Sean C. Capparuccia

22 March 2026

5th Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 53; Psalm 22; Philippians 2:5-16; John 12:12–16

            Here we are, then, at week five of our Lenten journey; next week will be the last when we see the Savior crucified, dead, and buried. Liturgically speaking, this doesn’t happen until Good Friday, but as we will not be having a Maundy Thursday or Good Friday service this year, the event of the Cross will take place next Sunday. I say that as less of a spoiler for next week and more as an advertisement for next year when I hope we can implement either a Maundy Thursday or Good Friday Service, or both.

             But before Jesus can be put on the cross, He has to make it into Jerusalem and present Himself for Who He truly is. And so today we hear about His triumphal entry into Jerusalem and ask ourselves the question that has to be asked and answered by every single human being who has ever walked this earth since 32 A.D.: Who is this Jesus?

            The passage in Isaiah was all about this Jesus. Of the 66 chapters in Isaiah, chapter 53 is considered to be the most significant in that it contains within the 12 verses we just heard a remarkable list of very specific prophecies about the atonement of the Messiah.[1] Every prophecy fulfilled; and each one fulfilled by one man, Jesus of Nazareth. Remember that Isaiah was a prophet in the years 740-680 B.C. These prophecies were spoken over 700 years before Jesus was even born! I fear that many of us tend to forget these little facts that ought to continue to amaze us.

Think about it. Imagine you go to the Chinese restaurant in Clinton and after dinner you open up your fortune cookie and it reads, “Next month something good will happen to you.” Hmm. Something good. I wonder what it will be? Something good. You’re thinking about it for several days until you forget about it. Then, out of the blue, on April 9^th, you come out of the store and find $20 lying by your car in the parking lot. And it all comes back to you – Something good. The fortune cookie. The Chinese restaurant. Amazing, isn’t it, that the fortune cookie was right!!? And the nest time you talk to one of your kids: “You won’t believe what happened to me today….” You know it’s true! Friends, Jesus fulfilled somewhere around 350 Old Testament prophecies. Granted, some of those could have been fulfilled by other people, but most of them were pretty specific and the fact that He, one man, fulfilled all of them is a whole heck of a lot more amazing than $20 in a parking lot! So, I guess you will go home after church and call your kids and tell them that.

But Jesus was much more than a man who fulfilled a bunch of prophecies. The real magic lies in what prophecies He did fulfill. Isaiah 53 begins with these words: “Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” Who is speaking here? In other words, whose message? The question is being asked by Israel. Remember, this is a prophecy, put into the mouth of Isaiah by God Himself who is not bound by time; Who “declares the end from the beginning” (Is. 46:10). It is a lament by the nation from whom the Messiah came and yet they did not recognize Him. “Who has believed our message?” There were a few who believed, of course. But the vast majority of the Jews were blinded to the facts.

“To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” This question was quoted by John in 12:38. (If you have your Bibles open to the gospel, look there at verse 38.) Even though Jesus had performed so many miracles and signs right in front of their eyes, they did not believe. “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (The “arm of the Lord” here meaning His power.) Not “To whom was the arm of the Lord shown.” It was shown to everybody. But to whom was it revealed? John says here in verse 40, quoting Isaiah again, “He has blinded their eyes, and He has hardened their heart; lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and be converted, and healed.” Then John says something interesting, (and I’ll get to our actual Gospel lesson in just a moment; I feel like I need to make this point so that it all makes sense) he says, “Nevertheless, many even of the rulers believed in [Jesus], but because of the Pharisees they were not confessing Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God” (Jn. 13:42). The Lord hardens hearts; he makes the eyes blind; he makes the ears deaf just as He opens the heart, open the eyes, and opens the ears. He does both, according to His pleasure. Holding that in the back of your mind, let’s move on to the Gospel lesson.

            :12 The next day in verse 12 refers to the day after Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead in the town of Bethany, just a few miles from Jerusalem.  At this time Jews from all over the Jewish world were gathering in Jerusalem for the Passover feast. You can imagine that the news of Lazarus being raised from the dead spread really fast. It has already had a day to get through the grapevine and so the multitudes have heard about it. So, picture this multitude of people there inside the walls of Jerusalem. Jesus heads out of Bethany on Sunday morning to make His way to the great city. Rumor has it that He’s coming to Jerusalem, so they are more or less waiting for Him.  

            :13 Sure enough, when they see Him coming, they start ripping palm branches of the palm trees and head out of the eastern gate to meet Him. (The palm tree, or palm branches, were a symbol of the righteousness of God’s people.) We also see this in Leviticus 23:40 where the Israelites are instructed to wave palm branches as a symbol of joy before the Lord God at the Feast of Tabernacles. Lots of Old Testament imagery here! And they start yelling, “’Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,’ even the King of Israel.”

            A crowd following Jesus from Bethany and a crowd moving toward Jesus from Jerusalem meet and there’s all this shouting and chaos happening. Jesus has just raised a dead man from the dead! And it’s Passover – the celebration of Israel’s deliverance from bondage in Egypt by God’s almighty hand. This is a perfect storm. Surely, the Jews must have thought, this is the One! This is the one who will deliver us from the bondage of Rome and maybe even the oppression of their own religious leaders! It all makes sense, too, doesn’t it? He’s done some amazing things; now he’s gone and actually brought a dead man back to life, and I don’t mean CPR or AED shock treatment. Lazarus was dead for four days; he wasn’t dying; he wasn’t almost dead; he was D-E-A-D dead and starting to stink (Jn. 11:39). 

            :14 Zechariah was a prophet in the early 500’s B.C., so about 200 years after Isaiah. The thrust of his prophecy was the coming Messiah. In Zechariah 9:9 he writes, “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.” Rest assured, when they saw Jesus sitting on the donkey, they knew exactly what was happening. Now most kings would have ridden in on a great stallion or something, but the king that was prophesied would be on a donkey, just as the greatest king ever born, king David, was when he rode into Jerusalem. It all made sense! This was the King who was to come.

            :16a But watch this in verse 16: “These things His disciples did not understand at first…”  What did they not understand? Here was the King. And it wasn’t just Jesus’ disciples; it was the multitude that did not understand. This is a case of knowing some scripture, but not all of it. They were, just as we all do still today, picking out the bits and verses that they liked. The things that were relevant to them; the parts that “speak” to them.

May I remind you that “all of scripture is God-breathed.” It is all there for a reason. God gave us His word to direct our path. He didn’t give us a whole bunch of Scripture and say, “Ok, I know there’s a lot here, so just go through it and pick out the parts you like most.” He didn’t give us the whole book and say, as the liberal neo-orthodox theologians say, “Look through here and listen for My word.” The whole thing is His word and the whole thing is all that is necessary for teaching us our salvation. That, by the way is sola scriptura, a fundamental doctrine of our faith.  

The disciples and the crowd were looking for a messiah-king who would deliver them from the oppression of men. A king with a big horse and a big sword and a big mouth. But we need to go back to our reading from Isaiah. Is that the kind of messiah that God promised? If they had read and took to heart all of the scriptures, they would have understood that God’s messiah-king would be just, and humble; he would be despised and forsaken, a man of sorrows and grief; he would be one who was afflicted and smitten of God; one who would be abused and pierced and crushed. And for what?    For you.

He would deliver us from an enemy far worse than Rome and far more insidious than religious leaders who are greedy for power and control. He would deliver us from death itself. The curse that fell on Adam when he sinned against God in the Garden of Eden, the first true temple of God. And He would make your heart a new temple in which to dwell.

:16b Not until after Christ was crucified and risen and glorified did the Disciples understand what it all meant. Next week we’ll talk more about the crucifixion, but suffice it to say, at this point, they thought Jesus was a political conqueror. That he had come to make Israel great again. MIGA!? But just as our president isn’t in any way a religious messiah, neither was Jesus a political hero. But Jesus was so much more. He is God in the flesh. God-made-man. 

            Who Is Jesus?

There seems to be, and always has been, a group of people who are willing to say, “I can accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I can’t say that He is God.” They would reject Jesus’ claim to be God. But C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, writes

“That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil from Hell. You must make your choice. Either the man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”[2]

In a fairly recent poll of “evangelicals,” that would be defined as people who call themselves born-again and believe that the Bible is God’s word, fully 1/3 of those polled said that they did not believe that Jesus is God.[3] They think He’s a great teacher, one of the best, maybe thee best, better than even Buddha, but He isn’t God. Friends, that is not the belief of any evangelical believer that I know. This belief is rooted in the heresy called Arianism from way back in the early Church days. And even though it was condemned, it has survived. Today it is the belief of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormon church, Islam is a type of Arianism – they believe Jesus was a good teacher. Even the esteemed Martin Luther King, Jr. followed this belief, denying some of the absolute fundamental tenets of Christianity like the Virgin Birth and miracles.[4] Weird, huh? Modernism itself, which isn’t a religion per se, but it is a movement holds to this. No one denies that Jesus existed. No one denies that He was a great man. No one denies that He taught good things like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But if that is the extent of what you believe about Jesus, you don’t know Jesus.   

            Jesus is God. He is the One who “even though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped., but He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and allowed Himself to be made in the image of a man” (Phil. 2:6-7). He has, from eternity, been on the throne of heaven; He created all that is, seen and unseen; nothing came into being that He did not bring into being; no one has been revived from the death of sin without His direct command. “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” we asked earlier. All those whom He has chosen to reveal it. Every last one. And this One – with all the power in and over the universe – took on our flesh so that He could live in us. That is Jesus.

            Have you put your faith and trust in Him? Being in Christ doesn’t make you perfect, but it does mean you are on your way to perfection. Being in Christ doesn’t mean that you won’t make mistakes; that you won’t sin against God and one another, but it does mean that God will forgive you and that He will continue to help you be forgiving. He promises to walk with you through life’s joys and sorrows, and enables you to minister to others.   

To quote C. S. Lewis again,

“A [living] body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled [by the Holy Spirit] to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble – because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.”[5]

            Here is the promise of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: when you truly repent and put your faith and trust in Him, He will send the Holy Spirit to you and He will confirm all that is true in your heart. You see, the Disciples did not yet understand because the Holy Spirit had not yet been given. Without the Holy Spirit, no one csn understand the Truth of the Gospel, yet many think that they do. This is why many will say on the last day, “Lord, Lord…” when they come to the Judgement and Jesus will reply, “I never knew you.” He is basically saying, “I did not give you My Spirit, you couldn’t have truly known Me. You knew about Me, but you didn’t know Me.”  The Holy Spirit is the wedding garment that Jesus talks about at the wedding banquet (Matthew 22). Paul says in Romans 8, “Whoever does not have the Spirit of God, does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, though your body is dead – because of sin – the Spirit is life – because of righteousness” (8:9-10).

I don’t believe for a moment that anyone who can simply call Jesus a “good teacher” has the Holy Spirit inside of them. That would be God denying Himself. There are some fundamental truths that all true believers believe and that Jesus is not only the King, but is the Lord of His people, in accordance with His holy Word, is one of them. If you don’t truly know Him, then your opinion about Him can change. Like kids on the playground, one day you’ve got all these friends and everyone is getting along, then, fro some reason, the next day they have all turned on you. Today the crowds are shouting, “Hosanna! You are the King!” and in five short days they will be screaming, “Crucify!”

Our daily lives are full of decisions, from waking til sleeping, decisions to be made. Do you choose Christ throughout your day?  Do you know Him? Is the Holy Spirit living in and through you? If He is, then deciding for Christ is possible. I encourage you, good people, to make your decisions based on who you are in Christ, and who Christ is in you. Amen.

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[1] The Open Bible expanded eidtion, study notes on Isaiah (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983).

[2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 52.

[3] Ligonier, State of Theology Survey, 2025.

[4] Whether he actually articulated that Jesus was God is unknown to me; I have only read some of his theology wherein he does, in fact, deny the Virgin Birth and miracles of Jesus. In other words, having the form of godliness, but denying its power. He was certainly a great civil leader, but not a great spiritual leader.

[5] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 63.