The Arrival of the King | Mark 11:1-21
Brian Hedges | April 13, 2025
Let’s turn in Scripture this morning to Mark 11.
I think everyone loves the story of a great king, and we are familiar with these stories, of course, in our culture. You think of The Lion King and Simba, who returns to Pride Rock to reclaim the throne and bring life back to the land. Or think of Aragorn, who comes out of exile to Gondor to fight off the evil arising in Mordor. Or think of Aslan, who returns to Narnia to defeat the White Witch, break her curse, and bring spring into this long winter.
These are the stories that capture our hearts and our imagination. I think one reason those stories capture our hearts is because there’s something deep within us that longs for a good king, a gracious king, a king that will bring justice and peace and freedom to our hearts.
These, of course, are just stories, and in real life, I think we spend much of our lives longing for the kind of peace, justice, and freedom that we know that our broken world needs, but we’re often disappointed. We have seen corruption in governments. We’ve seen betrayal in work relationships. We’ve seen failure, abuse in the church, instability in homes—everywhere in our society where authority should be used in good ways to bring about peace and justice and freedom, we see it twisted and turned and actually used to oppress and to hurt and to actually bring destruction into people’s lives.
So there’s something within us that’s, I think, suspicious of authority because we’ve seen it misused so often, even while deep in our hearts there is a longing for a good king.
Well, the Gospel of Mark is the story of a King and his kingdom. We began this series last week as Brad gave us several vignettes from the life of Jesus in the first half of the Gospel of Mark, really showing us how Jesus used his authority to bring salvation and healing into the lives of people and into the world, but also how Jesus introduces us to the way of the cross. It is a way of bringing the kingdom of the world that subverts our expectations, that surprises us at every turn.
We’re going to see that again this morning as we turn to Mark 11. This is just a short series, “The King and His Cross,” that’s leading us into Holy Week, and then on Good Friday we’ll be looking at the crucifixion of Christ, and on Easter Sunday next week on the resurrection. But today, we’re looking at this familiar passage, Mark 11, and it’s what we know as the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. It’s pretty typical on Palm Sunday for us to consider one of these Gospel passages.
We’re going to read Mark 11:1-21 and essentially try to answer some questions about Jesus: Why do we need Jesus says our king? What kind of king is he? What does this king do about the evil and corruption and the brokenness that’s in the world? I think the passage will answer those questions for us. So, Mark 11, beginning in verse one.
“Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, to Bethphage and Bethany, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village in front of you, and immediately as you enter it you will find a colt tied, on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, “Why are you doing this?” say, “The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.”’ And they went away and found a colt tied at a door outside in the street, and they untied it. And some of those standing there said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!’
“And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
“On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard it.
“And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers.’ And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when evening came they went out of the city.
“As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, ‘Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.’”
This is God’s word.
In some ways, this is a very familiar passage. It shows us the entry of King Jesus into Jerusalem. But it does have some of these strange elements in it, especially the fig tree. We’re going to try to understand what to make of that fig tree here in a moment, but I think the passage suggests several insights for us about Jesus as the King. It shows us:
1. The Need for a King
2. The Humility of the King
3. The Judgment of the King
I think these points answer the basic questions we have about why we need a kingdom, what kind of king is Jesus, and what does this king do about the evil and brokenness in the world.
1. The Need for a King
Mark opens this passage with this deliberate, dramatic entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem. As you read through the details of this, as Jesus gives very detailed instructions to his disciples about getting the colt and then he rides into Jerusalem, it’s really clear that Jesus is doing this intentionally, he’s doing it deliberately. We know that he’s doing it in fulfillment of the Old Testament prophetic hopes of a king who would ride into Jerusalem.
The people seem to understand something of this. They were under Roman occupation, they were people who were living in exile, they were longing for deliverance, and as Jesus rides into Jerusalem they start singing a song. They’re singing from Psalm 118, and they’re saying, “Hosanna in the highest!” and, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” They’re talking about the kingdom of their father David. They’re using this kingdom language, and as they cry out “Hosanna,” literally what they are crying out is, “Lord, save us!” That’s what that word “hosanna” means. It means “save us.” So they are crying out for salvation, and they are looking for, longing for the kingdom.
I think this highlights the deep need in their hearts for deliverance, their need for rescue. They were living under a reign of injustice. They were longing for justice. They were longing for freedom. They were longing for their fortunes as God’s people to be restored once again. They were longing for rescue.
If we’re honest, each one of us in our heart of hearts is also looking for something like that. We know that the world is broken, and we look around and we see that brokenness all around us. We think about the corruption in government, we think about the fractures that happen in homes and in families, and even the brokenness of our own hearts. Every person, in one way or another, is seeking for a kingdom, or at least is seeking for those things we associate with the kingdom, truth and freedom and justice.
We see this in the world all around us. There are many different examples we can give. One that I think of often is that great novel, and the play that was based on it, Les Misérables. It takes place, of course, during the Paris uprising of 1832, which was a populist rebellion against the monarchy that was driven by this greater desire for justice and freedom.
There’s a song in Les Misérables that goes like this:
“Do you hear the people sing,
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again.”
It’s a rousing song, if you’ve ever seen the play or heard the music, but it’s a song that touches this deep longing for freedom. They don’t want to be enslaved. They want justice. They want freedom in their lives, in their society, and in their world.
All of us, at some level or another, we want those things. And the only way we get those things is through a king.
Now, of course, what we see in human history, and we see this even in the history of Israel, is that the human attempts to establish a kingdom always fall. Every great nation, every great empire in the history of the world has eventually disintegrated. And when you look at the story of Israel, here’s the story of a people who are searching for a king, and much of the Old Testament narrative is just about this. Remember, in 1 Samuel they rejected God as being king over them. They wanted a king like the other nations, and so they selected King Saul. King Saul proves to be a disaster.
Then they get perhaps the greatest of all Israel’s Kings, King David. He’s a man after God’s own heart. God even makes a covenant with David, a promise to David, to his household, that through him and through his son he’s going to establish his kingdom. But even David miserably fails—a moral failure and complicit in the murder of Uriah the Hittite after committing adultery with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. David proves to be a failure.
There are hopes that maybe Solomon will be the one through whom this kingdom dream will be fulfilled, but by the end of his life, Solomon—in spite of his wealth, in spite of his wisdom, in spite of his power, and all the prosperity that the people of God experience under his reign—Solomon builds alliances with foreign nations, he turns to idolatry, and after Solomon, the kingdom divides. You’ve got a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom. As one Old Testament scholar puts it, the the rest of Old Testament history is essentially like this moving spotlight, moving to the north and to the south, looking at the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah to see if there is a king who will bring to fruition this great dream of a kingdom. And while there’s an occasional good king here and there, all of the kings in some way or another fail. Israel ends up in exile; Judah, the southern kingdom, also ends up in exile after them. Then, several hundred years later, that’s when we have the beginning of the New Testament. This is where the people are. They are still waiting for this king to come.
When Jesus arrives on the scene, Jesus is clearly, symbolically showing that he is this king, as he comes into Jerusalem in fulfillment of this prophecy.
You and I are searching for a kingdom as well. You want this in your heart of hearts, whether you are married or single or a parent or a teacher, whether you have a trade job as a carpenter or a plumber or you are a doctor or a professor. You’re longing for and wanting to pour your life into that which will ultimately bring truth and justice and freedom and peace and healing into the world. Yet all of our efforts are frustrated, unless those efforts are somehow woven into the kingdom that Jesus is bringing.
What we see in this Gospel is that, when Jesus arrives on the scene, even though he comes claiming royalty and claiming kingship, he does it in a way that subverts the expectations of the people. What kind of king is Jesus? And what we learn is that he is a humble king.
2. The Humility of the King
He is a king who surprises us and confronts us and who challenges our assumptions about how power is used and what the kingdom really is all about.
We see this, again, in the first half of this passage, as Jesus rides into Jerusalem. But note this: he does not ride into Jerusalem on a war horse, but on the colt of a donkey. It is a deliberate fulfillment of Zechariah 9:9, which says,
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
So it’s clear that Jesus is intentionally fulfilling this prophecy, and there’s a tension here in what Jesus is doing. William Lane in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel points this out. There’s a tension between his messianic assertion and restraint. There is this veiled assertion that he is the Messiah, that he is the king, but the character of that kingship is going to be different than what people expect. It is affirmed, in Lane’s words, that the royal way involved humility and suffering.
So he doesn’t ride in on a white stallion or a black charger. He doesn’t ride in leading an army to overthrow Rome. He is riding into Jerusalem at the beginning of the last week of his life, and what Jesus will do in these next several chapters is tip over the first domino that sets off a chain reaction that will lead to his crucifixion and his death. He is showing us something about his kingdom: that his is a kingdom that is not established through violence or through force, but through humility and self-sacrifice and service.
Here is someone who does not use power to exploit people but to serve them, who does not come to dominate but to bless, who will wear not a crown of gold but a crown of thorns.
I think at least one of the applications for us is simply this, that if our king was humble, how much more should we be as his servants? The character of Jesus as our king is one of humility. Over and over again, both Jesus and the apostles exhort us to imitate Jesus, to be like him. Jesus himself said in John 13:16, “Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.”
This same Jesus, who washed the feet of his disciples, who took on the role of a servant, and who comes in the garments of humility, calls us to live humble lives as well.
To whatever degree we adopt attitudes of arrogance, and we are power-hungry and proud, to that degree we are stepping away from the pattern of Jesus.
C.S. Lewis once made this remarkable statement. “How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious?” And he answers, “I’m afraid it means that they are worshiping an imaginary God.”
If we really do worship this king, this king who’s clothed in humility, isn’t the outcome we should expect in our lives an increase in humility in our hearts?
So let’s just ask ourselves some questions in application this morning. I’ll put them in the first person.
Do I demonstrate humility in my life? Is my demeanor one that conveys humility, or is it one of arrogance and pride?
How do I carry my authority? Do I hold power loosely, or do I quickly find myself on a power trip? Am I a controlling person, or am I more inclined to service?
Think of yourself as a parent. Are you humble and approachable to your children? Think of yourself as a boss or a manager. Do you inspire confidence in your employees or fear? Do you bring out their best or do you diminish them in their vocation?
Even in our beliefs and opinions, we have a way of holding those opinions with pride rather than with humility. So think about the last theological debate you were in, or maybe the last political debate you were in. Did you find yourself defensive? Was the temperature rising? Do you find it difficult to have a conversation about something that you hold dearly in your heart, that you believe strongly in your heart? Do you find it difficult to have a conversation that is marked by gentleness and by humility?
Or even in things less important—I mean, we get defensive even about our taste in music or the movies or TV shows we like, and if anyone disagrees with us, how quick we are to rise up in a sort of judgment and arrogance and defensiveness. Why is that? What is it? It’s because the brokenness of the world has reached all the way into our hearts, and in our deep insecurity and fear and pride, we react in these ways to others.
It’s showing that we also need a king. We’re not good kings for ourselves. We need someone else who is able to rule our hearts in ways that will lead us into humility and service of others.
3. The Judgment of the King
So we see Jesus is the king that we need, we see his character—he is a humble kind of king—but what does Jesus do as the king about the brokenness and the violence and the wickedness and sin and evil and corruption in the world? That leads us to point number three, the judgment of the king.
This passage is interesting for a number of reasons, and one reason is what Jesus does when he gets to Jerusalem. It’s one thing when Jesus is on the parade through the streets and people are singing “Hosanna” and “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” but when Jesus gets to the temple, he starts turning over tables. He’s cleansing the temple. He is confronting everything that was wrong with the temple.
I think for us to just grasp how radical this was we have to remember how central the temple was to the whole religious system of the day. N.T. Wright, in his monumental work Jesus and the Victory of God, explains, “The temple was in Jesus’ day the central symbol of Judaism, the location of Israel’s most characteristic praxis, the topic of some of her most vital stories, the answer to her deepest questions, the subject of some of her most beautiful songs.” It’s to this place that Jesus comes, and he comes not with blessing, but with judgment.
You see it, first of all, in the cleansing of the temple in Mark 11:15-17, as he turns over the tables, he throws out the money changers, he criticizes the temple, because it was meant to be a house of prayer for all the nations. The Gentiles even were to be welcomed into this outer court, the Court of the Gentiles, but instead this has become a place of economic trade—perhaps also of political revolutionary ideas, because when Jesus says, “You’ve made it a den of robbers,” the word “robbers” is actually the word for bandits or political revolutionaries. So you’ve got economics and you’ve got politics in the temple, and Jesus throws it out.
Then you see it in Jesus’ teaching in Mark 12. I won’t cover that today, but in Mark 12, essentially you just see Jesus in a series of confrontations with the temple authorities. These confrontations are just leading further and further down this road of them rejecting his teaching. Then in Mark 13 you have Jesus’ most prophetic words, his Sermon on the Mount Of Olives. And what does he do? He predicts the destruction of the temple, which happened in precise detail just about four years later when Titus led the armies of Rome in a four-month siege against Jerusalem, and eventually destroyed the temple and further exiled the Jews who remained there in Jerusalem.
Jesus here is confronting the corruption of the temple. He is confronting the corruption within the religion of that day.
I think, then, when we look at the fig tree and we see how the whole temple scene is bracketed by these two references to the fig tree, things begin to make sense. The fig tree was often a symbol for Israel in the Old Testament. You can see this in Jeremiah. So in Jeremiah 7-8 there’s a lot about the temple. People were taking refuge in the temple. They believed they were good because of the temple, even though they had departed from God. And Jeremiah 8:13, in that context, says (these are the words of God), “When I would gather them, declares the Lord, there are no grapes on the vine or figs on the fig tree; even the leaves are withered.”
I think when Jesus had visited the temple and then he saw this barren fig tree, and it’s actually not even in the season to bear fruit, but he goes to the fig tree, he’s hungry, and there’s no fruit there. Jesus views this fig tree full of leaves but no fruit as a symbol for all of the activity that’s happening in the temple, but without the fruit that God desired from his people. His cursing of the fig tree, then, becomes something like an enacted parable, where by cursing the fig tree he is showing also his prophetic judgment of the temple itself. I think that’s what the whole thing with the fig tree means.
Now, again, I think this suggests contemporary application as well. It’s not just that Jesus was displeased with their religion, which was full of outward show but lacking inward reality, but also when that’s true in our lives.
So we need to ask ourselves, Is our religion an outward show without the inward reality? Are we like the fig tree? Are we all leaves, but no fruit?
In the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there was a grand bridge known as the Silver Bridge that crossed over the Ohio River. It seemed to be stable until December 15, 1967, when at the height of rush hour the bridge tragically collapsed and forty-six people died.
When the collapse of this bridge was investigated, this is what they found. There was a single defect, a tiny crack in an eye bar, which was an element in the bridge’s suspension system. It was invisible to the naked eye, but over time the crack grew, and what looked solid and strong and stable on the outside was actually fatally flawed on the inside. The bridge had the appearance of strength, but it couldn’t withstand the test.
In the same way, Israel in Jesus’ day, and often we ourselves, can appear to be outwardly strong and religious. We have all the leaves, but we can be missing the inward reality. We can be missing the fruit.
God sees beneath the surface. Jesus examines the depths of our hearts, and he is a righteous king who confronts what is wrong with the world and with our own hearts.
This can be both comforting and convicting to us. So in one way, it could be comforting. If you are someone who has ever been hurt or abused by someone who misused power, whether it was a parent or a teacher or an employer or a church, someone who misused power and it actually hurt you, this passage and this principle in Scripture can assure you that God is a God of justice, that Jesus is a king of justice, that he will not turn a blind eye to injustice, but he will bring all things to account.
If you are a skeptic this morning and you’re skeptical about Jesus, you’re skeptical about religion, especially when you think of all the bad things that religious people have done in the name of Jesus in the history of the world. Well, here, I think is the great answer to that critique: that Jesus himself confronted the hypocrisy and the injustice of religion. Your standard is no higher than Jesus’ standard was. Jesus himself confronts that and is displeased with that.
But for all of us, we should examine our own hearts, and we should ask where are those fractures in our own hearts, in our own lives that keep us from being the kind of people that God calls us to be, and that then bring some kind of distortion or even corruption into our lives. What’s the answer to that? Because if we’re honest with ourselves, what we see is not only a world that’s broken, not only systems that are broken, not only people who misuse power; what we see is that in our own hearts we fall short of the standard of God’s justice. We fall short of the standard of God’s righteousness. The brokenness is deep in ourselves.
What’s the answer? The answer is hinted at in verse 18, which says that “the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him.” In other words, when Jesus confronted the evil of the temple, it was the first domino to fall that will lead to the crucifixion of Jesus.
What we see then is that here is a king who not only brings judgment to the temple, here’s a king who actually takes that judgment onto himself. He is not only the messianic, Davidic king prophesied the Old Testament, he is also the suffering servant. In fact, Jesus combines the images, and he did this deliberately and intentionally in Mark 10 when he used the language of the servants, and he said that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” It is a direct echo of that great song of the servant in Isaiah 53. Here are just a couple of verses.
“Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.”
How is it that Jesus brings healing to the world? How is it that Jesus brings healing to us, to our own hearts? It’s through his wounds. It’s through the cross. It’s through Jesus taking our judgment upon himself.
It’s not only that Jesus comes as the king who curses the fig tree and pronounces judgment on the temple, but he’s also the king who comes and takes the curse that we deserved.
Friends, this is the gospel, isn’t it? That this good king, this righteous king, this king of peace and justice and righteousness, is also the king who is the substitute for his people and lays down his life for us.
So the final application of the fact that our king came not only to judge evil but to take that judgment on himself is simply a question: Do you trust this king? Do you believe in this king? Do you follow this king? Do you love this king? Have you put your hopes in this king?
The Gospel of Mark is all about this king, but it’s a king who establishes his kingdom through the cross and invites us to trust him, to follow him, and to embrace that way of bringing healing to the world, that way of bringing salvation to our own hearts, and then to follow in his footsteps of humility. If you’ve never trusted in Christ, I encourage you to do so this morning. And if you are a Christian this morning, let’s together walk in the footsteps of this king. Let’s pray together.
Lord, we thank you this morning for your word, and we thank you for this clear portrait of Jesus, who is both king of glory and of grace, majesty and meekness, power and humility, combining these things in a way that no one else ever has. Lord, our prayer today is that we would fully entrust ourselves to Christ, and doing so we would also learn to imitate him and to be like him in his humility. So Father, would you work that into our hearts this morning? As we come to the Lord’s table and we in a very visible and tangible way remember what Christ has done by laying down his life for us, sacrificing his body, shedding his blood for our sins, may it rest on our hearts today, the great price that has been paid for our sins, the great sacrifice that has been made, and then what it calls us to in imitation of our Savior. So we ask you, Lord, to draw near to us in these moments and be honored and glorified in our continuing worship. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
