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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this morning is the Gospel reading regarding Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. You may be seated. I could say amen and let you ponder what you heard with your ears and saw with your eyes to get the sermon. I hope you heard it and saw it because it was right in your face, especially for you sitting right there and right there. The same children singing Hosanna to the Son of David are the same children that said, “It is I who crucified you, O Lord Jesus. It is I who crucified you.” Amen. Meditate on that.
Palm Sunday is that kind of a dichotomy, contradiction all around. You have these crowds gathered to shout Alleluia at the top of their voices, and yet you know the story. In a matter of days, most of those crowded people cry out to this man and say, “Crucify, crucify Him.” That’s almost contradictory, just as you heard from the children’s lips. The text is about some contradictions as well that I want to point out.
Very interesting about what John wrote in his gospel account of Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem. When Jesus enters Jerusalem, it is as if the king or the owner of the house has come home. Half of the people that greet Him greet Him as He is, the King of Israel. In faith, do some of the crowd and in faith do some of the Pharisees greet and receive Christ as the King, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ. But the divided house unto which the King came home was also many of the crowd, and many of the Pharisees are the ones who say what the Pharisees said in the text… “The whole world is going after him. We’ve got to do something about him.” And they did. And they were glad, not in the same way that you’re thankful he died, but in a totally different way, aren’t they?
Palm Sunday is about these opposing things that are happening at the selfsame time. But it is what is said about the crowd by John that’s the interesting aspect to talk about this morning. This understanding and not understanding. As you read the text, as you read it slowly, you’ll notice that there are two crowds. There is a crowd with Jesus in Bethany, about two miles away. They’re the crowd that had seen Jesus raise a certain Lazarus from the dead, remember? Whose sisters are Mary and Martha. This crowd was a crowd of believers because it talked about them bearing witness to what they had seen and heard.
There’s another crowd that meets Jesus in this other crowd in the middle somewhere. They’re the crowd from Jerusalem who had heard about all of this but wanted to see it, and they meet in the middle, and then the whole group comes in bearing palm branches, giving him a king’s entrance. But you know that, as the definition of king has many different meanings. Most of those people saw Jesus being the powerful king, like a Rambo, coming in to kick out all the bad guys of the Romans so that they could worship freely and that they would be finally a world power again. The other king, understanding, is the king who comes home only to do one thing: to die for the people.
This king comes home to his house to die for the people, and that’s all. The text said, “His disciples did not understand these things.” Meaning, His disciples, that is the twelve who have been with Him for three years, and other men and women who believed in Him. Some had been with Him for almost three years. Others had been with Him only for a few weeks or months. They all were disciples. They all were believers. They did not understand these things.
What are these things that the text is talking about that they didn’t understand by faith? It’s not, “Why did he come on a donkey, the colt of a donkey? Why did he come in like that?” That’s not what they didn’t understand, or the “these things.” The “these things” that they did not understand is that they acknowledge Him to be the Messiah. They believe in Him as the Christ. But the part that still sticks there is that this Christ or this Messiah has to sacrifice himself on the cross. And we are the ones, as the children sang to you, who killed Jesus. That’s the things that they didn’t understand.
And I ask you, how well do you understand that concept? We cannot think that, oh boy, they don’t get it. We’ve got the full revelation of Christ in the New Testament and we struggle with it. See, your and my problem is that we think that if we could have the pitch to sell, everybody would always respond in faith to Jesus. I wish I had that. I wish I had that. But I can tell you many people who I told about Jesus looked at me as if I had horns coming out of my head and politely said, “Thank you, but no thank you.” But Satan is prodding, saying, “You need to say it a certain way. You need to use the right words. You need to cloak it and say it the right way. Then they’ll come to faith.” How’s that working for you? Same? Same way, huh? Well, don’t worry. God in the flesh spoke the exact words that God wanted to be spoken in the flesh, and God in the flesh was rejected. So we’re in good company, aren’t we?
The point that’s being made today says, “And the people that bore witness were introverts and extroverts. And the people that bore witness were shy and people-oriented. And the people that bore witness in that crowd were stutterers and eloquent of speech. And the people that bore witness in that crowd were slovenly and svelte at the same time.”
How dare we tell God how His message is to be delivered by His people? You are His people. He’s called you to be the messenger, to bear witness to that which you have seen and heard. Whether we are all of those things or not, the people that bore witness from that crowd were all of those things and far more examples than I’m giving you. And they were not concerned about what would happen. They just bore witness.
You’ve been called by the same gospel, in the same one Lord Jesus Christ, the name above every name, by which everyone shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth. This one true faith in which we have been baptized points to only one truth, and we bear witness to that truth.
So here’s an example. Never would it ever be said that any one of you would say, “No way, pastor,” if I said to you, “Do you believe in the forgiveness of sins?” Every one of us would shout, “Yes!” If you do believe in the forgiveness of sins, tell yourself how that faith in the forgiveness of sins, your forgiveness of your sins, shaped how you talk to other people. How has your forgiveness of your sins shaped how you treat and talk to your spouse? You believe in it, right? Absolutely. How has it shaped and identified your identity as a forgiven sinner? And how has that shaped how you deal with your children? They with you. Accountability, one to the other.
See, then forgiveness is no longer an abstraction, is it? It’s much more concrete. And it has shaped your heart. You are identified by it. Put your finger on it. That’s called meditating on God’s Word. All of us will not deny that we believe in the eternal salvation that Christ has given to us. No one’s going to say no to that either. How does heaven shape how you deal with money if you believe in it? And I know you do. How does it shape how you handle money given and money received? How does it shape how you serve someone else or not? How does it shape how you speak of someone else or not?
If you believe in eternal life, and I do and you do, it’s no longer an abstraction. It is sitting in your and my craw. And we’ve got to digest it. This is the paradox of Palm Sunday. We can at one moment cry, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” and we can at one moment cry, “I crucify Thee.” And then we can act like we have never been forgiven and do not have eternal life to inherit.
If I say to you, “Do you believe you’ve been saved from sin, from death, and from the power of the devil?” all of you are going to shout amen to that. How does being saved from sin and from eternal death and from the devil shape how you treat one another? About the words that flow from your lips. About the actions that you want to claim. Do you see the paradox of Palm Sunday?
These things of which we speak are not abstract things. They are what identifies our I-person as a God’s child. And it looks like, in my heart, you struggle with that just like I do. And there’s a difference between the two, isn’t there? Our faith says one thing and our reason says another. We’re like the disciples. We did not understand these things and what they mean to us and for us.
In fact, those prepositions are what I want you to consider. If Christ did these things, what does it mean that He did them to you? That’s a preposition, “to.” He did them to all, but what does it mean that He did them to you? How does that change you? How does that make you different? How is that your identity that you will not let go?
The Coptic Christians who are looking at the mess that was made of their church and the scattered body parts and pieces of flesh scattered within their church could turn their back and say, “You know where, do what we want to go because this whole Christian faith is crazy.” But they don’t. And they’ll die just like their brothers and sisters will die if need be. How is that a part of your fiber, of your identity?
What are you willing to let go of and give up because of the forgiveness of sins, of salvation from sin, death, and the devil, of eternal life being yours? It’s not a matter of giving up; it’s also a matter of giving, putting forth, rather than expecting from someone else. It’s not just what Jesus did to you. The other preposition is what did Jesus do for you? Especially those things that you and I know we cannot do for ourselves.
But the one that amazes me the most… what has Christ done with you? That’s the only thing really you can talk about. What has He done with you? He has allowed you to prosper and be blessed and He has put you on your knees, hasn’t He? He has lifted you up from the miry pit and elevated you and exalted you and He has crushed you. And it’s the same God whom the children sang, “I crucified Thee.” That’s the kind of God in the flesh who saves you. That’s the one that we can only bear witness to.
What He’s done to us, for us, and with us. How you bear witness is your story. How I bear witness is my story, but it’s the story about the same Jesus Christ who did many of the same things to us and for us and with us. Jesus has come home to His house today. And eventually he’ll close the door to his house, won’t he? And many will be outside saying, “Lord, Lord, don’t you not remember us? We were with you in the streets.” And he will say, “Depart from me, I never have heard of you.”
He’s not going to say that to you, will he? That’s something to bear witness about, isn’t it? That you won’t hear those words. You will hear rather, “Welcome, come. And to the treasure and the paradise reserved for you.” For what did Jesus say? “But my Father has a mansion, and in it, He has many rooms and I go to prepare a place for you.” That’s what you’ll hear.
That’s what we bear witness about to other people in how we treat them, in how we love them, in how we serve them, and how we receive their treatment of us. And how we give them grace when they’re not always on their best game. And how we keep our expectations of them within godly reason and not sinfully ungodly reason of expectations. Because only one expectation was given. And do you know what? He fulfilled that expectation. He died and was damned that you fulfill all of the Father’s expectations in Christ.
In the name of Jesus, amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
