"Hosanna" to "Crucify": Palm Sunday 2026 (Matthew 21:1-11)

March 29, 2026, Year A, Palm Sunday, Sunday in Holy Week

Matthew 21:1–11, Psalm 118:19–29, Liturgy of the Palms

Matthew 26:36–27:66, Psalm 22:1–11, Isaiah 52:13–53:12

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this Palm Sunday, as we enter Holy Week together.

There is something unusual about what just happened in this service, something the liturgy does deliberately, and something we ought to name before we go any further.

A few minutes ago, many of us processed with palm branches and sang Hosanna. We were the crowd. We played the part gladly, coats on the road, branches in hand, the great shout from Psalm 118 on our lips: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matthew 21:9, ESV) It felt right. It felt festive. It felt like the beginning of something wonderful.

But then the liturgy turned. The festivity fell quiet, and the long Passion narrative began. And in that reading, the city turns too. The same Jerusalem that rang with Hosanna will, by the end of the week, hear something else entirely: “Let him be crucified!” (Matthew 27:22, ESV) Some who welcomed Jesus may well have joined that later cry. But the deeper point does not depend on proving that every throat belonged to the same person. Palm Sunday deliberately puts Hosannaand Crucify side by side.

That movement, Hosanna to Crucify, is not a liturgical accident. It is a mirror. It is the Church, in her ancient wisdom, refusing to let us stand at a safe distance from the story and observe it as spectators. We are in it. We are the crowd. The same mouth that sings the processional Hosanna can turn toward resistance when the King does not meet our expectations, because that is the truth about human nature that Holy Week will not allow us to paper over. We are capable of both. The liturgy makes us feel that before we have the chance to edit ourselves.

We see the same shifting hearts in the disciples themselves. Peter, who boldly declared in the upper room, “Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you,” (Matthew 26:35, ESV) ends up cursing and swearing before a servant girl that he never knew the man (Matthew 26:69–75). The others who promised loyalty fall asleep in Gethsemane while Jesus pleads for them to watch and pray, then “all the disciples left him and fled” when the soldiers came (Matthew 26:40–45, 56, ESV). Even Judas, who walked with Jesus for years, betrays him with a kiss for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:14–16, 47–50). These are not distant villains; they are the inner circle, the ones closest to him.

And if we are honest, we recognize the same fickleness in ourselves. We leave this service with praise, palms still in our hands, Hosanna echoing in our hearts, only for that fire to cool by Tuesday into distraction, worry, grumbling, or willful sin. We promise loyalty in relationships, “I’m here for you, no matter what,” then withdraw when life presses or feelings fade. We recommit to Jesus with Sunday zeal, yet by midweek skip prayer or snap at family when routine hits. We wake grateful, then slowly turn praise to complaint. Sometimes we leap into things in which we should have no part.

Deeper still runs disappointment, even anger, when the Lord does not meet our expectations. We want healing swift, justice immediate, victory without cost. Israel longed for the promised Messiah, and under Roman occupation those hopes naturally included deliverance from her oppressors. Many were ready for a King who would overthrow Rome and restore Israel. But Jesus comes as a servant riding toward death. He really is the King, and he really has come to save, but his victory will be greater and stranger than the victory many expected. This is not mere fickleness; it is hearts offended by a King who saves us his way, not ours. This is the mirror the liturgy holds up.

With that discomfort still present, let us look at what is actually happening in the text.

The scene opens just outside Jerusalem, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, at a village called Bethphage. Jesus stops and sends two disciples ahead with specific instructions in verses 2–3: “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” (Matthew 21:2–3, ESV)

These instructions are not improvised. Matthew tells us immediately in verses 4 and 5 that this took place to fulfill the word of the prophet Zechariah: “Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’” (Matthew 21:5, ESV) The King they had been waiting for would come not mounted for ordinary war, but mounted humbly and riding toward the Cross. The detail is deliberate, the fulfillment precise.

As Jesus heads into the city, the crowd spreads cloaks on the road, an act associated with honoring royalty, and cuts branches from the trees. And in verse 9 they shout: “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” (Matthew 21:9, ESV) Matthew notes that the whole city was stirred. The Greek word carries the sense of being shaken. Not a polite welcome. An upheaval. An uproar.

And then verse 10 asks exactly the right question: “Who is this?” (Matthew 21:10, ESV) The crowd answers in verse 11: “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” (Matthew 21:11, ESV) True enough, as far as it goes. But the crowd’s answer and the reality of who is riding that donkey are not yet reconciled.

Now, “Who is this?” That is the city’s question on the streets. And we need to see that it is the same question that has been sharpening all Lent, just wearing different clothes.

Every Sunday this season, in various forms, we have been pressed toward the same question: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (John 9:35, ESV) It was there in the wilderness on the First Sunday, the tempter pressing Jesus with “If you are the Son of God,” and Jesus pressing back with the Word of God alone. It was there with Nicodemus at night, his cautious “we know you are a teacher come from God” really being the question in disguise. It was there at Jacob’s well, where the Samaritan woman moved from “you are a Jew” to “I perceive you are a prophet” to “can this be the Christ?” It was there most explicitly when the man born blind fell down and worshiped. And it was there last Sunday at the tomb of Lazarus, when Martha made her confession: “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” (John 11:27, ESV)

“Who is this?” is just the city’s version of that same question, asked now not in private conversation or at a well, but in the streets of Jerusalem, in the final week. The Lenten question has gone public. And the crowd has only a partial answer: a prophet from Nazareth. True. But not yet fully understood. The full answer requires the whole week, the upper room, the garden, the Cross, the silence of Saturday, and the empty tomb. Palm Sunday begins the answer. It does not complete it.

We cannot stay with the crowd’s acclamation without hearing the older voices behind it, the ones speaking centuries before anyone laid a cloak in the road.

Isaiah 52 and 53 contain the fourth Servant Song. The passage opens with what seems like triumph: “Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.” (Isaiah 52:13, ESV) But the picture darkens immediately: “his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance.” (Isaiah 52:14, ESV) This is a King who will be disfigured. The crowd shouting Hosanna is not prepared for this King, and neither are we if we come to Jesus expecting only smooth times and immediate gratification.

Isaiah 53 deepens it. He “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.”(Isaiah 53:2, ESV) He is “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3, ESV)But here is the theological center of the entire passage: “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.” (Isaiah 53:4–5, ESV)

This Servant is not suffering for his own failures. He is bearing ours. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6, ESV) The one who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, fulfilling Zechariah, is fulfilling this prophecy too, riding with full knowledge and full willingness toward the Cross. He does not come to receive the crown without the Cross but to receive the crown through the Cross. He knows the arrest is coming, the mockery, the thorns, the wood. He rides in anyway.

And Isaiah will not allow us to leave the guilt safely with people long ago. Our transgressions. Our iniquities. We did not stand in Jerusalem and drive the nails, but Christ goes to the Cross for sins like ours and for sinners like us. The denial, cowardice, betrayal, pride, self-protection, and resistance to God that surround the Passion are not foreign to fallen human hearts. We are not spectators standing outside the story. This is the burden he bears for us.

There is a third voice we need to hear on Palm Sunday, the voice that the King himself will cry from the Cross on Good Friday. And you may have noticed something when Psalm 22 was read this morning: we stopped at verse 11. Not at the end. The psalm does not end there.

The psalm goes on, past the depths, all the way through to a remarkable turn in verses 22 through 31, where the desolation gives way to vindication and praise, and the one who cried “Why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1, ESV) can proclaim in verse 24: “For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” (Psalm 22:24, ESV) The psalm ultimately ends not in darkness but in triumph, with the news spreading to all the nations.

And yet today we heard only the opening portion. Palm Sunday leaves us for a time within the darkness of the psalm because we are entering the week in which Christ himself will pass through suffering and death. The victory is real and certain. The Resurrection is coming. But the Church does not hurry us from palms directly to Easter morning. Holy Week calls us to walk the road Christ walked.

Verse 1 is the most harrowing line in all the Psalter: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22:1, ESV) We know these words because Jesus will speak them from the Cross on Friday: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46, ESV) When he does, he is not merely grabbing an isolated line of Scripture. He takes upon his lips the lament of the righteous sufferer and enters fully into the horror of the Passion as he bears sin for us.

The Father does not cease to be the Father, nor is the eternal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit torn apart. Yet the incarnate Son truly enters the suffering and judgment expressed by the psalm. The Passion is not staged suffering. The One who knew no sin bears sin for us.

The psalmist continues in verse 2: “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.”(Psalm 22:2, ESV) Day and night. No answer. No rest. And yet the psalmist does not stop talking to God. He stays in the conversation, reaching back into the story of God’s faithfulness and holding on: “In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.” (Psalm 22:4–5, ESV)

And then verses 9 through 11 land on the one unshakable thing: “Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust you at my mother’s breast. On you was I cast from my birth, and from my mother’s womb you have been my God. Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help.” (Psalm 22:9–11, ESV)

There is none to help. The crowd cannot help. The disciples will scatter. Pilate will wash his hands. There will come a moment, the moment toward which all of Holy Week is moving, when the one who rode the donkey into Jerusalem will stand abandoned by human loyalty. What holds in that darkness is not the crowd’s enthusiasm, not the Hosannas, not the palm branches. What holds is the Father’s saving purpose and the Son’s faithful obedience even unto death.

So here we are: the city’s question unanswered in full, the Servant riding toward what Isaiah described, the psalm stopping before its victory. The liturgy is being honest with us about where we actually are in the story.

The crowd on Palm Sunday got the procession right. They laid down their cloaks, cut the branches, shouted the Psalm 118 acclamation. Their cry for salvation was right, and their recognition of a King was right. But many were looking for a Messiah who would deliver Israel from her oppressors and break the power of Rome. Jesus had come to bring an even greater deliverance. Rome was not humanity’s deepest bondage. Sin and death were. They wanted the King to conquer their enemies, and he came to conquer the enemies none of us could defeat.

And we have already read in this service what Jerusalem will hear that Friday: “Crucify him.” That means we know something the palm-waving crowd did not yet know about itself. We are capable of the whole range. Hosanna and resistance both live in us. Lent has been building an honest portrait of us, and Palm Sunday refuses to let us hide from it.

Into all of that, the King rides. We estimate him as less than he is. We want a different kind of King. We want salvation on our terms. He comes anyway, on a donkey, into the upheaval of our expectations, toward a Cross he fully intends to reach. That is the love the whole of Lent has been preparing us to receive.

So the invitation of Palm Sunday is not simply to enjoy the procession and come back for Easter. It is to follow the King all the way through the week: in through the gate, through Thursday night in the upper room and the garden, through Friday afternoon on the hill, and through the long silence of Holy Saturday, when the darkness has not yet turned.

Because the full answer to the city’s question, “Who is this?”, and the full answer to the question sharpening all Lent, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (John 9:35, ESV), cannot be given without the whole story. The first asks who Jesus is. The second asks what you will do with the answer.

On Easter morning, the one who cried “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” will walk out of the tomb alive, Psalm 22 will find its ending, and Jerusalem’s question will receive its full answer. This is not merely the prophet from Nazareth. This is the Christ. This is the Son of God. This is the Lord.

And then the question comes back to us: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

The man born blind answered by worshiping him. Martha answered at the tomb of her brother: “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” (John 11:27, ESV) And that is the answer the Church is being prepared to make again as Lent gives way to Easter: Yes, Lord. I believe.

In a few moments we will come to this Table. This is the Table the King sets as we enter the week in which he gives himself for us, the Table whose meaning he will unfold again on Thursday night in the upper room.

As the psalmist says: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” (Psalm 23:5, ESV) That Table is set here, now, at the entrance to Holy Week, in the presence of everything that opposes us, including the sin within us that resists the very King we acclaim. He sets the Table. He invites us to come.

Come with whatever weight you carry into this week. Come with the ache of every unanswered prayer, every verse-one darkness, every moment the wilderness felt permanent. Come as those who have heard the Hosanna and are willing to stay for the whole story, through the silence and the Cross, all the way to Easter morning when the psalm finds its ending and the King walks out of the tomb alive.

“Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (John 9:35, ESV)

“Yes, Lord. I believe.”

Then follow him through the gate. Come to the Table. And stay for the whole story.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.