The Last Week of Jesus' Life – Welcome, Rejection, and Conspiracy
Pastor Tan Thai · Mar 31, 2012
This sermon walks the congregation through the major events of Jesus' Passion Week, from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem to His crucifixion. The pastor calls each believer to examine their own spiritual life and live faithfully for Christ as if this were their final week.
This sermon was preached on Sunday, March 25, 2011, two weeks before Easter, based on Matthew 20:17-19. The pastor introduces the special significance of Passion Week by noting that all four Gospels devote a disproportionately large portion of their content to the final week of Jesus' life, indicating that this period carries the deepest theological meaning of His entire earthly ministry.
The pastor walks through each day of that final week in sequence. On Sunday the crowds welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem with shouts of Hosanna; on Monday He cleansed the temple and cursed the fig tree—a symbol of Israel's outward religiosity masking an inner distance from God; on Tuesday He taught in the temple for the last time as the people began to reject Him and the religious leaders plotted to kill Him; on Thursday He instituted the Lord's Supper and prayed in Gethsemane before His arrest; and on Friday He endured six trials before being crucified, crying out from the cross, My God, my God, why have You forsaken me.
A central theological thread running through the sermon is the rapid shift in human hearts—from welcome, to rejection, to conspiracy. The pastor uses the image of a fig tree with leaves but no fruit to warn against a religious life that is outwardly observant yet inwardly estranged from God. The sermon also teaches that hatred grows out of envy, and that once a person rejects God, their heart becomes hardened and prone to misinterpreting His Word.
In the application section, the pastor challenges the congregation with a searching question: If this were your final week on earth, what would the Lord find in your life? He points out that throughout His final week Jesus never stopped loving, forgiving, teaching, serving, and living for others—even entrusting the care of His mother to the disciple John while suffering on the cross. The sermon closes with a call to faithful service based on 1 Corinthians 15:58 and 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, emphasizing that the love of Christ must be the driving motivation for every believer's life.