Palm Sunday is an essential part of the Easter experience, of the Resurrection experience. Without this day, we wouldn't have a foretaste of the Second Coming.
Palm Sunday is a place to pause before entering into the inescapable whirlwind of Holy Week.
And there is genuine cause to celebrate, as we imagine the energy of that day. [Pause]
If we can set aside what we know of how the crowd that welcomed Jesus on this day turned on Him...put that aside, as much as we can, and witness the enthusiastic crowd that welcomes King Jesus, that seems limitless in its praise of Him, that seems, even If just for a moment, to grasp how incredibly important and beautiful and life-changing is this man who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey.
City of Peace
Jerusalem. Jeru...salem. The city on a hill. The city of peace...welcomes the Prince of Peace as He comes in peace. That's perhaps the first contradiction that we'll touch on.
The very name of the City of David represents not reality but aspiration. Jerusalem, the peace city, was never a peaceful city.
The very opposite is true. It had known little rest from conflict. It had been the feather in the cap of conquering nations, the central place of the expulsion of the People of God as they were forced to go into exile.
But somehow, Jerusalem was where the deep desire for peace, external and internal, had been named. So here the city of peace welcomes the Prince of Peace and The Lord of Glory.
Preview of Second Coming
We just watched a filmed version of the Triumphal Entry (YouTube Link). It's a joyful scene. A busy scene. A scene where hundreds flock to Christ and rejoice at His arrival in Jerusalem.
There is much clammering, much shouting. "blessed is He who comes in the name of The Lord" is the refrain of the crowd, the chorus of the mob's song of welcome to Jesus, who, it should be said, they did not understand.
No doubt some are hoping this is the sign of the inauguration of a new Jewish king who will subdue the Roman overlords.
The full lyric of their song was: “Hosanna! He who comes in the name of the Lord is the blessed One—the King of Israel!” lots of Hope and aspiration, sweat and raw energy in the crowd.
It's also a scene that frustrates the religious leaders who distrust Jesus and feel threatened by Him. They think that all their efforts to challenge and suppress Jesus, their attempts to expose Him as a fraud or a heretic have failed.
The Scripture says: "Then the Pharisees said to one another, “You see? You’ve accomplished nothing. Look—the world has gone after Him!”"
But beyond all that, something else much more important is going on here. Something that the Scribes and Pharisees, you would have thought, might have known or at least wondered about, because they were familiar with the Scriptures, the Law and the Prophets, including the minor prophet Zechariah
Zechariah had written: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious,
lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. Zechariah 9:9
Ring a bell? I think so!
The book Second Samuel was written in around the 7th century BC, 700 years or so before Jesus was born. It says this of King David: "When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever". 2 Samuel 7:12-13
This was one of many Old Testament references to the coming Messiah. Little did the Pharisees know, because it was most likely still hidden and treasured in the heart of Mary the mother of Jesus, that the Angel Gabriel had said these words about Jesus even as he announced to her that she was pregnant with the Son of God:
32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” Luke 1:32-33
So, I guess you could say the Pharisees were understandably nervous. Most of them didn’t think Jesus was the Messiah, although a few were beginning to suspect it.
The Pharisee Nicodemus had been evangelized by Jesus Himself as recorded in John chapter 3.He was leaning heavily toward Jesus.
Later, after Jesus’ death and resurrection and in the early life of the church, the pharisee Gamaliel was concerned that in opposing Jesus and His followers, the religious leaders might actually be opposing God.
Back to the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and the reason that this day, Palm Sunday is something special, something more than it appears to be.
T.D. Jakes talks about this in one of his sermons and I’ll bring to you some of his ideas about what’s going on here.
There is something dramatic going on here in the narrative of Jesus entering Jerusalem.
Not drama the way we think of it, in a common or colloquial sense, but drama in its purest definition - a re-enactment of reality, it is the imitation of life. In order for there to be an imitation of life, there has to be a reality.
And I want to suggest that Jesus sends for the colt before He goes into Jerusalem because there is about to be play, about when He will come riding into Jerusalem as the Lord of lords and the king of kings, and the real coronation will begin.
This is not that day, but it IS the day when Jesus says: “Go get the colt”. He’s going to act out what will ultimately happen.
Now the drama, an enactment of another day and another time, when they will really recognize that He is the King of kings and Lord of lords.
Jakes suggests that something is going on in Jesus’ mind. Jesus is thinking, “I’m about to make my entrance. I’ve got to have an entourage, I’ve got to have the stage set, I’ve got to have everything in place.
I’ve got to offer it to them in this realm, knowing that they are going to reject me, but I’ve still got to offer my Kingship to them, knowing that if they reject me today, there will come a day where there will not be an option.
“Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess”.
“I don’t have to have the royal diadem, nor the host of heaven, don’t bother with the 24 elders, don’t open up the clouds, don’t split the mount of Olives,
I’ll walk across this time. But let’s act it out so you can see on earth what has been done in heaven.
I told you to pray “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Let’s put this drama together.
So this simple and familiar picture of Jesus riding into Jerusalem.
On the one hand, as you’ve likely heard before, you could say that Jesus, choosing to enter the city on a donkey, a beast of burden and not of war, and a young one at that that had never been ridden.
To ride into a conquered nation or city on a horse and with the trappings of war would signify that the defeated people would be subjugated to the conquering king. That much is true and historical.
Jesus entering on a young untested colt is the way that a conquering king would sometimes ride into a city or nation after his army defeated it, in order to “come in peace” as it were.
But then there’s this other thing going on, this drama that’s enacting in a small, compressed fashion, what the Bible says is going to happen.
Jesus Himself had recently taught about the time of the end, when He will return.
Referring to Himself as the Son of Man, Jesus said: Matthew 24: 29 “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 30 Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. 31 And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.
The Apostle Paul elaborated on this in 1 Thessalonians 4: 16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words”.
So really, Palm Sunday is (not a re-enactment), but a pre-enactment on a relatively microscopic scale, of the time when our King Jesus will return, in His Second coming, to planet earth.
He will return in glory and power, and His main purpose in returning is to call all those, dead and alive, who trust in Him...to Himself.
That is exciting. That is kinda mind-blowing.
Of course trials will come. Tribulation will come. Darkness and light will battle it out.
Even still at this point in history on the original Palm Sunday, Jesus Himself has yet to go through the ugliness and contradiction and agony and slaughter of Holy Week,
but He does so knowing that on this day He enacts ahead of time his glorious Second Arrival on this planet.
Evil men have bad things in store for Jesus. We know what is to come. We know what Jesus will endure in Jerusalem. Slander, false-accusation, hatred, the abandonment of even His own closest friends and followers. He was about to lose everything, actually.
Worse, Satan is drooling over the prospect of murdering God. The devil is relishing what appears to be, and is in fact, the final days of Jesus on this planet. But Satan does this not knowing that Jesus actually came to die.
He came to bear the cross. He came to live out the suffering and judgement that we deserve for our sins. He who knew no sin WANTED to become sin for us, in order that we would become the righteousness of God.
Jesus knew this was His purpose, but we know that He didn’t find it easy. There was anxiety in Him as He approached the City of Peace.
There was the knowledge in Him that even these who welcomed Him with palm branches, with honour and praise, would quickly spin on a dime, contradict themselves, and their praises would turn to jeers,
their honour of Him to disdain, their enthusiasm for His presence among them would turn to blood lust as they would yell: “Crucify Him!”
There was fear and dread in Him as He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, asking the Father to remove His ‘cup’, to shift to plan B, as though He didn’t know that there never was a Plan B.
Jesus sweat drops of blood due to the overwhelming anxiety and fear in Him at what He was to experience in His flesh, at the sheer weighty agony that awaited Him in a few hours.
So...what do you and I do with Jesus who rides as the Prince of Peace into the City of Peace, where there has only ever been the absence of peace.
What do you and I do with Jesus who wants to make His way into our lives...our lives that crave peace, that wrestle with anxiety and fear and the absence of peace, that struggle with doubt and perhaps even sometimes a curious neutrality toward the promises of God and the love of God?
Jesus wants to give us His peace that passes understanding. He wants to impart the gift of His Holy Spirit so that we experience and live out the fruit of the Spirit, which includes the peace of God.
And what does Jesus do with the messiness of our lives? With the contradictions that we sometimes live? You know, on that first Palm Sunday, the crowds welcomed Jesus into their world on Sunday.
Starting Monday morning...not so much. And the rest of the week, less and less. Is that sometimes the cycle we find ourselves in? Do we kind of accept that for ourselves, week after week?
The city of peace, Jerusalem, was called one thing and yet in reality experienced something quite different.
We are a people of peace - Christians - literally “little christs” - but do we experience something quite different in the day-to-day.
Whatever the case may be, the reality is, the truth is, that the Lord of Glory, Jesus Christ, invites us into His peace, into His joy, into His salvation. And His offer is real.
His call in our lives is to ‘make Jeru-salem, the city of Peace’, or to allow the reality of our chosenness, our belovedness by God, our honour at bearing the name ‘Christian’ to be a real thing, a lived thing, and not ever something we aspire to on certain days of the week.
He calls us to follow Him, to deny ourselves, to take up our cross and to live lives worthy of Him...that’s a call and a challenge that has connected deeply with an enormous number of people since Jesus called His first disciples.
Those who heed the call are those who understand that following Jesus is a matter of God’s grace, not human effort. God’s riches poured out into hearts that abandon themselves to Jesus Christ.
Let me ask you, does that call connect with you? The call to go deeper. The call to more intently practicing, on a daily basis, what you call yourself, if indeed you call yourself a Christian. The call to consistently reflect the love, the kindness, the welcome and the hospitality of the Son of God, our Messiah.
May each of us choose the life of a fully-devoted follower of Jesus Christ. May we, together, affirm and agree and ‘live yes’ to what Jesus says in Matthew 5:14-16.
The message paraphrase puts it this way: “You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven”.
Amen.
