Palm Sunday 2024: A Triumph of Love

This week’s devotional was written by J.D. Walt and is entitled, Holy Misnomer, Batman. J. D Walt is the Executive Director of seedbed.com. We hope this devotion encourages you this week.

ZECHARIAH 9:9

(No hymn tune for this scripture.)

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! 
Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! 
Behold, your king is coming to you; 
He is just and endowed with salvation, 
Humble, and mounted on a donkey,
Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (NASB)

CONSIDER THIS

Before we get too much further into Passion Week, I want to revisit what I consider to be a major misnomer we often find in our Bibles. Misnomer—it comes from a French word that means “to wrongly name.” Remember back a few days ago with me to Palm Sunday, and the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem “humble, and mounted on a donkey,” as the prophecy read.

Anyone remember the two words that appear in most of our (English) Bibles as the heading over this passage of Scripture? (See Matthew 21:1–17; Mark 11:1–11; Luke 19:28–40; John 12:12–19.) Here is the misnomer: “Triumphal Entry.”

These subheads, mind you, are not the Word of God. They are, rather, the work of translators. Likely, the translators were themselves playing with the irony. I will leave that to those smarter than I. Suffice it to say, though, this word triumphal is precisely the wrong word. Yes, it’s the word we want and like, but it’s wrong. Why not the “Humble Entry” or at least the “Prophetic Entry”?

Entries matter a lot. Just in case we entered this week with any notion of triumphal, as in “We Will Rock You” in our spirits, there’s still time to run back outside the gates and come in again. Crawl this time.

Passion Week is not our annual opportunity to put yet another exclamation point on our theological dogmas and doctrinal foundations. Passion Week is the annual invitation to become disoriented by the holy love of God, shaken to the core of our comfortable being, and dispossessed of our sentimental illusions about grace.

For all practical purposes, the best two-word caption I can think of for all that is about to unfold? “Hell Week.” The only one making a triumphal entry into Jerusalem was Satan himself. This is the week that the very gates of hell were opened, unleashing all hell on the Son of God. Remember that time in the desert when we were told that after unsuccessfully unseating Jesus with his tawdry temptations, “he left him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13)?

This is that time.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
O! Sometimes it causes me to tremble! tremble! tremble!
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?
O! Sometimes it causes me to tremble! tremble! tremble!
Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?