Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026
Matthew 21:1–11 | Christopher Ingram
In the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James, Percival Everett retells the story of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of Jim, here called James, the enslaved man who travels with Huck down the Mississippi. James is, quietly, the most intelligent and perceptive person in every scene he inhabits. He’s a reader. He’s a thinker. He sees exactly what is happening around him, and he cannot show any of it. One unguarded moment of his real self, his actual voice, his actual mind, and he is dead. So, he feigns ignorance and gives people the version of himself they need to see. His survival depends on their comfort.
Jesus does the opposite.
That’s the thing that stops me every Palm Sunday. He doesn’t manage the crowd’s expectations. He doesn’t give them the general they’re hoping for. He comes in exactly as he is, on a borrowed donkey, just as Zechariah promised six centuries earlier, heading straight toward a cross he has already predicted three times (Matt 16:21, 17:23, 20:19). And he lets the parade happen anyway. He doesn’t correct them. He doesn’t slow down. He rides straight into the middle of their mess and misunderstanding and loves them through it.
Matthew tells us the whole city was shaking. The word he uses is the same one he’ll use on Sunday morning when the ground trembles at the empty tomb. Everything in between is the story of what it costs to be exactly who you are in a world that expects you to be something else.
The crowd cries, “Who is this?” It is the right question asked for the wrong reasons. Their answer comes back to them that “this is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee” (Matt 21:10-11). It’s true, and not nearly enough.
You’ve been with Jesus in Lent for six weeks. You’ve watched him in the wilderness, hungry and refusing every shortcut. You stood at Lazarus’s tomb. You know more about who this is than the palm-waving crowd does. So here’s what I want you to carry into this week: the character of God, as Jesus reveals it all the way to Friday, is this: he comes to us fully, holds nothing back, and loves us through our incomplete understanding of him.
He doesn’t wait for us to get our theology right before he rides in. The crowd’s answer was still forming. He came anyway.
Yours is still forming too. He’s still coming.
Prayer:Humble King, you knew what this week would cost and you came anyway. I don’t always know what I believe about you. I say the right things and then go live like none of it is real. You see that. You’re not surprised by it. Send your Spirit into the gap between what I say and how I live. I trust that you will. Change me from the inside out, the way only you can. Amen.