Triumphal Entry

A Sermon (No. 405) Delivered on Sunday Morning, August the 18th, 1861 by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.

Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. (Matthew 21:5)

We have read the chapter from which our text is taken; let me now rehearse the incident in your hearing. There was an expectation upon the popular mind of the Jewish people, that Messiah was about to come. They expected him to be a temporal prince, one who would make war upon the Romans and restore to the Jews their lost nationality. There were many who, though they did not believe in Christ with a spiritual faith, nevertheless hoped that perhaps he might be to them a great temporal deliverer, and we read that on one or two occasions they would have taken him and made him a king, but that he hid himself.

There was an anxious desire that somebody or other should lift the standard of rebellion and lead the people against their oppressors. Seeing the mighty things which Christ did, the wish was father to the thought, and they imagined that He might probably restore to Israel the kingdom and set them free. The Saviour at length saw that it was coming to a crisis. For him it must either be death for having disappointed popular expectation, or else he must yield to the wishes of the people, and be made a king.

Disciples and rabbis

Hundreds of sages or rabbis in the first century recruited disciples who would follow them to receive instruction in the Torah (the Law of Moses) and the oral interpretations of that Law propounded by notable rabbis. It was not unusual for a devout Jewish man to take a hiatus from his career for a month or two to follow a master teacher, traveling with him to minister in small towns and villages.

It seems that The Twelve followed Jesus part time for about two years and full time the last year and a half of His earthly ministry. This was an unusually long—but not unheard of—period of time.

There was nothing odd about a Jewish sage asking men to follow him as his disciples. The culture acclimated people to open their homes to traveling rabbis and their disciples and Jewish leaders established rules to regulate discipleship. For example, a married man could not leave home to follow a rabbi for more than 30 days without permission from his wife.

When Jesus told His disciples to borrow a donkey and explain that, “the Lord needs them” (Matt. 21:3)—this was not unusual either. The Jewish ethic taught individuals to do what they could to support the training of disciples, thus promoting Torah study (during that time, when one studied Torah, he entered “the Kingdom of God”). In fact, the Talmud instructs the disciple to prioritize his Rabbi even above his own father: