Behold Your King: The Triumphal Entry | John 12:12-19
Phil Krause | March 29, 2026
We’re starting a series today called “Behold Your King: Holy Week in the Gospel of John.” So this morning, would you take your Bible and open to John 12? If you’re looking at one of the Bibles provided in the room, you’ll find our passage on page 899. It will also be on the screens if you’d like to follow along. We’re going to be reading John’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry.
As you’re heading there, think for a moment about the arrogant kings of history, okay? Pride is a characteristic that kings and other politicians often seem to have in overflowing amounts. Maybe we all do, but it seems like they have a greater opportunity to show their pride. There have been crazy despots, like Emperor Gaius Caligula of Rome, who called himself a god and, among other things, forced Roman senators to run next to his chariot for miles.
Or Louis XIV, known as the Sun King and famous for saying, “L’État, c’est moi,” “I am the state.” Historians tell us there’s no record that he actually said those words verbatim, but it is a good representation of his attitude about absolute monarchy and how he ran his government. “I am the state.” He considered himself to be above the law.
Or think about how pride and arrogance affected or even infected many of the kings we read about in the Bible—King Saul, with his extreme jealousy, his fearful obsession to try to kill David, and his compromise and disregard for the Lord’s instructions; or King Solomon, who started out so well, but by the end of his reign he had amassed so many women and so much wealth that he could say, “I’ve tried it all, I’ve withheld nothing from myself, and it’s all vanity, emptiness.” That’s assuming that he’s the author of Ecclesiastes.
Maybe King Nebuchadnezzar comes to mind. He’s the cruel, maniacal ruler of Babylon whose pride caused him to take all the credit himself for his great kingdom and his beautiful city, and he spent seven years, as a result, literally living like an animal.
Or King Herod Agrippa, whose rule came to a sudden, maggoty conclusion when the people listened to his speech. They had political reasons to want to butter him up, and Acts 12 tells us the people were shouting, “’The voice of a god and not of a man!’ Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.”
It’s a sad fact of history: Give a sinful man absolute power, and he will be corrupted absolutely. It’ll go to his head. Pride will be the precursor to his downfall.
I think that’s one reason that, in today’s culture, we have these no-kings rallies and protests. That phrase resonates with people because nobody wants an arrogant leader who thinks the universe revolves around him or her, like a bad king. (And by the way, I should add that I think those kinds of leaders…we have prideful leaders in both political parties in this country.)
But here, in John 12, we have a snapshot of a very different kind of king. Let’s look at John 12:12-19. This takes place just days prior to Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus had raised his friend Lazarus from the dead in Bethany, and the word was out. In fact, the jealous chief priests were scheming to kill both Jesus and Lazarus.
So, hear the word of the Lord as we pick up the narration in verse 12.
“The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, ’Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!’ And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written,
’Fear not, daughter of Zion;
behold, your king is coming,
sitting on a donkey’s colt!’
“His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him. The crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to bear witness. The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign. So the Pharisees said to one another, ’You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.’”
This is God’s word. Let’s pray one more time.
Father, help us to hear your voice in these words of Scripture. Help us to know what you want us to know as a result of this today. In Jesus’ name, amen.
In the church calendar, today is called Palm Sunday, precisely because of this story and the other accounts in the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Jesus here is entering Jerusalem. Crowds are large because of the Passover feast. Scholars are divided as to whether or not this happened on a Sunday or maybe Monday. It just depends on how you interpret the timing markers here in John. Like in verse 1 of chapter 12, it says, “Six days before the Passover,” and then verse 12, “The next day.” Then, when do you count the beginning of Passover and things like that.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it was a Palm Sunday or Palm Monday. But what happened on those days and in this scene was hugely significant. So today I want to focus on three elements in this passage:
1. The King
2. The Prophecy
3. The People
I’m going to try to show you how each one has a direct bearing on your life today as well.
1. The King
First, let’s look at the king, Jesus. He doesn’t claim to be king in so many words, but his actions are deliberately designed to show his kingship. It’s like he’s living out or acting out a parable to say, “Yes, I’m a king, but there’s a twist. There’s a surprise in it.”
(1) We see this, first of all, in his sovereignty over the situation. Kings are sovereign. That means they’re independent of outside influence. They’re in control. They rule.
So how do we see Jesus’ sovereignty in this story? Well, one way is wrapped up in that simple phrase, “Jesus found…” Look at verse 14 again. “And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it.” If you’re familiar with the other gospel accounts, you know this is way more than just happenstance at this moment. Jesus wasn’t just kind of walking along, “Oh, look, here’s a donkey. I think I’ll ride it into town.” No, he clearly orchestrated everything, including predicting how the donkey’s owners were going to respond and what the disciples should say, telling them what to say in return. So John is kind of understating things when he says Jesus found a young donkey. There’s nothing chance about it. The sovereign king here is doing this on purpose.
The twist is, sinful leaders often use their sovereignty or their authority, which is derived—granted—authority; it’s not there by absolute divine right. But they often use their authority for selfish ends, for political advantage. Jesus isn’t doing that here. So sovereignty.
(2) There’s also great symbolism at play here. Kings rode on donkeys during times of peace and prosperity. If they were going to war, they’d be on a charger, a big war horse.
Pastor Nate Shurden says it this way:
“Do not all the great men of history have a trusty horse? There was Alexander the Great and his beautiful black stallion Bucephalus. There was George Washington and his white-coated Arabian blueskin. But here Jesus is riding a donkey. It’s almost comical. Can you imagine Alexander the Great on a donkey? From the world’s vantage point, it’s ridiculous. But every move Jesus makes is filled with purpose.”
So the ancient Middle Eastern mindset was that donkeys stood for prosperity and peace and productivity. If you needed a donkey, that meant you had things you needed to carry from one place to another. It was like having a pickup truck today or something. You had to get things from point A to point B, and that’s a good thing.
In the Bible, some of the judges rode donkeys. The law of Moses warned kings not to multiply horses for themselves, so donkeys became associated with royalty. King David used donkeys and mules (a mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey). At Solomon’s coronation, David had Solomon, his son, ride on David’s mule when they announced him to be the king.
So donkeys meant something, they stood for something in that culture, and Jesus choosing to ride a donkey was a deliberate claim to being the king.
(3) Then, let’s talk about Jesus’ sweet temperament, his gentleness. We see this in his choice of the particular donkey he selected. You’re going to say, “Well, how’s that?”
Well, it’s the fact that he’s riding a young donkey. Again, Mark and Luke point out it was a donkey on which no one had ever sat. Mark says they brought along the colt’s mother, too. Well, that makes sense to anyone who is familiar with livestock.
Now, what do you know about young colts that have never been ridden before? Good luck with that, right?
The story is told of a jockey in England who surrendered to Christ simply by hearing this passage read out loud. Apparently, this jockey, this man who rides and trains animals for a living, he randomly (“randomly”) went to a Palm Sunday service. The Lord had gotten this man’s heart ready. He knew he was stuck in sin. He couldn’t control what he called the sins of his youth, and he was sick of it. He was disgusted with himself. So he went to church, he heard this passage read, and it blew him away that Jesus rode an untrained colt that had never been mounted before. It hadn’t been broken! Beyond that, with the crowd shouting and all the chaos of the environment, a colt would normally have just panicked and run away. So this jockey understood it takes a lot of time and energy and work to train a colt. He knew that this was a miracle.
Here’s what went on in his mind. He said, “If Jesus could so quietly and quickly control a colt that hadn’t even been trained, surely Jesus can master my untamed, wayward, immoral life.” And at that moment, he was converted.
So Jesus, the gentle, humble Prince of Peace, the weeping king—we see elsewhere that he is crying as he enters Jerusalem—he was announcing, “I’m not about to start a fight.” In fact, he knew he was riding into the city to give his life. He was riding on to his death.
(4) We also see that Jesus is king in the shouts and overall behavior of the crowd. The palm branches, the cloaks represented this general attitude of, “Hey, let’s make the way as smooth as possible, as cushy as possible, as clean as possible, as nice for this king that is coming, as possible.” They were treating him like royalty.
What about their shouts? They’re quoting from Psalm 118 when they say, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the king of Israel.”
Now let’s unpack that word “Hosanna” just a little bit. Actually, here’s how Pastor John Piper unpacked it. The children’s choir in his church was going to sing a song with the word “Hosanna” in it, and so he explained it in a simple way that even kids could understand too. So that’s why I latched onto it. This is what Pastor John said.
“Our English word ’Hosanna’ comes from a Greek word ’Hosanna,’ which comes from a Hebrew phrase, ’Hosi-a-na.’ And that Hebrew phrase is found one solitary place in the whole Old Testament: Psalm 118:25, where it means, ’Save, please!’ It’s a cry to God for help. Like when somebody pushes you off the diving board before you can swim and you come up hollering, “Help! Save me! Hosi-a-na!” But something happened to that phrase ’Hosi-a-na.’ The meaning changed over the years. In the psalm, it was immediately followed by the exclamation, ’Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ The cry for help, Hosi-a-na, was answered almost before it came out of the psalmist’s mouth.
“And over the centuries, the phrase Hosi-a-na stopped being a cry for help in the ordinary language of the Jews; instead, it became a shout of hope and exultation. It used to mean, ’Save, please!’ but gradually it came to mean, ’Salvation! salvation! salvation has come!’ It used to be what you would say when you fell off the diving board, but it came to be what you would say when you see the lifeguard coming to save you. It’s the bubbling over of a heart that sees hope and joy and salvation on the way and can’t keep it in. So ’Hosanna’ means, ’Hooray for salvation! It’s coming; it’s here! Salvation! Salvation!’
“’Hosanna to the son of David’ means, ’The son of David is our salvation. Hooray for the king! Salvation belongs to the king!’ And ’Hosanna in the highest’ means, ’Let all the angels in heaven join the song of praise. Salvation! salvation! Let the highest heaven sing the song.’”
I find that explanation helpful, from John Piper.
So the people were shouting, “Hosanna.” They even called Jesus the king of Israel. That’s a phrase that just days later would be used in mockery against him as the soldiers beat him. Do you remember the sign that Pilate put over Jesus on the cross? His accusation, the reason he was being executed, according to that sign—it was written in three different languages—“Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews.”
Whether the crowd understood it or not, the full truth of their words was seen only after it was all over and Jesus had been crucified and resurrected. Jesus is king. His entry into Jerusalem that day was announcing that fact.
So a question to ask ourselves is, are you—am I—a loyal subject to this king?
2. The Prophecy
The other beautifully obvious characteristic of King Jesus we see in this passage is his profound humility, and that’s brought out in the prophecy. So number two, let’s talk about the prophecy.
John and Matthew both quote the same prophecy from Zechariah 9. We’re going to look at that for a moment. Keep in mind, Zechariah wrote this 470 years before Jesus was born. Zechariah 9:9-12—and as I read, I’m going to kind of walk through this phrase by phrase. Pay attention to how we see the gospel, how we see the good news about Jesus in each phrase of this prophecy.
Verse 9 says, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!” Now, let me pause. The scene that the prophet is about to describe should give great joy. That’s what he’s saying. He says, “Rejoice! Rejoice greatly!” If you’re super observant, like I sometimes am not, you’ll notice that John actually started his quotation of this prophecy with the phrase, “Fear not.” Here it’s, “Rejoice greatly”; in John’s quoting of it, it’s, “Fear not.” John wanted it to convey great comfort to his readers. So John’s communicating comfort, and Zechariah’s encouraging joy and rejoicing, comfort and joy. “Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.”
Why, Zechariah? Why, John? Why should we experience great rejoicing and shout aloud? Why should we not fear? Next phrase: “Behold, your king is coming to you.” Ah, there’s something different about this king! Normally, if you had a problem, you had to go to the king. This king is coming to you! That’s amazing in and of itself.
We celebrate this every year at Christmas. He came to us. He came as one of us.
Now, here’s the description. “Righteous and having salvation is he.” Break that down. Righteous. The king who’s coming to you is righteous. That’s a really good thing because (A) most human kings, most kings are not righteous, and they goof up royally. But also (B) in the Bible, we see that righteousness is a requirement for getting to be with God, and we’re not righteous. So we actually couldn’t go to him if we tried. No, this king who’s coming is the very essence, the very definition of righteousness himself. He has it, and he’s going to give it.
What else? “Righteous and having salvation is he.” If he has salvation, that is great news, because that means he can actually do something about my problem when he comes.
Next phrase: “Humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Oh, this is truly an amazing king! Who ever heard of a king who’s willing to come to his people, a king who is righteous, a king who isn’t a pushover and can actually accomplish our salvation, but he’s also humble?
Are you seeing the gospel here? So the prophecy that Zechariah was giving here was about so much more than just that hour, or however long it took for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem. Jesus’ triumphal entry was a picture of everything God has done and is doing for us in Christ.
The king comes. He comes with righteousness. He comes with salvation. He’s humble.
Speaking of humility, the great British preacher of the second half of the 1800s, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, preached a whole sermon on the lowliness, the humility of Christ. And in that message, Spurgeon pointed out that this humility in Jesus was more than just an external characteristic. He said,
“His supreme lowliness of character grew out of the actual lowliness of his heart. He never aimed at humility nor labored after it. It was natural to him. Of all sickening things, the pride that apes humility is the most loathsome. Not a particle of that nauseous vice was found in our Lord. He never puts on an air nor strikes an attitude nor plays the humble part, but he is meek and lowly, and all can see it. He’s never other than he seems to be, and he always is and seems to be the meekest of mankind. His inmost heart was seen and is seen to be all lowliness.”
I love that. So, genuine humility; it’s rare and it’s refreshing, and that’s what we see in Jesus.
Let’s keep going in Zechariah 9. Next we see something about his kingdom or the rule of this humble, righteous, saving, coming king. Verse 10: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim.” Now, just remember, a chariot was more than just a cart pulled by horses. It was a sign of military might in that day, like we might think of tanks or missiles or drones or fighter jets. So, “I’ll cut off the chariot from Ephraim…” There aren’t going to be any more of those. “...and the war horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off. And he shall speak peace to the nations.”
So, this king is going to speak peace to the nations. It’s a kingdom of peace. No more war—not just peace within the borders of Israel; it’s peace with the nations.
Look at the extent of his coming kingdom. “His rule shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.” That is everywhere. Why, Zechariah? And how? How is this amazing king going to do all this? Verse 11: “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope. Today I declare that I will restore to you double.”
Now, covenants were always ratified with blood, but something that the people in Zechariah’s day didn’t know and something that we do know now, today, is that the blood of his covenant was actually his own blood. And it’s because of that blood and that covenant that we, the prisoners of hope, can be in our refuge, in our stronghold, our place of safety, which is way better than we deserve. It’s grace upon grace, restored double. That’s the idea here.
It’s incredible how much we can see about Jesus and his kingdom just in these few verses. Some of it has yet to be fulfilled, but he is king, he came, and by the way, he’s coming again. He’s righteous. He saves. He’s humble. He brings peace. He gives hope. He sets prisoners free because of the blood of his covenant. He will reign over all the earth. All of that, says Zechariah, is cause for great rejoicing. All of that, says John, is cause for great comfort.
It’s the gospel. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem that day was capturing all of that in one living, acted-out parable.
There are implications for us too, this humility of Jesus. As the song says,
“Your kingdom is humble, as humble as death.
This king is a savior who gave his last breath.
So may we die daily, our pride laid to rest.
His kingdom is humble, and the broken are blessed.
Hallelujah! Let all creation say,
The king of heaven reigns.”
So be amazed by our humble king, Jesus. His kingdom is a different kind of kingdom. It’s backwards from the way all other governments work. He’s a humble king. Don’t ever get tired of praising him, and look for him on every page of your Bible.
3. The People
Now we’re going to head back to John 12. We’ve seen how Jesus is king in this scene, we’ve looked briefly at the prophecy that he was fulfilling, and I want to spend our remaining time talking about point number three, the people; specifically, their responses to King Jesus.
When we read this story, there’s actually quite a cast of characters, isn’t there? Obviously the focal point is Jesus. But let’s look at the ways that the others in this account responded to this person riding into town on a donkey. It was a crowd, so likely thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of people thronging around. So it makes sense that there are going to be a lot of different responses, a lot of different motivations for why they’re even there, thoughts that were going through their minds. I think we can break down their responses into a few different categories. It probably was a spectrum, but for the sake of discussion, we’re going to kind of break it down into these hard categories.
(1) First of all, some of them in the crowd are antagonistic toward Jesus. They’re hostile. I didn’t read these verses before, but look at John 12:9-11.
“When the large crowd of the Jews learned that Jesus was there, they came, not only on account of him but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus.”
Then, verse 19, “the Pharisees said to one another, ’You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.’” So these religious leaders were antagonistic toward Jesus. They viewed him as an enemy who needed to be silenced.
Now, of course, it was motivated by their own pride, ultimately, but also this severe inability to think outside their neat theological system. So judgmentalism, envy, criticism—these all contributed to their anger and their rejection of Jesus. Maybe we could sum up their attitude with the question, “How can I get rid of Jesus? How can I make him go away?” So that’s the antagonistic.
(2) Many that day responded to Jesus because they were curious. Look at verses 9 and 18. It says, “They came not only on account of him, but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” Verse 18, “The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign,” meaning the raising of Lazarus.
Their thinking was more along the lines of, “I want to see Jesus do something really cool again! I want to see it for myself, not just hear about it.”
Earlier in the book of John, in John 6, Jesus had confronted people about this very same kind of attitude. It was just after he had fed bread and fish to a crowd of 5,000 men. It was an amazing miracle. And the next day, the crowd caught up to Jesus and they started pestering him for more miracles. Jesus said in John 6:26, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” In other words, “You’re missing the point of the miracles! You’re attracted by the sensational. You’re attracted by free food and what’s in it for you.” But he said, “You’re forgetting who it’s supposed to point to.” It’s like Jesus is saying, “You want more bread? Here’s something you can chew on, pun intended. Me! I am the bread of life. Eat my body and drink my blood and you’ll never be hungry again.”
It’s a fascinating conversation. It’s recorded in John 6. Obviously, we don’t have time to go through it now. But the result of it all was that many turned away from him and from Jesus, and it says they no longer walked with him.
The same motivations, that same curiosity to see Jesus do something amazing, was driving many in the crowd as Jesus rode into Jerusalem in John 12. And there’s a sad commentary by John in verses 37 and 39. Verse 37: “Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him…Therefore, they could not believe,” verse 39.
So their response to him is represented by the question, “What’s in it for me?” Or, “How can I use Jesus for my own benefit?”
(3) There’s another group, another response. Let’s call them the seekers. These are the ones who don’t completely get it yet, but they’re putting the puzzle pieces together. In our passage, we see it in the disciples, in verse 16. “His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.”
So God had them on a journey of understanding. They hadn’t arrived yet, they were making progress. Maybe some of them were still confused about what kind of king Jesus was or is. Some of them still maybe expected him to overthrow the oppressive Roman government and set up his kingdom right then in Jerusalem. But, as events unfolded according to God’s plan, they started understanding and putting the pieces together. “Oh, maybe that’s what Isaiah meant when he talked about a suffering servant of the Lord.” Things like that. “Maybe I’ve been thinking wrong about it this whole time.”
The old saying is that hindsight is 20/20. Well, slowly, gradually, the disciples pieced it all together later—and oh, by the way, they later had the indwelling Holy Spirit living in them to help them understand these things as well.
I think the question that goes with this group is, “How can I lay aside my assumptions and learn from what Jesus is doing? And what does God have to say about it in his word?” Those are the seekers.
(4) Finally, the last response to Jesus we see in this passage is from worshipers, true worshipers. This group is seen in verse 17. “The crowd that had been with him [Jesus] when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to bear witness.”
These people are all in. They know, “He’s my king.” These are the ones referred to in the Gospel of Luke, Luke 19, starting in verse 37, where it says,
“As Jesus was drawing near, already on the way down the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.’ And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.’”
They’re worshipers. They’re saying, “Not only is he my king, I’m going to tell others.” They’re bearing witness. “I’m going to continue to bear witness about the great things that he’s done. I don’t want to stop.”
So the question they were asking was simply, “How can I give Jesus as much glory as possible?” Or, “How can I keep the rocks from having to cry out?”
So, here’s what I want to do as I finish up this morning. Would you please close your eyes while I ask you some questions to think through? And then I’m going to close in prayer.
Which response best matches where you’re at today? You might be antagonistic toward Jesus. Maybe you’ve been hurt by someone claiming to be one of Jesus’ people. Maybe you have intellectual hangups and you feel like you could never submit to or follow or obey Jesus. You don’t want him to be your king; you’d rather try to be your own king.
Or, you might be more in the curious camp, wondering what’s in it for you. Can I lovingly say this to you, friend? If either of those is true of you, you’re in a dangerous place. I want to plead with you. Don’t superimpose the wrong ways that people in authority have treated you on Jesus. He’s not like the arrogant rulers of the world. He’s the only truly righteous, gentle king. So take your concerns, your fears, your questions to him. Allow him to minister his sweet grace to you before it’s too late.
If you’re just casually, curiously watching from the sidelines, it’s time to jump in. You could never do enough to earn your place in the kingdom. Instead, submit now to his loving kingship. You’re never going to regret it.
Maybe you’re a seeker. God has you on a journey. You know there’s a lot you don’t get yet, but you’re learning. Can I encourage you, that’s great. That’s great! Keep going! Be patient with the process. Don’t give up. Remember, King Jesus is gentle enough to calm a fearful donkey colt. He can handle all your own fears and questions.
Then finally, if you’re in the category of worshiper, the challenge to you is to go deeper and deeper. Become more and more passionate for your king. There are still ways he wants to expand the reach of his kingdom in your life. So what’s in the way? What’s distracting you? How can your focus, how can your gaze be even more entranced by his beauty? It’s all about Jesus. The more you can do to bring the attention to Jesus instead of to yourself, the more satisfied you’re going to be and the more glory he is going to get. So, how can you bear witness to others and tell others about the great things that he’s done?
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for telling us the story of Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem four different ways. Thank you for the fact that it’s a beautiful picture of what you’ve done for us. Jesus, you are the king. We don’t make you king; you already are king. But all of us need to acknowledge and submit to your rulership more. There are still ways we try, we want to be in charge of ourselves. So Holy Spirit, do the work you want to do in each of our hearts today. Help us see the beauty and majesty of King Jesus. We pray in his name, amen.
Phil Krause
