Great, Greater, Greatest (Pam Sunday 2025) Series

[Grateful for Skip Heitzig at Calvary Church Albuquerque for this outline]

Good morning church! Please open your Bibles to John 12

Today is Palm Sunday, the start of what Christians all over the world call Holy week. It’s amazing when you look at the gospels how much attention was given to this one week. Look at it this way: there are a total of 89 chapters in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Only four chapters say anything at all about Jesus’ birth or childhood.

Nothing is said about Jesus’ life from age 12-30.

So 85 chapters that speak of the last 3 1/2 years of Jesus life,

and of those 85 chapters, 29 of them are about the final week of Jesus’ life!

So I would argue that in terms of how it has shaped world history, there’s no week more significant than Holy Week (except maybe the six days God created the world. That one was pretty great too!)

[Talk about devotional]

So let’s see how this week started. Read with me John 12:12-19.

[Read]

[Pray]

We’ve been in a series called “Greater Love.”

We shared about the Great Love God the Father has given to us that we should be called His children (1 John 3:1).

We celebrated and continue to celebrate Great Transformation as we’ve welcomed new Christians to the banquet Table.

We talked about how there is greater satisfaction to be found in a relationship with Jesus than with anything else in the world.

This Friday we will meet on the hill as a church family and reflect on “Good Friday.” I kind of wish it was called “Great Friday,” or at least “Greater Friday,” because this is the day we saw Jesus put into practice what He said to His disciples in John 15:13, where Jesus declared “Greater Love has no one than this: that He lay down His life for His friends.”

So for weeks now we’ve been thinking about superlatives— what’s great, what’s greater, what’s the greatest. Or what’s good, what’s better, what’s best.

When I was in elementary school, one of my teachers—- can’t remember which one— had a poster on her wall that said, “Good, better, best, and don’t ever rest, till your good becomes better and your better is best.”

So the first contrast we are going to make is that Jesus is better than religion.

Let me just set the context of Palm Sunday for you. This was all happening during Passover week.

This is an incredibly religious context. Jerusalem is considered the most religious city on earth. The Jews are among the most religious people on earth. And Passover is most important religious feast in Judaism. God’s law required that every able-bodied Jewish man and his family to come to Jerusalem for Passover. So while the normal population of Jerusalem was somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people on a normal day, on Passover, the city swelled to at as much as 10 times that.

The timeline of the gospel of John indicates that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the 10th day of the month of Nissan. I know the month of Nissan sounds like a sales event at a car dealership, but its not. Its actually a month on the Jewish calendar. On the 10th day of Nissan, Jewish families selected the lamb they would sacrifice in a few days on Passover. Remember how John the Baptist introduced Jesus way back in John 1:29?

29 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

So on the 10th of Nissan, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world comes into the city of Jerusalem. We read in verse John 12:13 that “the crowd took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!”

You know, as big a deal as Passover was, I wonder if it ever became routine. And every year it was the same. Families would travel the same roads. They would travel with the same families. They would sing the same songs, practice the same rituals, and say the same prayers on those roads.

It’s sort of the same thing for us with Christmas. We have to constantly remind ourselves why we do it— Jesus is the reason for the season. Otherwise, it starts to feel like a rut.

And at this point in history the Jewish people were ready for a change. For thousands of years they anticipated a Messiah would come. And those Messianic expectations were at an all-time high at the time of Jesus. They wanted more than the rituals and rules and repetitive prayers of Judaism.