Sermon Notes / Transcript

Mark 11:1-11 — Authority and Humility

Speaker: Daniel Coughlin
Date: 2026-07-19

Scripture Reading: Mark 11:1-11

Our scripture reading today is Mark chapter 11, the first 11 verses. You might recognize this. We read it for Palm Sunday. Do you guys, do you kiddos remember what you did in Sunday school on Palm Sunday?

Does the word palm ring a bell? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the moment? What'd you hold up? Palm leaves. Yeah, good job. Good job, girls. Good job. So, do you remember that? Palm leaves? You waved them in the air, the little green, greenery, fern-like greenery.

All right. This is where we're at in the book of Mark now. We've made it to Jesus' triumphal entry. This is God's word, and it is eternally true.

As they approached Jerusalem at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them: Go into the village opposite you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there on which no one yet has ever sat.

Untie it and bring it here. And if anyone says to you, why are you doing this? you say, The Lord has need of it, and immediately He will send it back here. They went away and found a colt tied to the door outside the street, and they untied it, and some of the bystanders were saying to them, What are you doing untying the colt?

And they spoke to them just as Jesus had told them, and they gave them permission. They brought the colt to Jesus and put their coats on it, and he sat on it. And many spread their coats on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields.

Those who went in front and those who followed were shouting, Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our Father David. Hosanna in the highest.

Jesus entered Jerusalem and came into the temple. And after looking around at everything, he left for Bethany with the twelve, since it was already late,

this is the word of the Lord. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, may the words of my mouth and the thoughts of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

A Picture of Your Savior

All right, if I were to ask about your children or your grandchildren, what would you likely do after I asked about them? Tell me about them. What do you have for children, grandchildren?

You'd probably pull out your phone, right? And you'd show me a picture. You'd show me some, you know, some smiling picture of the last time you all got together, some family reunion. In the old days, you might have had a flip book or, you know, something, you know, up people's wallets in the old days were really fat because they'd carried around like 12 pictures, right?

School pictures, things like that. Or, you know, if it's at your house, you might say, oh, come over here, come to the stairwell, and then here's a picture of when we were all together last. And pictures, it would be some snapshot in time, right? It would be, it'd be some, you know, maybe your children were young and they were riding their bikes or, you know, they were out, and you just planted some trees, and so they were out, and the trees are all about as tall as your kids, right?

Or maybe you were at Disney World, and some special, you know, some special event, some thing that you did, some Boy Scout camping trip or, you know, some snapshot of life. And what it does is it shows a part of you that I can't see normally, right? It's like, oh, yeah, we are, my family, we all got together and we did this thing.

And it reveals something about your interests, right? And maybe it just reveals something about your age, right? There you are in front of your old 1950s car, or you know, your hair was the style of the 80s. You know, and for you kids, you don't understand that, but you know, you're, you're, you know, you'll see, you'll look back on your styles now, the clothes that you have to buy, because that's all the store sells.

And things will change. And you'll be like, I can't believe I wore that. I can't believe I did my hair like that. I can't believe that I rode planes through the sky.

And, you know, that's my picture that I have, right? But when you show someone your picture, they learn something about you other than just who you are today, they see more, they see who you were, and then if, they're really thoughtful, they'll see, oh, I wonder how they got to this point.

Church here in Mark 11 is a picture of your Savior. And it's an interesting, unique picture. Now, clearly, it's not a photograph, right?

Don't open your Bible up and expect to see a photograph of Jesus because they didn't have those. And any painting of Jesus, be very, very, very suspicious of. Because paintings, images of Jesus, have a way of telling more about the artist who made the painting than they do about who Jesus is.

Because we don't have much for what Jesus looked like. That seems like a very unimportant thing in Scripture's opinion, in God's opinion, of what his word is. We know he was stricken and smitten, and he was not much to look at. But other than that, the style of his hair, we know nothing about.

It's all conjecture. It's all, it's, he likely did not glow like a lot of paintings have him. He didn't have a halo that doesn't fit how Scripture talks about him. So, how does Scripture give us pictures? Well, here's a picture of an event, right?

Here's an event, and if you stop and see the scene, you see a glimpse of who Jesus has always been and what He became for our benefit. Mark gives us this picture, and the picture is full of tension, not like relational tension, like sometimes you see the relational tension.

You see the scribes and the Pharisees, and you can feel the tension of their hatred for who Jesus is. That's not what we have here. The tension's different. It's a tension in who Jesus is, what Jesus is. Right? Because you have at the same time:

• you have a king entering his capital city riding on a borrowed donkey.
• You have him receiving royal praise, but just from ordinary people, not from the rulers.
• You see him announced as the son of David, yet as soon as he gets into the capital city, he heads off to the outskirts.
• And you see him exercising absolute authority, yet displaying remarkable humility.

That's the tension, and it's a tension that is drawn out from our normal thinking of authority and our normal thinking of humility. Like normally, when we think about a humble man, you're probably not thinking about someone who exercises great authority. And if you think about someone who exercises great authority, you're probably not thinking of a humble man, right?

Let's, our president is a good example. And we can like Donald Trump, but we can also see, you would not reasonably describe him as a humble man, right? Is that fair? Any pushback on that? So, authority and humility is, there's a tension, and it's a tension that we feel as mankind because, you know, for us guys, these are kind of opposite, these can tend to be opposite sides of the ditch, right?

We can either be really big on authority and we're domineering and we're, you know, we're aggressive, and we're going to pound you into the dirt if you cross us. That's what we think of as authority, right? Or you can be humble in kind of a gross way, right?

You can be always agreeable to everyone. You can never have an opinion. You can be. I'm trying to think of a good word for it. You know how a reed just blows in the wind?

You know, whichever way the wind blows, you're so humble, you have no opinions. You're so humble, you have no preferences. You're so humble that you don't matter. You're not interesting. You're the exact opposite of the domineering authoritarian.

And yet, somehow gloriously, there's this embodiment of man in Jesus Christ that is both humble and authoritative. So let's see that. Let's see how he is humble and authoritative all at the same time and see what we can learn from that.

Jesus Exercises Absolute Authority

Almost everything in this passage happens because Jesus commands it.

See how specifically Jesus describes a colt. You will see a colt tied there. Everything happens just as Jesus says. He knows a colt's history.

No one has ever sat on him. He knows the potential objections from the men who are in town. Tell them the Lord has need of it. And Jesus gives the confidence in his authority that they're going to respond.

He will send it back here immediately. You're not going to, you're just going to tell them the Lord has need of it, and that's enough. Clearly, Jesus is not the victim here. He's not found himself in a desperate situation where, oh, I need a colt.

I don't have wheels. I left. This happened to me recently. I was setting up at a swim meet, and Cabe and I drove separate cars. I went home with him, and we left a car there.

But when I got home, I do what I always do, which is I take the keys out of my pocket and I set them down. And then we got back. And guess what? I did not have. I did not have the keys to my car, which was still there.

So, and I parked right where the coffee truck needed to be. So, anyway, it was a disaster and an embarrassment. That's not what happened to Jesus. Jesus didn't forget the keys to his colt at home, right?

He had the colt there. It wasn't his colt, it was this other man's colt. But whose colt was it really? I mean, we have to see that all of our possessions, we didn't go create these things on our own.

We didn't come create our own authority, create our own rights. We're stewards of God's goods, of the things that He's put in our charge. And so there's a real sense in which Jesus had the right to this colt. It was not a big ask.

He's not a victim being swept along by powers outside of His control. He is on the way to the cross and he knows he's on the way to the cross. And he is, as we're going to see, he's ratcheting up his exposure. He's ratcheting up how much people are seeing, how much he's engaging the powers.

You know, previously, every time a crowd was coming around, he would find ways to remove himself, right? He'd cross over to the other side of the lake. He would go up into the mountains, and often the crowds would follow him there. But it was like almost a cat and mouse game, right?

Where he was getting away, he was telling people not to tell about him, he was avoiding the big dramatic entries. As we get to this last days of Jesus' life, it's less and less like that. He has embraced the publicity. All the way up to the crucifixion, none of this is an accident.

Jesus is going into Jerusalem intentionally, and his hour is almost here. Part of Jesus' kingly authority as a second is his authority over all creation, over all possessions of man. The response is simple. Jesus doesn't give a long, like, a long explanation: I'm the creator, I'm this, I'm that.

He tells his disciples just to say, the Lord has need of it. Go get it and tell him the Lord has need of it. Simple and remarkable. Jesus doesn't negotiate, he doesn't explain. He just sends the messenger.

He doesn't even go himself. I am Jesus and I need this. He sends his children, right? He sends his children to go get what he needs.

And the permission is granted. The colt belongs to another man, but ultimately it belongs to the Lord, which is a subtle reminder that every possession we have is only temporarily entrusted to us. It's hard not to think of the Childresses, but our homes, our money, our businesses, our farms, our time, that's a big one.

Our children, that's another big one. All belong ultimately to the king. Whenever the Lord has need of something, the proper answer is the same: it's yours already. Of course, the Lord has need of it, the Lord can use it.

The problem is, we like our possessions, and more importantly, we like our control over our possessions. We want our homes to require no maintenance, right? Every time something breaks in our home, we have a toilet that seems to the wax ring seems to never work. I don't know what the deal is, it's been replaced three or four times, and I hate it.

It drives me bonkers. I want it to just work. And yet, one of the ways the Lord keeps me humble is that when I have a hundred things to do, He sends some disaster my way that I have to deal with immediately because it's a gross thing and it needs to be dealt with immediately.

We want our money to never run out in a bank account. We never want to get that overdrawn balance. We want our cars never to have a flat tire. We want it to start every time we turn the key, right?

That is, and if it doesn't, it's frustrating. We want control. We want control of our businesses and our farms. We want them to always be successful and without conflict or controversy. And when there is conflict or controversy, what do we think?

Why did this happen to me? Why today? Oh, how often do we think, ah, the Lord is training my heart, the Lord is training His or her heart. Usually we're focused on woe is me. We want to use our time as we see fit, which means an unexpected guest, a drop-in visitor, especially a chatty one, or maybe we live in the opposite life, and it's loneliness, and no one stops in to visit, and we wish someone would stop in to visit, and it's watching the clock tick and the hours tick by, and the phone doesn't ring, and no one stops in.

There's different stages of life, and different ways for us to be annoyed at our control or our lack of control. And then with our children, we want them to be happy and healthy and smart, wise, useful, not annoying or needy or whiny or sick, and never needing discipline.

Think about the owner of this colt, right? He had every reason to object. What? Who? Who wants my colt? Who are you to tell me the Lord wants my colt?

Oh, that's my new colt, and no one's trained it yet, so it would be unsafe for you to take my colt, right? Like you could think of all the ways that the owner could make objections. How different are we? We readily confess that everything belongs to God, but our faith is often revealed when He lays claim to our possessions, when He lays claim to our tiny little areas of control.

Our homes, our finances, our work, our farms, our time, even our children are not ours ultimately. We're stewards, we have responsibilities for them, but it's a subordinate responsibility, subordinate to the Lord. And nothing exposes the difference between our profession of faith and our reality of what we really believe than when the Lord makes a claim as to what is really his.

Hosanna: The King Receives Worship

When Jesus mounts the colt and enters, the crowd cries, Hosanna, which doesn't mean much to us these days. We don't have a lot of significance there. This is pulled out of Psalm 118, and it basically means save us now. That was the original cry.

It's Hebrew, sounds like Hosanna, means save us now. It began as a prayer. This is Psalm 118. You'll recognize several of these passages.

I'm gonna read Psalm 118, a couple of verses here.

Open to me the gates of righteousness, I shall enter through them, I shall give thanks to the Lord This is the gate of the Lord. The righteous will enter through it. I shall give thanks to you, for you have answered me, and you have become my salvation.

The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our sight. This is the day which the Lord has made.

Let us rejoice and be glad in it. O Lord, do save, we beseech you. Oh Lord, we beseech you, do send prosperity. Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

We have blessed you from the house of the Lord. The Lord is God, and He has given us light. Bind the festival sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar. You are my God, and I give thanks to you.

You are my God, I extol you. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his loving kindness is everlasting.

This is where it started. Save us now. It's Hebrew is Hoshiach.

So you can see how Hoshi-na became Hosanna. They continue: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Save us now, blessed, blessed one who comes in the name of the Lord. Save us now, blessed one that's coming with the kingdom of our Father David.

These are royal declarations, these are covenantal claims. Here comes the Savior and the King. And what does Jesus do? He rides on, seated on his colt, colt covered in coats, coats on the ground, palms on the ground, being worshipped as God, being worshipped as the fulfillment of God's promises, what do angels do when man starts to worship them?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, get up, get up. What are you doing? You don't worship me. I'm an angel. I'm created like you are.

How about men? What do men do when men fall down and worship them? What do righteous, godly men do? It's the same thing. Get up. Don't worship me. What are you? You worship God. You don't worship me.

Only God is proper to receive worship, not the angels, not man. So, what do we see in Jesus? As he rides on his colt, being praised, as blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the bringer of salvation, the coming, the one who brings the kingdom of David.

Does Jesus object? No. Why? Because he's the proper object of worship. Now, this is where non-Christian religions get off. We were talking at Sunday school about, you know, where do you draw the line? Where do you draw the line between a church that you have fellowship, people who profess faith that you have fellowship with, and who you don't.

Well, the nature of Jesus is one of those lines. It has to be. It's our prime distinctive between Mormonism and Islam: who is Jesus? And is Jesus the proper object of the worship of mankind?

If he is, all of a sudden he's not man, he is God. And that's what we see here. We see as God, Jesus deserves the praise. He is the proper recipient of worship.

And as God, he enters into the temple in Jerusalem, right? This is who Jesus is. He is the King of kings and the Lord of Lords. He is begotten of the Father, not made.

He is different than mankind. And that's why he's worthy of praise and deserving of praise. And then, look what happens when he gets to the temple. It's almost anticlimactic. Here it is, verse 11.

Jesus entered Jerusalem and came into the temple.

Right? Do you remember what James and John were asking for? Oh, when you set up your throne, I want to sit on your right hand and on your left. When you come into the temple, right?

Like this is God coming to his temple, what does he do?

And after looking around at everything, he left.

He left? Do you see? Now, he doesn't stay gone, right? We're going to get to one of the things that he does, but right, this is God coming into his temple.

This is what you've done for me. This is what you've done. This is my home. This is my special place of presence.

This is what you were commanded to do and prepare for Jesus, for God. And Jesus walks in, he looks around, and he leaves. And he doesn't just leave the temple, he leaves Jerusalem. It's not time. It's not time for him to sit down as an earthly king.

Here we see that God has come to inspect his house. The temple doesn't belong to the priest, it doesn't belong to the Sanhedrin. It belongs to God. And the next day, he will begin cleansing it.

But first, he just surveys it. That's his authority.

Jesus Comes in Humility

Where do we see humility in this verse? In these verses. We can look at the borrowed colt. Everything about his entrance is humble, right?

He doesn't arrive on a war horse. Is that how should a king walk come in, right? I mean, shouldn't he come in and, you know, Air Force One or some giant steam engine train thing? Sorry, that came out weird.

You know, some symbol of power and might, right? What's that? A chariot, yes, yes. Or, you know, an armored limousine, or what's the Popemobile, where he's got, you know, the big, the big bulletproof casing around, right? Like that. How about a military escort?

Shouldn't the, shouldn't the king of the universe have a military escort as he goes into town? And shouldn't he gather all the kings in front of him to like kneel down and show his authority over, he doesn't. He borrows an animal. The regular citizens throw, you know, whatever they can find, the palm branches, but the creator of the world's riding on a borrowed beast, a beast of burden.

And this fits the pattern of Jesus' whole life. What did Jesus own here in this life?

• He was born in another man's stable.
• He preached from another man's boat.
• He rides into Jerusalem on another man's colt.
• And he's going to be buried in another man's tomb.

We get so caught up in our accumulating things, protecting things, maintaining things. We've got to do some of that. But here's the Lord of all creation willingly living among us with almost no earthly possessions.

Let that inform the value we place on things of this world. Maintenance is good, it's necessary. We need to maintain things, but how much more should we have our mindset, our heart set on things of eternal value and eternal glory? I told, we had an elders' meeting this week, and I told, you know, it was what, almost three hours?

But I looked back and we spent probably 60-70% of it just talking about pastoral care issues. People here in the church, people that, you know, like the Childresses that we're doing outreach to, that's what I want us to focus on. You know, we're about to have a business meeting.

We have to talk about business, right? We have to have financial reports. We have to maintain the building we have. We have to replace the sidewalk because it's fallen apart.

Like, there's things that we have to do as good stewards of the things that God has entrusted us. But what we don't want to do is make that the most important thing. Because if that's the case, we're not a church any longer. We are just the social club that we want to try and avoid being.

We've got to attend to the practical things of life, but that should not be our focus. It must not be our focus. And if we're going to draw swords against each other, it definitely should not be over the color of the carpet or the color of the walls or the, you know, the practical things.

It's got to be about eternal, things of eternal value. This church has lasted 100 years. Is that not an incredible thing? I mean, do you ever just, like, every once in a while, this just dawns on me.

I look around and I'm like, these walls are 100 years old. That's an incredible thing. They probably won't last another hundred. I mean, just realistically, maybe.

And, you know, we live in America and in the history of worldly time scales, of, you know, our history is pretty short. Like, you go to Europe and you go see things that are like 400 or 500 years old. I've not, you know, but that's what I understand.

You go to the Middle East, though, and you're looking at things that are like 1500, 2,000 years old. You're like, wow, this is incredible. 100 years old. It takes our maintenance, but not our focus. This is not where the focus of our purpose is.

The focus of the church is to care for souls. It's to proclaim the good news of the gospel and to care for souls. The Lord of all creation willingly lived among us with almost no possessions. It should just inform us.

Enjoy the things that we have. Use them, but don't let your life center around those things. We also see humility in that he deliberately chose a colt. This fulfills Zechariah 9, which I read earlier.

Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey.

Right? The crowds, the disciples even, expected liberation from Rome. They expected Jesus to enter Jerusalem as the king riding a war horse as someone ready for conquest. But here Jesus comes to deliver them, not from Rome.

And pay attention to this because there's a bunch of Christian influencers these days who want us to be delivered from the Democrats, immigration, you know, whatever the political problem of the day is. Jesus did not come to deliver us from political troubles. We are going to have political troubles.

It's going to continue to be a battle. Jesus came to deliver us from something much worse. He came to deliver us from sin and death. He does not enter as a warrior prepared to kill his enemies, not this time.

He enters as the Savior prepared to suffer and die for his enemies. This is the picture of who our Savior is. This is the picture of who we needed our Savior to be.

And then, you know, we talked about the crowd shouting, Hosanna, Hosanna, save us now, save us now, right?

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. What's the crowd going to be shouting in a week? Crucify him! Crucify him! The fickleness of the crowd. Listen, don't be surprised if you see people who are worshiping Jesus one day and condemning him a week later.

It is the fickleness of the crowd. Jesus accepts their worship, he knows their hearts. He rode through that crowd, he knew exactly what was going on, and yet he continued towards the cross. He's not sustained by their approval.

He knows exactly what's in their hearts as he walks through. And his true humility is he continues walking the path that was set down before him by him and the Father before time began? This is the plan of salvation. This was his intention.

This was the path that he was going down, and this was his authority and his humility to choose to walk down it and to walk down it.

Do We Welcome Jesus as He Truly Is?

The crowd is right that Jesus is king, but they're wrong about the kind of kingdom he came to establish. They wanted a political victory.

Jesus came for redemption. They wanted a throne. Jesus came for a cross. They wanted Rome defeated, but Jesus comes to defeat sin and death.

The tragedy of Palm Sunday is not that the crowd praised Jesus, it's that they praised him based on their false image of who he was. They praised him because of what they wanted. They wanted a king who had served their agenda, but he came to establish God's kingdom, the kingdom of God.

Which, you know, and this is the question that I've been driving at through all of these examples: do we welcome Jesus as He truly is, or only as we want him to be? Do we only want Jesus who keeps us healthy? Do we only want Jesus who keeps us clean and good-looking?

Do we only want Jesus who wants the best for us and is willing to bless us in this life? A Jesus who approves of our healthy life and approves of our successful businesses and approves of how we use our free time? Or do we acknowledge Jesus as King, who has authority over our possessions, authority over our plans, authority over our time, authority over our worship, authority over our children?

The crowd spread their cloaks before him. We're willing to spread out our Sunday mornings from 10:30 to 11:45 and don't push it past 11:45, right? Maybe that's pushing it. We're willing to give up swearing and cursing and you know, dirty living, but what about the sins we really like?

What about the respectable sins? Are we willing to give up the respectable sins, the hidden sins? Because that's what a king demands. A king demands fruit, as we'll see next week.

He's the Creator, He's the Lord. Church Mark gives us a picture of God and His Son Jesus that's worth more than a thousand words. It's a picture of who Jesus is, his authority and his humility perfectly balanced in Jesus Christ. The king arrives with his absolute authority.

Every person, every possession, every act of worship, the temple itself belongs to Jesus. Yet the king comes clothed in humility. He rides a borrowed colt. He comes in peace.

He receives rejection for who he really is, what he's really accomplishing. He walks into his temple and sees how it's been marred, to see how it's been misused. And within a few days, he will march not to a throne, but to a cross. This is your Savior.

This is your king, the sovereign king who humbled himself to save sinners. Because he humbled himself, God highly exalted him. So, what do we do? Well, we say, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

But we say it knowing who Jesus really is. Save us, O Lord, not from our inconvenience, not from your control and your sovereignty, not from the government that annoys us and takes too much of our money and property taxes. He saves us from sin and death and condemnation.

That is what the church is gathered for. He saves us from ourselves, from our sinful desires, from our selfishness, our self-centeredness, our wickedness. Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Save us now, O God, is what we pray.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray, Heavenly Father, you've revealed yourself to us. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. Help us to see how you have come not to satisfy our every desires, not to grant us our every wish, not to set us on chairs right next to your throne.

You've come to redeem us, to redeem a people for your good pleasure and for your glory and for your honor. Help us to submit our lives more than just Sunday mornings. Help us to submit all of our lives, all of our desires, all of our efforts at control, that we would trust you and we would know you and we would serve you.

Help us to do this. Help us to see past our earthly possessions and to submit our lives to you, Father. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.