Palm Sunday and Psalm 118

Matthew 21

Christ Cleaning the Temple by El Greco (1570)

A Link to Matthew 21 (ESV)

Palm Sunday and Psalm 118

Matthew 21:1-11

When Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowds lay their cloaks on the road and cut branches from the trees. What they shout is (in part) directly from Psalm 118:

“Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” (Matt. 21:9, quoting Ps 118:26).

The crowds are not improvising. Psalm 118 was the final psalm of the Egyptian Hallel (Pss 113–118), the sequence of psalms sung at the Passover seder.¹ As Jesus entered Jerusalem in the days before Passover, every Jewish pilgrim who had ever celebrated the feast would have recognized these words. The question the crowds are answering, perhaps without fully realizing it, is who is the one for whom these songs have always been waiting.

But notice what they add. They call Jesus “Son of David.” To hail David’s Son in the first century was not an act of gentle piety. It carries the weight of the Davidic warrior tradition, the hope for a king who would defeat their enemies and restore Israel’s sovereignty. The crowd wants a conqueror riding into Jerusalem. What they get instead is the fulfillment of Zech. 9:9: a king who is “humble” (πραΰς), riding a donkey, a figure the prophet explicitly links with peace rather than war. The crowds are singing the right psalm about the wrong kind of king, at least from their point of view.

“Hosanna” captures this exactly. When the crowd shouts “Hosanna” (ὡσαννά), they are quoting Ps. 118:25 directly, transliterating the Hebrew הוֹשִׁיעָה נָּא, meaning “Save us, we pray.” The crowds intended it as a plea for military rescue, the kind Israel had longed for under Roman rule. Jesus accepts the cry but will spend the rest of the week reinterpreting what salvation truly means.

The crowds shout, “Hosanna to the Son of David!”, meaning one thing. Jesus enters Jerusalem with a completely different purpose. This contrast will carry through all of Holy Week.

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The Way of Righteousness (Feb. 13, 2026)

Matthew 21:28–32

Just before Jesus shares the parable of the two sons, the chief priests and elders confront him in the temple with a pointed question.

“By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” (Matt. 21:23).

Jesus avoids giving a direct answer, but he doesn’t leave them without a response. The parable of the two sons is his reply and is unique to the Gospel of Matthew.

The parable is simple. A father asks his two sons to work in the vineyard. One agrees but doesn’t go. The other says no, but later changes his mind and goes. When Jesus asks which son did the father’s will, the religious leaders correctly answer: the second son. But then comes Jesus’s explanation, and this is where most people miss the point.

Jesus says:

“Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him” (Matt. 21:31–32).

The key phrase here is “the way of righteousness” (ἐν ὁδῷ δικαιοσύνης). This phrase is not just a nice way of talking about living a moral life. As N. T. Wright has shown, dikaiosynē in biblical thought often refers to God’s covenant faithfulness—his righteousness in the sense of God acting to set things right and fulfill his promises to Israel. John the Baptist came “in the way of righteousness,” meaning he announced that God was now acting to restore his people and fulfill his covenant promises.

When the tax collectors and prostitutes heard John’s preaching, they recognized that God was at work fulfilling his promises. They saw that God’s saving justice was breaking into the world, and they responded with repentance. When the religious leaders heard John, they missed it entirely. These were the very people who were supposed to be custodians of Israel’s hope for God’s covenant faithfulness. Yet, they could not recognize it when God was actually delivering on it.

This parable is Jesus’s response to the authority question. The same covenant faithfulness of God that validated John the Baptist’s ministry also validates Jesus’s ministry. Those who saw God’s saving work in John naturally saw it in Jesus too. The religious leaders, who agreed with God’s covenant promises through their religious practices but rejected John’s call to repentance, showed they could not see God’s righteousness when it was right before their eyes.

Matthew shares this parable to help his readers grasp an essential point. The key question isn’t whether we verbally agree to God’s covenant promises but whether we recognize when God is actively fulfilling them. When God’s saving justice enters the world, do we notice it? Or, like the first son and the religious leaders, do we say yes with our words while remaining blind to what God is truly doing?

1. For the curious, these six Psalms are called the Egyptian Hallel Psalms because Ps 114 describes the exodus from Egypt.