Palm Sunday: Looking for the Messiah in All the Wrong Places

Sermon delivered on Palm Sunday, March 24, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Isaiah 50.4-9a; Psalm 31.9-16; Philippians 2.5-11; Luke 22.14-23.56.

As we enter the most sacred week of the Christian calendar, it is an appropriate time for us to pause and take stock of what God has done for us in Jesus. It is important for us to not be in a hurry to get to the great Easter celebration and so we need to reflect on the terrible cost of God’s great love for us in Jesus. One way to do that is to ask why the crowds turned on Jesus. Why did they hail him as the Lord’s Messiah on Sunday and shout for his crucifixion on Friday?

When Jesus entered Jerusalem, he never explicitly announced that he was Israel’s Messiah. Instead, and consistent with his previous modus operandi, he announced his messiahship through his actions and symbols. When you are living in occupied territory, it is a dangerous thing to come right out and announce your intentions, and Jesus understood this all too well. If you understand this dynamic, by the way, it will also help you better understand Jesus’ ministry in which he often taught in parables and/or acted out prophetic announcements in public and then later explained their meaning in private to his disciples (cf., e.g., Mark 4.1-20).

And the crowds, both those who supported Jesus and those who opposed him, would have understood his symbolic actions. When he chose to enter Jerusalem on a donkey right before the great Passover celebration that marked Israel’s defining moment when God delivered his people from their bondage to slavery in Egypt, the crowd that followed Jesus would have understood that he was enacting the prophecy about the returning King found in Zechariah 9.9, part of the prophetic book that generally addressed God’s unfulfilled promise to return and live among his people. The crowd showed their understanding of Jesus’ prophetic reenactment by waving palm branches to symbolically convey the notion of victory over Israel’s enemies and reciting a passage from Psalm 118.1-29, a psalm that celebrates God’s rescue of his people.

And while there were diverse opinions about what God’s Messiah would do when he came, generally speaking most first-century Jews expected the Messiah to do two things: First, to expel Israel’s enemies and establish God’s righteous rule, and second, to cleanse the Temple. This helps us to understand what the crowd expected Jesus to do as he approached Jerusalem that day and why they would later turn on him. Jesus’ followers surely expected him to be a conquering Messiah who would rid their land of the hated Romans. They were still operating under a shock and awe conception of God, where God would be present to his people like he was in the pillars of cloud and fire in the desert, the kind of God who would deliver his people in dramatic fashion as he had done at the Red Sea and then annihilated Israel’s enemies who pursued them. And when Jesus failed to deliver in the manner the crowds expected of God’s Messiah, they were quick to turn on him. Sadly, I suspect that many, if not most, Christians today have the same conception of God. We want a God who is powerful and who will take no prisoners, a God who will rid his world of evil and evil-doers in a dramatic and spectacular fashion, making the latter drink to the dregs his terrible cup of wrath—provided, of course, we are not on that list of evil-doers. We, like Jesus’ contemporaries, much prefer the God of shock and awe, the God of Mount Sinai and the Red Sea. The God of the cross? Not so much.

But Jesus would have none of that. He did indeed come as God’s Messiah. He did indeed come to rescue God’s people Israel and through them the rest of the world. But he would not use pagan means to do so because that would mean his mission was defeated before it ever got started. It is impossible to be God’s light and salt to the world when you act just like those you have come to redeem. No, Jesus would come to rescue us from a greater slavery than political ideology or military occupation. He would come in the fashion of the suffering servant contained in our OT lesson and echoed in our epistle lesson this morning. He would come in great love and humility and pour out his very blood for us and for the world to free us from our slavery to sin and death. This means we no longer have to fear death or God’s righteous judgment on us because our sins are covered by the blood of the Lamb shed for us. It means we are freed to become the fully human creatures God created us to be and to be his salt and light to his broken and fallen world to announce to others that evil, sin, and death have been conquered and that there is no longer any reason to live in fear of anything because God himself has overcome all that can really ever harm us. To be sure, evil is not fully vanquished. However, we do not fear because by faith we know that in Jesus, God has overcome evil and death.

But important as our salvation is, it is only one part of God’s plan of redemption because God plans to redeem and restore his fallen creation as well (cf. Romans 8.18-30). From the very beginning God has remained faithful to his fallen world and broken people and we are saved so that we can be the wise stewards God always intended us to be to watch over God’s new creation that Jesus’ resurrection proclaimed on that first Easter Sunday and which will be fully consummated when our Lord comes again.

But that is a story that must wait and we must not be too eager to get to the great Easter celebration before we stop and consider how terribly costly our salvation and the redemption of God’s world is to God. And so this morning I invite you to be fully invested in the story of your redemption this week. Come to table with Jesus on Thursday and listen as he proclaims the meaning of his impending suffering and death. “This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you.” Follow our Lord to Gethsemane and watch as he agonizes over the prospect of taking all the evil and sins of the world on himself so that we will be spared God’s terrible wrath. Given the countless stories of courageous Christian martyrs who gladly suffered death for the sake of their Lord, this is the only reasonable explanation of Jesus’ agony in the garden. We can hardly bear the weight of our own sins let alone the weight of the world’s as well as the evil of the powers and principalities arrayed against us. No wonder Jesus sweat blood that dark night as he contemplated what he must do for us!

Then on Friday, come to the stations of the cross and stay for the Good Friday liturgy where you can stand with our Lord as he faces relentless questioning and abuse from the Jewish authorities and then Pilate and the Romans. Recoil in horror at the massive injustice you are witnessing and the terrible scourging that Jesus endures for you. Weep with the women at Calvary as you behold the spectacle of Jesus’ naked and pierced body hanging on a cross so that you might not have to live in fear of death or God’s judgment on your sins. Shudder as you listen to his cry of dereliction as he experiences the God-forsakenness that must inevitably accompany his bearing of our sins and all the world’s evil, and weep with sorrow as you see his dead body taken down from the cross and buried in a newly hewn tomb. “This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you.” And then come to the great Easter Vigil on Saturday where you watch in sorrow at the tomb and listen to God’s story of redemption for his world and us, unworthy as we are. Then be prepared for the most unexpected thing. The great shout of acclamation! He is not here! He is risen! If you do not participate in the events of the Holy Triduum (Maundy Thursday-Holy Saturday), you will certainly miss why we must celebrate Easter so wildly and joyously.

In the meantime, this week if you want to learn more fully what it means to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus, try this exercise. Pray through our Psalm lesson this morning (Psalm 31.9-16) each day, but don’t be in a hurry to get to verses 14ff. Instead, focus on verses 9-13. Be honest with yourself and admit that there are real and terrible problems in God’s good but fallen world and in the lives of his people and of people everywhere. Then identify people who are being afflicted by the kinds of trials identified in this psalm—physical ordeals, overwhelming sadness, loneliness, and a sense of utter abandonment—and then ask Jesus to help you pray for those people this week and to bear their pain with them. As you pray in the power of the Spirit, and as you begin feel the awful hurt and the pain of the people for whom you pray, only then come to verses 14ff. Doing so will help you better understand part of what Jesus is calling you to do as his followers who take up their cross. We do that often in prayer. Remember too that Jesus died to ultimately redeem the awful hurt and pain and evil, as well as the people, for whom you are praying so that even if your prayers are not fully addressed in your mortal lifetime or in ways you completely understand, the hurts and the sorrows and the evil have been dealt with on the cross so that you can live with hope, expectation, and thanksgiving, even in the midst of all that can go wrong in the world. “This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you.” Doing so will not only help you prepare for the great Easter celebration next Sunday, but by the power of the Spirit, you will also know you have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.