We know Christ was to have been a king, because for one thing he was to sit on the throne of David his father. Pilate, when he said provokingly, ‘Art thou a king then?’ spoke more truly than he was aware. The populace that haunted Jesus’s footsteps, that followed, followed for the sake of a miracle, it too was convinced that Jesus was the king who was to come. On one occasion they went so far as to attempt force in order to have their way with him; but he fled to the mountains alone.

It was certainly this riotous and revolutionary attitude of the crowd that made our Lord, not disown the title, but avoid it. Nevertheless on two great occasions he bore it publicly, and once he suffered it, when mockingly acknowledged, in silence.

The first occasion was Palm Sunday. Of all the scenes in the New Testament, that is one of the most strange. Christ had implied he would not go up to Jerusalem at that time, but he had gone up alone.