The Sunday before Easter is traditionally called Palm Sunday. This is the scene where that idea comes from. The scene itself is called The Triumphal Entry. Jesus—the carpenter, the teacher, the friend, the miracle worker, the human who is also God—enters the city of Jerusalem and is given a hero's welcome.

The people assemble and celebrate him.

That word the crowd is shouting, Hosanna! is a religious cheer.

Hosanna is an English version of a Greek word, which is the Greek version of a Hebrew word, which is a little phrase that means "Lord, please save me now."

The people were calling out for salvation, but salvation from what? They were thinking about the wrong salvation by the wrong messiah, because they had the wrong diagnosis.

When they cried for God to save them, they meant:
Overthrow the Roman Empire.
Restore Israel's political power.
Set up a new Golden Age, like when David and Solomon were king.
Create an earthly kingdom of military might.

They figured that's what the Messiah would do, and if Jesus was that Messiah, count me in.

But they made a fatal mistake. They got the word Hosanna from their ancient book of hymns, called the Psalms. The only time the word Hosanna is there it's in the 118th Psalm. But when they chose that word, they got the right Savior, but the wrong message.

Psalm 118 is not a prayer for political liberation. It's a prayer celebrating spiritual salvation.

It's about Gods grace, through faith, and the work of God in the whole wide world, not just their own nation.

Jesus' response to their "Hosanna" was essentially: You're praying for the wrong thing because you're diagnosing the wrong problem.

From God's perspective, that wasn't their greatest need. Their deeper oppression was internal: the darkness separating them from relationship with God.

Rome was a symptom. Sin was the disease.

They wanted deliverance from Rome, when what they needed was deliverance from sin.
And there's a really tragic arc to this triumphal entry.

On Palm Sunday, the Jewish people...welcomed Jesus, celebrating Him as the Messiah with shouts of 'Hosanna!' 'Save us, Lord!' But five days later, they screamed 'Crucify Him!' Many of the same people were in both crowds.

And right into the middle of that fever-pitch expectation... rides the world's unlikeliest King.

He doesn't show up in a Ferrari, he shows up on a donkey.

He doesn't show up with a display of his own wealth, it's a rented donkey.

Nobody rolls out the red carpet, just cloaks and palm branches.

He isn't carrying a sword, he is armed with nothing but grace and truth.
He doesn't lead an army, he leads the rabble of the city.
He looks weak. He looks entirely unimpressive to a world addicted to celebrity and power.

This is the gigantic secret code of Palm Sunday, every feature of which is designed with great detail to point to the central mystery of the Gospel:

And I'm going to prove it.

Let's look at how that donkey changes everything.

 

 

 

Every religious system and every philosophical system has its own idea of salvation.

You can search the entire globe. You can study every world religion and dissect every dominant human philosophy. You will find brilliant minds, complex rituals, and deep devotion.

But if you strip away the cultural paint, you will find a shocking reality: They all sell the exact same product.

They hand you a ladder and tell you start climbing.

They tell you that salvation, or wholeness, or peace, or nirvana, or good karma depends on your effort, your performance, and your morality. The burden is on your shoulders. Climb. Climb harder. Climb faster. Climb more.

Islam hands you a ladder of submission, where your good deeds and bad deeds are weighed on a scale, and you hope you've climbed high enough to earn mercy.

Hinduism hands you a ladder of karma, demanding you pay off your own moral debt, even if it takes you a million lifetimes of climbing.

Buddhism hands you a ladder of personal discipline—an eightfold path to save yourself through your own realization and self-negation.

Stoicism hands you a ladder of willpower and mental toughness. Master your emotions, so you can master the world.

Secular Humanism strips away the gods entirely and hands you a ladder of social ethics. Just work hard, be a "good person," and save society yourself.

This is the constant, exhausting pattern of human history. The engine is always the same: Ascent. The finite human must sweat and bleed to climb up to the infinite, divine approval.

The Catastrophic Flaw
These are serious, historically massive systems of thought. But they share one catastrophic flaw.

They assume that if you just try hard enough—if you are just disciplined enough—your finite human effort can somehow bridge the gap to the infinite.

But you cannot build a ladder to the moon. No matter how hard you work or how badly you want it, you will run out of strength long before you run out of oxygen.

You cannot cross the chasm between a temporary, flawed human and a perfect, eternal God with your own moral effort. Finite effort, multiplied over an entire lifetime, is still finite. The math is impossible.

No wonder people are emotionally exhausted.
No wonder people in this room are spiritually burned out.

Because whether you realized it or not, you have adopted an operating system of endless effort that is destined to fail.

It is destined to fail emotionally.
It is destined to fail logically.
It is destined to fail theologically.
It is destined to fail you personally.

You wake up every day trying to climb a ladder of self-justification that has no top rung.

You don't need a better ladder. You need a rescue.

You need a wildly different, totally counterintuitive approach... something like the Savior of the World—who is the King of the Universe—riding in on a donkey.

The Brutal Diagnosis: Dead People Don't Climb

Why do so many people keep falling for the religion of the ladder?

Partly because it's flattering. It's the message: "You've got this. You're just a little off track. You're just a little broken. Read this book, try this routine, dial up your energy, get a better strategy, and you can fix yourself."

It feels so logical. Striving, straining, trying, reaching... it's the way of the world, so it has to be that way with God, right?

Wrong.

The Bible refuses to flatter you. It delivers a diagnosis that is brutal, offensive to your pride, and absolutely necessary to get your heart where it actually needs to go.

The brutal diagnosis isn't just that you fall short, so try harder. And it isn't that you're a little off track, or a just a little broken.

The diagnosis is that you are dead.

It's why, when Jesus spoke to a religious leader, he didn't tell him to try harder or do better—he told him, You must be born again.

It's why St Paul didn't say that humanity was just stumbling—he said: You are dead in your trespasses and sins.

He said, you think the problem is that Rome reigns over you... the real problem is that sin reigns, and because sin reigns, death reigns.

It's why St John didn't say that Jesus helps us pass from bad to good—he said Christ pulls us from death to life because Christ has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light.

The Christian version of the human story is not a narrative of incremental improvement, moral performance, or religious ritual. It comes down to this one, inescapable conclusion: