Teaching Summary: An Embodied Faith (Palm Sunday)

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey. — Zechariah 9:9

He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’ — Luke 22:19–20

The Christian faith was never designed to live only in the head. Some religious traditions are primarily intellectual: you assent to a creed, you sign on to a set of ideas, and that is more or less the end of it. But the faith of the Bible has always been stubbornly, beautifully physical. Moses told the people of Israel to let God’s commands move through the rhythms of ordinary life, sitting and walking and lying down and waking up. The faith asks something of your body, not just your mind.

This is what Holy Week is built on. It is not a week of ideas. It is a week of events, bodily, historical, irreversible events. And it begins with a parade.

Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and this was not a spontaneous moment. He sent two disciples ahead with specific instructions, arranged the animal, and chose his entrance with deliberate care. If you knew your Old Testament, and the people lining that road did, the image was unmistakable. Zechariah had written five centuries earlier that Israel’s king would come righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey. Jesus was making a claim without saying a word: I am the one you have been waiting for.

The crowd understood the signal, even if they did not fully understand what it meant. They tore palm branches and waved them. They threw their cloaks on the road in front of him. And they shouted Hosanna, a Hebrew word meaning save us. They wanted a king. They wanted a deliverer. They wanted someone to ride in and fix things. What they were about to receive was something far larger than any of them could have imagined.

Jesus was not riding toward a throne. He was riding toward a cross. He would enter the city as a king and leave it as a Savior, having defeated the two oldest enemies of the human race: sin and death. The crowd welcomed him with their bodies before they understood with their minds. That is not a failure of faith. That is faith. The body going where the understanding has not yet arrived.

At the end of that week, on Thursday night, Jesus gathered his twelve disciples in a borrowed upper room for the Passover meal. The Passover was the most sacred meal in the Jewish calendar, commemorating the night God delivered his people from slavery in Egypt. The angel of death passed over every home marked with the blood of a lamb. By morning, a nation was free. God’s instruction to his people afterward was simple and physical: eat this meal every year. Put it in your bodies. Don’t just remember it. Embody it.

For over a thousand years, the Jewish people had done exactly that. And now Jesus sat down at that very table and reinterpreted the whole story around himself. He took the bread and said: this is my body, given for you. He took the cup and said: this is my blood of the new covenant. Everything this meal had always pointed to, he was about to fulfill. He was the lamb. His blood would mark the doorpost. And everyone covered by it would be free. Paul would write it plainly a few decades later: Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. That is not a metaphor Paul invented. It is the claim Jesus was making at that table.

Free from a slavery older and deeper than Egypt. Free from sin. Free from death. That is what it all means.

There is one more piece. Jesus ate with people constantly, and it was one of the things that got him in trouble. He kept sitting down at tables with tax collectors, sinners, and outsiders. The religious leaders grumbled: this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. They meant it as an accusation. Jesus wore it like a badge. Every table he sat at was a statement: there is room here. You belong. You are welcome.

The table is not incidental to the gospel. It is an expression of it. When the church gathers around a table, it is not a social event. It is a theological act. It is the family of God doing what the family of God does: receiving his bounty and his blessing in the most ordinary, physical, human way possible.

The king who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey is the same one who sat down at the table with his friends and said: this bread, this cup, this is what I am about to do for you. The crowd on that road did not fully understand. The disciples in that upper room did not fully understand. But they showed up. They walked. They ate. They let their bodies go somewhere their understanding had not yet arrived.

You don’t have to have it all figured out to come to this table. You just have to come. Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.