Matthew 21

Today’s Passage: Matthew 21

Everything in this Gospel has been moving toward this week, and here it arrives. Jesus comes over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives with Jerusalem spread out below Him, and for the first time in Matthew He does not hush the crowds or slip away from them. He arranges His own welcome. He sends two disciples for a donkey and her colt, He rides down into the city over a road carpeted with cloaks and cut branches, and He lets the shouting run: Hosanna to the Son of David. The whole city is shaken by it and wants to know who this is. Then He goes straight to the temple and turns the tables over, and the blind and the lame come to Him in the courts and are healed, and children keep up the shouting after the grown men have stopped. He spends the night out at Bethany. In the morning He curses a fig tree that had leaves and no figs, and it withers on the spot. And then the day is spent in the temple courts under interrogation. By what authority are You doing these things? He answers with a question they dare not answer, and then He tells them two stories, one about two sons and one about a vineyard, and by the end of the second one the men holding the question know perfectly well that they are standing inside it. They want to arrest Him on the spot. Only the crowds hold them back. Watch how the chapter is built, because it is built with care: a King who comes in humility, a house cleaned out, a tree judged for fruitlessness, and then parable after parable asking the same question. Where is the fruit?

As you read, hold this: The King finally comes to His own city, and He comes gentle and riding on a donkey, and He comes looking for fruit.

Matthew 21:1–5 (BSB)

¹ As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent out two disciples, ² saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt beside her. Untie them and bring them to Me. ³ If anyone questions you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.” ⁴ This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet: ⁵ “Say to the Daughter of Zion, ‘See, your King comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’”

Notice first who is arranging all of this. Jesus is not swept along by a crowd; He sends. He knows what is tied in a village He has not entered, He knows the owner will release it, and He gives the two disciples one sentence to say if anyone stops them: the Lord needs them. That is the whole authorization, and it is enough. Then Matthew stops the story to tell you why it is happening this way, and he reaches back some five hundred years to Zechariah. Hear the prophet’s own words:

"Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your King comes to you, righteous and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey." Zechariah 9:9 (BSB)

Sit with the picture. A conquering general came into a city on a warhorse, with captives walking behind him. Every expectation on that road wanted exactly that, and every expectation on that road was about to be disappointed, because the King who comes to Zion comes gentle (πραΰς) praus, pronounced PRAH-oos. Strong's G4239, meek, gentle strength held under control. Praüs is one of the loveliest words in the Greek New Testament and one of the most misread. English hears “gentle” or “meek” and thinks of a person with no strength, but the Greeks used this word family of a horse that had been broken to the bridle: all the power still there, every ounce of it, now entirely under command. It is not weakness. It is strength that has been placed at another’s disposal. Matthew has used the word before, in the third beatitude, where Jesus said “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth,” and again when He said of Himself “I am gentle and humble in heart.” He uses it here of the King entering His capital. Hold those three together and you will have something worth carrying: the only Man who ever had unlimited power at His disposal is the Man who came into His own city on a donkey, and the world He rode into will finally belong not to the men who grabbed at it but to those who are like Him. If you are waiting for God to prove Himself by force, this verse asks you to look again. He has already shown you what He is like, and He showed you on a borrowed colt, and the crowd that lined that road never guessed how much power was riding past them under such quiet control. and riding on a borrowed farm animal that has never been broken to a saddle. This is not a King pretending to be modest. This is what the King is actually like, and the prophet said so long before the donkey was foaled. He is righteous and victorious in Zechariah’s line, so there is nothing weak here, but His victory will not be won the way the crowds are hoping. Understand what He is doing by riding at all. For three years He has quieted the ones who wanted to crown Him. Now, in the last week, He deliberately fulfills the one prophecy that announces the King and defines what kind of King He is in the same breath. He is making a claim in public, and He is making it in a form nobody can mistake for a bid for a throne in Rome’s sense of the word.

Matthew 21:6–11 (BSB)

⁶ So the disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. ⁷ They brought the donkey and the colt and laid their cloaks on them, and Jesus sat on them. ⁸ A massive crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹ The crowds that went ahead of Him and those that followed were shouting: “Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest!” ¹⁰ When Jesus had entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?” ¹¹ The crowds replied, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

They had no red carpet, so they took off what they were wearing and laid it in the dust, and they cut branches and threw those down too, and they walked before Him and behind Him singing. It must have been a glorious noise. And what they sang was Scripture, the psalm the pilgrims sang as they came up to the feast: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD,” which stands in Psalm 118 a few verses after the line about the rejected stone that Jesus Himself will quote before this chapter ends. They shouted Hosanna (ὡσαννά) hōsanna, pronounced ho-san-NAH. Strong's G5614, save now, a plea for salvation turned shout of praise. Hōsanna is not originally a Greek word at all. It is Hebrew carried over into Greek letters, from the cry in Psalm 118, hoshi’ah na, which the BSB renders “O LORD, save us, we pray.” It is a plea, not a compliment. It means save now. By the first century it had softened in common use into something closer to an acclamation, the way a crowd shouts a word at a coronation without weighing every syllable, which is why the same crowd can shout “Hosanna in the highest,” a phrase that is really a shout of praise up toward heaven. But the old meaning is still lying underneath it, and it is the truest thing anyone said that day. They were crying save us to the only One who could, and He was riding into the city precisely to do it, and He was going to do it in a way that would empty that road within the week. There is something here worth keeping. Your best prayers may be truer than you know and answered in ways you did not order. The crowd wanted saving from Rome. He came to save them from something deeper and older, and He went to a cross to do it. When you cry save now and God does not do the thing you had in mind, do not conclude He has not heard. Look at what He is actually doing, and at the price He was willing to pay to do it. to the Son of David, and that title is a royal one, the promised heir of the covenant God swore to David. So the crowds are not wrong. Every word they shout is true. What they do not know is what kind of salvation they are asking for, or how soon their voices will change. Understand this plainly, and do not use it to sneer at them, because there is nothing in us that would have done better. This is the same city, in the same week. The crowds that lined this road with their cloaks are not necessarily the crowd that stood in Pilate’s courtyard on Friday, but they were drawn from the same feast, and no one is recorded as standing in the street on Friday to stop it. That is how quickly public enthusiasm turns when the King turns out not to do what the public wanted. The whole city was stirred, Matthew says, using a word that means shaken as by an earthquake, and it asked the right question: Who is this? The answer that comes back is true and far too small. A prophet from Nazareth in Galilee. He is that. He is a great deal more than that, and the rest of the week is going to say so.

Matthew 21:12–17 (BSB)

¹² Then Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. ¹³ And He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer.’ But you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’” ¹⁴ The blind and the lame came to Him at the temple, and He healed them. ¹⁵ But the chief priests and scribes were indignant when they saw the wonders He performed and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” ¹⁶ “Do You hear what these children are saying?” they asked. “Yes,” Jesus answered. “Have you never read: ‘From the mouths of children and infants You have ordained praise’?” ¹⁷ Then He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where He spent the night.

He gets down off the donkey and walks into His Father’s house, and the first thing He does there is turn it over. Do not soften this and do not exaggerate it. There is no cruelty in it and no loss of control, but there is holy anger, and He aims it exactly. Tables of money changers, benches of dove sellers, out. And then He tells them why, in two lines of Scripture stitched together, and the charge is precise. The first half is Isaiah: “for My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations.” All the nations. That is the point of the court they had filled with livestock pens and coin tables. The one square of ground on earth where a Gentile could come and seek the God of Israel had been rented out, and the sound of prayer in it had been replaced by the sound of a market. The second half is Jeremiah, who had stood in the gate of an earlier temple and asked, “Has this house, which bears My Name, become a den of robbers in your sight?” Notice what a den is. A den is not where a robber (λῃστής) lēstēs, pronounced lace-TACE. Strong's G3027, robber, brigand, man of violence. Lēstēs is not a pickpocket. It is the word for a bandit, a brigand, a man of violence who takes by force, and in the first century it carried a political edge as well, since the Romans used it for the armed insurrectionists who hid in the caves of the Judean hills. It is the same word John uses for Barabbas, and the same word Matthew uses for the two men crucified beside Jesus. Jeremiah’s Greek gives Jesus the phrase, and He plants it in the temple courts on purpose. What He is saying is not merely that the traders overcharged, though they very likely did. He is saying that a house built for prayer had become a stronghold where predators felt secure, protected by the very holiness of the address. That is a warning that has never once gone out of date, and it is not aimed only at ancient priests. Anything can be turned into a den: a ministry, a reputation, a habit of churchgoing, a familiarity with holy things that quiets the conscience without ever changing the life. Ask the Lord to walk through your own house of prayer and turn over whatever is standing where the seeking ought to be. It is a mercy when He does it. He never overturns a table without meaning to give the room back to its right use. does his robbing. It is where he goes afterward to feel safe. That is the sharper half of the charge: men were treating the temple as a hideout, a place where the machinery of religion covered over what they were doing everywhere else.

And then look what happens in the cleared space, because Matthew puts it in the very next sentence. “The blind and the lame came to Him at the temple, and He healed them.” Where the tables had been, there is now room, and into that room come exactly the people that a temple full of commerce had no time for. This is what the house is for. Sellers out, the broken in, and the Son of God standing in the middle of it healing them one by one. The chief priests and scribes are indignant at the sight, which tells you a good deal about what had happened to their hearts, and what finally provokes them is the children. The children have picked up the song from the road and are shouting it in the courts, Hosanna to the Son of David, and no one can make them stop. So the leaders demand that Jesus silence them. He will not. He answers with Psalm 8: “From the mouths of children and infants You have ordained praise on account of Your adversaries, to silence the enemy and avenger.” Weigh what He has just done. He has taken a psalm about praise offered to God and applied it, without a blink, to praise offered to Himself. And He has told the most learned men in Israel that the children in the courtyard see what they cannot. Then He walks out and goes to Bethany for the night. He will be back in the morning.

Matthew 21:18–22 (BSB)

¹⁸ In the morning, as Jesus was returning to the city, He was hungry. ¹⁹ Seeing a fig tree by the road, He went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. “May you never bear fruit again!” He said. And immediately the tree withered. ²⁰ When the disciples saw this, they marveled and asked, “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?” ²¹ “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen. ²² If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

This is a hard scene and it is honest to say so. It is the only miracle in the Gospels in which something is destroyed rather than healed, and readers have stumbled over it for centuries. So take it slowly. First, look where it stands. Matthew has placed it right against the temple cleansing, with the tree cursed on the way in and its withering noticed on the way back. Mark tells it with the temple scene set inside it like the filling of a sandwich. That placement is not accidental. This is an enacted parable, the kind of thing the prophets did with a smashed jar or a yoke of wood, and the subject of it is the same subject as the morning before. A fig tree in full leaf is a tree advertising fruit, since on that tree the early figs come with the leaves. Leaves without figs is a promise the tree cannot keep. And Jesus has just walked out of a house full of leaves. All the machinery of worship was running, the courts were crowded, the sacrifices were going up, and He came looking for fruit and did not find it. Hosea had already used the fig tree for Israel and Micah had already gone through the orchard looking for an early fig and found none. The tree by the road is the sermon in one gesture, and it is a sermon against religion that has everything except what it is for.

Then hear how gently He turns to the disciples, who are staring at the withered branches asking how it happened so fast. He does not moralize at them. He speaks to them about faith and prayer, about a mountain lifted and thrown into the sea, which was a proverbial way of saying the impossible thing. And notice that they were standing on the Mount of Olives, in sight of the temple mount, when He said it. Take the promise as broadly and as gladly as He gives it, and take it as He gives it: this is prayer offered by disciples who are following Him, to a Father whose kingdom and will they are learning to want, as this same Gospel has already taught them to pray. It is not a lever for making God do our bidding. It is an invitation to ask enormous things of a Father who can do them. The Lord has just shown them that a word from Him withers a tree. He now tells them that the God who does such things listens to them when they pray. Be honest about the warning in this scene, and then be honest about the kindness in it too.

Matthew 21:23–27 (BSB)

²³ When Jesus returned to the temple courts and began to teach, the chief priests and elders of the people came up to Him. “By what authority are You doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave You this authority?” ²⁴ “I will also ask you one question,” Jesus replied, “and if you answer Me, I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. ²⁵ What was the source of John’s baptism? Was it from heaven or from men?” They deliberated among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will ask, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ ²⁶ But if we say, ‘From men,’ we are afraid of the people, for they all regard John as a prophet.” ²⁷ So they answered, “We do not know.” And Jesus replied, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

He is back in the courts teaching, and the delegation arrives. These are the men with the running of the temple, and their question is a fair one on its face. A man walks into their jurisdiction, overturns the furniture, and stands teaching in the colonnades. By what authority? But the question is not really a question. It is a summons, and they are the court. So Jesus does what a wise man does when a trap is set with a question: He asks one back, and His question is not a dodge. It goes to the exact same issue. Where did John’s baptism come from, heaven or men? Because if they could not recognize God at work in John, whom the whole nation revered, they will not recognize Him in Jesus either, and the answer to their question was already given at the Jordan.

Then Matthew does something remarkable. He lets us listen in while they huddle, and their deliberation is one of the saddest paragraphs in the Gospel. Look at what is not in it. There is not one word about what is true. Every consideration is tactical. If we say from heaven, He has us on why we did not believe. If we say from men, the crowd will turn on us. So we will say we do not know. Do you see what has happened to these men? They are the official guardians of the truth in Israel, and they have arrived at a place where truth is simply not a category they use anymore, only consequence. It is a chilling thing, and it does not happen all at once. It happens by a hundred small preferences for the safe answer over the true one. And so they lie, publicly, and say they do not know, and Jesus lets the refusal stand: Neither will I tell you. That is not petulance. It is mercy of a sort, and it is justice. Light offered to a heart that has already decided not to see it only hardens what it falls on. Sit with that for a moment before you read on, and ask the Lord to keep you a person who wants to know what is actually true, even when the true answer will cost you something.

Matthew 21:28–32 (BSB)

²⁸ But what do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first one and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ ²⁹ ‘I will not,’ he replied. But later he changed his mind and went. ³⁰ Then the man went to the second son and told him the same thing. ‘I will, sir,’ he said. But he did not go. ³¹ Which of the two did the will of his father?” “The first,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. ³² For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.

He has refused to answer their question, and now, having refused, He tells them three stories anyway, and the stories say everything the answer would have said. Here is the first, and it is short enough to seem harmless. Two sons, one father, one vineyard, one command. The first says no to his father’s face and then thinks better of it and goes out and works. The second says I will, sir, which is the courteous answer, the respectful answer, and then does nothing. Which one did the will of his father? There is only one possible reply and they give it. The first.

And then the trap closes, and it closes gently and terribly. “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.” Hear how much is packed into that. Tax collectors were collaborators who made their living off their own neighbors, and the other word names women whose lives the respectable would not discuss. These were the people at the very bottom of the religious ledger, and they are the first son. They said no to God with their whole lives, out loud, in public, and then John came preaching in the way of righteousness and they changed their minds and went into the vineyard. The men Jesus is speaking to are the second son. They had said yes to God since childhood, in the courteous, respectable, unbroken way, and when the Father’s messenger actually stood in front of them with work to do, they did not go. Notice, too, the last line, which is the sharpest of all: even after you saw this, you did not repent. They watched the transformation of the worst people they knew, they had the evidence in front of their eyes, and it moved them not one inch. Do not read this and congratulate yourself on not being a chief priest. Read it and ask which son you have been this week. It is possible to say I will, sir every Sunday of a long life and never once go out to the vineyard, and Jesus says plainly that the man who said no and went is the one who did the will of his father. What God is after is not the courteous answer. It is the changed mind that gets up and goes.

Matthew 21:33–39 (BSB)

³³ Listen to another parable: There was a landowner who planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a tower. Then he rented it out to some tenants and went away on a journey. ³⁴ When the harvest time drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his share of the fruit. ³⁵ But the tenants seized his servants. They beat one, killed another, and stoned a third. ³⁶ Again, he sent other servants, more than the first group. But the tenants did the same to them. ³⁷ Finally, he sent his son to them. ‘They will respect my son,’ he said. ³⁸ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and take his inheritance.’ ³⁹ So they seized him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

Every man listening knew this story before Jesus finished the first sentence, because it is Isaiah’s. The wall, the winepress, the tower, the owner who does everything for his vineyard and then comes looking for fruit: that is the Song of the Vineyard, and Isaiah told the nation plainly what it meant.

"For the vineyard of the LORD of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the plant of His delight. He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard a cry of distress." Isaiah 5:7 (BSB)

So when Jesus opens with a vineyard, the listeners lean in expecting the old song. And then He changes it, and the change is the whole point. In Isaiah the problem is the vines. Here the vines are fine; the harvest is coming in; the problem is the men who were given charge of the place. This parable is not about the vineyard at all. It is about the tenants. Keep that firmly in hand, because a great deal of harm has been done by readers who forgot it.

Then watch the owner. He sends servants, and they are beaten and killed and stoned, which is exactly what the prophets received across the centuries, and everyone in that court knew the list of names. And he sends more. That is the astonishing thing in this story, the patience of it: not one delegation but many, over and over, when any landowner in the ancient world would long since have come with armed men. And finally, finally, he sends his son, and the sentence Jesus puts in the owner’s mouth is almost unbearable to read: “They will respect my son.” Understand who is telling this story and where He is standing. He is four days from the cross, in the courts of the house He cleansed yesterday, describing His own death out loud to the men who will arrange it. Even the detail is exact. They threw him out of the vineyard and killed him, and Jesus would be led outside the city wall to die. He is not a victim of events. He knows, and He tells them, and He goes anyway. That is love you can lean your whole weight on.

Matthew 21:40–46 (BSB)

⁴⁰ Therefore, when the owner of the vineyard returns, what will he do to those tenants?” ⁴¹ “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” they replied, “and will rent out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him his share of the fruit at harvest time.” ⁴² Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? ⁴³ Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit. ⁴⁴ He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” ⁴⁵ When the chief priests and Pharisees heard His parables, they knew that Jesus was speaking about them. ⁴⁶ Although they wanted to arrest Him, they were afraid of the crowds, because the people regarded Him as a prophet.

He asks them to pass sentence, and they do, briskly and without hesitation, exactly as Nathan once got a verdict out of David before telling him whose case it was. A wretched end for the wretches, and the vineyard to other tenants who will hand over the fruit. Then Jesus quotes the psalm the pilgrims had been singing on the road two days earlier, from the very same song as their Hosanna: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is from the LORD, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” Weigh the word builders. These men were the builders. They were the professionals, the ones whose trade it was to know a good stone from a bad one, and they had looked at the cornerstone (ἀκρογωνιαῖος) akrogōniaios, pronounced ak-rog-oh-nee-AH-yos. Strong's G204, cornerstone, chief corner stone. Akrogōniaios is a compound, from akros, meaning the highest or outermost point, and gōnia, meaning a corner or angle. Scholars have long debated whether it names the great foundation stone laid first at the corner, from which every wall and course takes its line, or the capstone set at the summit that locks an arch or a gate together. The two pictures are not really rivals, and the New Testament seems glad of both, because both say the same thing: this is the one stone the whole structure depends on. Peter, who was standing in that court when Jesus said it, never got over the image. Paul told the Ephesians that the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone.” What matters most is what the psalm says about who did it. This is from the LORD. The rejection was real, and it was wicked, and men meant it. And God took the very stone they discarded and made it the one thing everything else is measured by. That is how He works. He is not merely repairing the damage our rejection did; He is building His house out of it. Praise Him for a God like that, who can take the worst thing men ever did and set it at the corner of everything He is making. of God’s whole building and thrown it on the rubbish heap. And God picked it up and set it at the corner, and the psalm says the sight of it is marvelous in our eyes.

Now come carefully to verse 43, because it has been terribly misused and this study will not add to it. Read verse 45 first, and let Matthew tell you plainly who is being addressed: “When the chief priests and Pharisees heard His parables, they knew that Jesus was speaking about them.” Them. Not a nation, not a people, not a race. The tenants in the story are the leadership entrusted with the care of God’s vineyard, the men in front of Him in that courtyard, and both they and Jesus understood it that way. Look at the very same verse and see who else is standing there: the crowds, the ordinary people of Jerusalem and Galilee, who at that moment are the only reason the arrest does not happen, because they hold Jesus to be a prophet. The Man telling this parable is Himself a Jew, a son of David and of Abraham, as Matthew’s first sentence insisted. The disciples listening to Him are Jewish. Peter and John and Paul are Jewish, and the church that will be born a few weeks later in this same city will be Jewish to a man before a single Gentile is added. Paul would later ask the question directly, did God reject His people?, and answer it himself: “Certainly not! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin.” This parable is not a verdict on a people, and anyone who has ever used it as one has misread the plain sense of verse 45. It is a warning to stewards. The vineyard was never the tenants’ property. It was always the owner’s, and the only question ever put to them was whether they would hand over the fruit when the servants came. That question is now put to every steward of God’s things: to the writer of these words, and to the one reading them, and to every person who has ever been trusted with something that belongs to God. Verse 44 is sober and it should be left sober. This stone is not neutral. A man may fall on it and be broken, which is what repentance feels like and is the safest thing that can happen to a sinner, or the stone may fall on him, and Jesus does not soften that. Better broken now than crushed later. And the chapter ends with the leaders wanting Him arrested and not daring, held back for a few more days by a crowd that will not be there on Friday.