Introductory Comments
1. Palm Sunday is a joyous time. A time when we rejoice and wave our palm branches as we sing "Hosanna, Loud, Hosanna". It is the time that we welcome Jesus into our midst and we receive Him as the King of Israel and as the Saviour of our lives. We imagine what it would have felt like standing at the side of the road, just outside of Jerusalem, catching a glimpse of Jesus, as he rode by. Soon He would free us from our enemies, our struggles, our pain. Soon He would sit on His throne and bring us peace and joy forever .
2. Its fun to wave our branches and to rejoice. Its also easy - even a little child can carry a branch - its easy to hold onto and not very heavy. Who would not want to welcome Jesus and let Him ne their King. That is what the Pharisees feared as they watched the crowd. One of them even said "Look the whole world has gone after Him."
3. Their prediction comes true in the very next verse, the first verse of our passage today.
Teaching
4. There were some Greeks or Gentiles at the passover. They were either proselytes - non- Jews who had become jews or else they were seeking God and checking out the Jewish festival. But they represent the world that is going after Jesus.
2. They are not sure whether they can even approach Jesus. His ministry has been almost exclusively to the Jews. And so they approach Philip. Perhaps because He had a Greek name they felt more at ease asking Him or perhaps they just ran into Him. But they ask him "Sir, we would like to see Jesus." Perhaps they had seen Jesus riding into Jerusalem and seen the crowds naming Him their king. Perhaps they had heard about this from others. But they wanted to see Him. And not just see Him or be introduced to Him. They wanted to get to know Him. Hhere was a man on his way to power, and it does not hurt to know people in high places.
3. When Philip and Andrew tell Jesus about their desire, Jesus gives an unusual answer. He does not say whether or not He will meet with them and we are not told if they ever did. They probably did not meet with Jesus to get to know them. But His answer tells them that such a meeting would probably have done little good. They would not have been able to understand what He would tell them.
4. For the way they would get to know Jesus is by His actions and by His disciples. They would know Him not by seeing Him, lifted up on a donkey, but by seeing Him lifted up on a cross. They would know Him not by seeing people carrying palm branches, but by seeing His disciples carry their own crosses. That is the essence of that which Jesus is telling His disciples, that which he is really telling these Greeks, and that is essence of what He tells us today.
5. First, we know Jesus through His actions. The people were ready to place Jesus on a throne on Palm Sunday. They would have let Him bypass the events of that Monday through Saturday and go right to Easter Sunday. Christ would be exalted, He would establish His kingdom on Easter Sunday. But what happened between these two Sundays, these two Lord’s Days would enable us to understand Him and His kingdom.
6. Jesus talks about His actions and what would happen to Him in the coming week. He does not explain details of every event but He gives meaning to them. He makes it clear that He is talking about Himself when he says "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified." The time had come for Christ to be raised up and exalted. But later in chapter 12 Jesus would talk about this hour in a different way.
John 12:27 "Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it"
He asks His Father to save Him from this hour, because it would be an hour or time of intense, unbearable suffering. Jesus' time has come. His hour would be the events of that most holy of all weeks. The hour is the time when Christ would be exalted but first He would suffer.
7. Jesus explains that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed, But if it dies it produces many seeds. The passover week was a feast of harvest. Jesus says that unless He dies on the cross there will be no spiritual harvest.
8. Soon many of you will start planting seeds. If you keep the seeds in storage each seed will remain just that. It would be a ludicrous thing to buy seeds and keep them so taht we can keep track of them. Instead we bury them in the ground. We can’t see them. We don’t even dig them up every so often to see how they are doing. We give them over to death, as it were. And then, of course, we hope to have a bountiful harvest.
9. Christ came to bring a harvest. In John 4:35-36 he said
"Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together."
10. In order for the harvest of souls to take place Christ had to be buried. Only then could salvation take place
2 Cor 5:21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Rom 3:23-25 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.
11. Only by Christ dying was the price for our sin paid. He took our place.
Rom 4:25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.
12. Only by Christ dying are we able to be made a new creation. Only then does Holy Spirit come and reveal Christ to us.
Jer 31:33-34 "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the LORD.
13. And then we also will know the great love that Christ has for us.
Rom 5:6-8 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
14. In vs. 27, Jesus wondered if He should ask His father to save Him from this hour. But He would not, since he came to do his Father’s will and He knew He had to die if we were to have life.
15. If you want to see Jesus, to know Him, see Him dying on the cross and you will know His obedience, His love, His holiness. The Greeks would know Jesus by His actions, by that which would soon take place.
16. But Jesus tells them that they can also know Him through His disciples. In verse 25, Jesus turns from talking about Himself to talking about those who would follow Him.
17. Just as His way to glory would be through denying Himself and through giving up His life, so it is with those who follow Him. If we love this life on earth more than we love God and His glory we will loose our life. The word life in vs. 25 is two different words in Greek. The first, psyche, refers to our personality, our experiences, our achievements. The second, zo, is usually used with the word eternal and refers to the spiritual vitality that we have when we experience and know God. Eternal life is something that we experience already on earth. It mans we are aliens, foreigners whose real home is not here but with God.
18. If the things of this world and our earthly life is what is most important, we will miss out on eternal life. Life on this earth is a gift of God and Jesus is probably not saying that we must hate this gift but that eternal life and God comes first. Then we will keep it for eternal life. Jesus has already taught this:
Luke 9:23-26 Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.
19. To know Christ means to be His disciple. It means that we also must be willing to suffer for the salvation of others. It means we deny ourselves and we take up our cross daily. Its easier and more joyous to carry a palm branch than it is to carry our cross, but it is necessary to carry our cross for only then do we show we are true disciples.
20. Following Christ means denying ourselves for Him. It means seeking His will not ours. It means that we also will be raised with Christ. Jesus says "where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me." Although we will carry our cross, we too will reign with Christ.
21. I believe that Jesus is also saying here that people will know Him through His disciples, through you and me. Remembering He is still responding to the request by the Greeks to meet with Him so they might know Him. When we deny ourselves, when we carry our cross, we reveal Christ to others. When they see our love and willingness to place the needs of others before our own needs.
1 John 4:12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
22. Friends - Palm Sunday is a day to celebrate. Christ is the King of Israel, He is our Lord and King - the king of Kings. But to understand Him and to know Him and to make Him known - we need to see Him on that cross and we need to carry our own crosses.
23. Thanks be to God for His Son, our Lord!
