) “they will revolt against Rome, and Rome will come destroy us!”
Then Caiaphas, the high priest, said something he meant one way, but in light of what happens afterward we hear in a completely different way: “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” What he had in mind was death by expediency—killing Jesus, whether or not he’d done anything to deserve it, would serve to keep the status quo in place and preserve the religious leaders’ power.
You might or might not be aware that the high priests had their positions at the pleasure of the Roman Empire. If they did their jobs and kept the people quiet, they were fine; if not, they would be removed. So Caiaphas thought doing away with Jesus would keep the people quiet and keep Rome from unleashing their forces and destroying everything.
We learn a bit later in today’s reading that not only do they intend to put Jesus to death, but Lazarus also: As they did when disfellowshipping the man born blind in John 9, they wanted to remove any evidence of Jesus’ miracles.
Signs are irrelevant when people refuse to see them.
At the beginning of chapter 12, Jesus is back at Lazarus’ house, where he and his sisters give a dinner party for him. During that meal, Mary’s gratitude over Lazarus’ raising and her anticipatory grief at what was going to happen to Jesus overflowed, and she anointed Jesus’ feet with a jar of expensive perfume—which incensed Judas, whom John tells us was the disciples’ treasurer. (I take that with a grain of salt, because none of the other Gospels say it; but it does appear that by the time John wrote the tradition that Judas did what he did out of greed had taken hold.) Judas makes up his mind that he is going to work with those who wants to kill Jesus.
The next day, as tradition expected, Jesus came down from the Mount of Olives and entered Jerusalem.
We tend to call his coming into Jerusalem the “Triumphal Entry.” It was pretty common practice for a conquering ruler to come into the capital of the nation he’d conquered with a great procession, intended to demonstrate his power. Sometimes the procession included the display of the former ruler of that nation in chains or shown some other way to be in subjection—the conquered one’s head on a pike, maybe. It was also—and still is, in a lot of times and places—common for a conqueror, military leader, king, or whatever, to have a great parade in his own capital city and in other major cities in their nation after an important victory.
I’ve seen pictures of the parades that happened around this country at the end of the Second World War. They were celebrations to honor not just the leaders but the people themselves who were involved in bringing about that victory—and in the case of World War II, in this country that meant just about everybody.
Men who could fight joined the military. Those who couldn’t found other ways to help—like my grandpa and great-uncle, who were security guards at the munitions plant in Parsons, Kansas. Women stepped in, in a lot of places, to work in the factories where airplanes, ships, and other needed equipment were being built. We even know women played baseball during the war, so that all-American sport didn’t have to go on hiatus while the men were away fighting.[1] Little kids did their part: my uncle Barry, who was six years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, loaded his set of rubber soldiers up in his little red wagon and took them to the place in town where salvage materials were being gathered for re-use in the war effort.
Those parades at the end of the war weren’t just for President Truman (since FDR had died before the war ended). They weren’t just for the Generals: Eisenhower and MacArthur, Bradley and Marshall and Patton. They were for the whole country that had pulled together to end the war.
So technically speaking, these were a bit different from the kinds of triumphant processions that were common in the days of the Roman Empire. In a democracy, with a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” in Mr. Lincoln’s words, and where everyone who could do their part had done their part, a victory parade is a celebration of both leaders and ordinary people, serving at home and abroad, sacrificing in small ways and great.
We know about victory parades, about triumphant processions of conquering commanders, kings, and armed forces. And so we imagine that’s what was going on in the story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem. We imagine a huge crowd gathered on Main Street, waving palms and laying their garments on the road—both of which are symbols of honor for a conquering king.
But is that really what this was?
All four Gospels tell this story. All four quote Psalm 118:25-26 (Hosanna means “O save us,” which is what verse 25 says); all four mention or at least allude to a passage from the prophet Zechariah about the king coming to Jerusalem humbly riding a donkey. And all four sort of gloss over the size of the crowd that gathered to see him; they don’t say which street of Jerusalem he’s on (it’s not actually even clear whether he enters Jerusalem at all, or whether this all happens outside the city limits), and they don’t say just how much of a spectacle this was.
Yes, it is meant to be a demonstration of Jesus’ kingship. But to whom? If it was meant to show the city of Jerusalem that a conquering hero was coming into town, it didn’t exactly accomplish its goal. Rome was still very much in charge there; and Rome would exert its authority in a few days when that supposedly conquering hero was hung naked on a cross.[2]
Chances are that, the Franco Zeffirelli version notwithstanding, this probably wasn’t a major parade down Main Street with the whole city throning the streets to watch and cheer. Instead, it probably happened up on Mill Street, out by the graveyard, blocking the traffic for just a few minutes and with the onlookers mainly consisting of those who already followed Jesus—and in John’s version, a fair-sized crowd of people whose curiosity had been stirred by stories of the raising of Lazarus.
Had Jesus and his followers tried to stage a true “triumphal entry” onto Main Street with all of the residents of the city gathered to watch, I promise you that Jerusalem would have been in ruins by nightfall. Rome simply would not have put up with it. As it stands in the Gospels, though, Jesus was not on Rome’s radar screen until the Jewish religious leaders brought him to Rome’s attention after they decided he needed to be done away with.
But the Pharisees, even though the so-called Triumphal Entry was more a piece of performance art in a back alley than a grand victory parade, could see the writing on the wall. In Luke’s version of the story, these Pharisees, worried that Rome might catch wind of what Jesus has done, urge Jesus to quiet his disciples down. But in John they don’t even try; the know the matter is settled.
“The whole world is watching!”
Of course “the whole world” cannot have seen this, cannot have known about Lazarus, cannot have come to follow Jesus as a result of that single event, or even the events of three years in the life of a Jewish man from Galilee who never wrote a single thing and lived before most people could read, before the printing press made materials widely available, much less before television or the internet.
But the Pharisees knew. They knew something very important was happening, and that it had already gone beyond anyone’s ability to get it under control. They had no way of knowing how far it would go: how soon the whole world would know about Jesus, and there would be people who followed Jesus from every part of the globe, proclaiming the story in every human language.
“Look, the world has gone after him!” Indeed.
[1] The popular 1992 film A League of Their Own is based on the true story of the first female professional baseball league.
[2] Most of the depictions of Jesus’ Crucifixion in art and film ignore that little detail. Nobody really wants to see Jesus’ privates, so he is tastefully covered. In reality, part of the horror of crucifixion for Jewish people was that they were indeed crucified totally naked, which Jews of the time considered to be extremely humiliating.