THE PRESIDENT'S MOTORCADE
Whenever the President of the United States visits a city, a well-oiled security machine begins to roll into high gear as White House staff, Secret Service personnel, and local and state law enforcement scramble to make sure everything is in place long before the visit.(1) Up to three months before the President’s visit, secret service agents begin checking local routes for safe points of entry and egress, for possible blockages or problems, for blind spots, and high vantage points which all may pose a risk. Then, local police are notified of people who have proved to be security threats in the past that live in the area, and these people are actually warned that they will be watched closely while the President visits.
After this, as the date of his visit gets closer, agents begin to bring in bomb sniffing dogs and equipment, to check parked cars, potential stops along the route, and to set up canopies wherever the President might leave his heavily armored limousine, nicknamed “the Beast,” to ensure that he isn’t exposed to lines of sight from above. Next, they send coordinators and agents to every hospital in the immediate area to ensure facilities are readily available and that the President is no more than 10 minutes away from a trauma hospital at any given time. And finally, as Air Force One, the almost universally recognizable presidential plane arrives; another, almost identical plane lands at a secret location in case the primary aircraft becomes disabled.
Then, the morning of the Presidential visit, highways and local roads are shut down to ensure the 20 vehicle motorcade is able to advance unimpeded. If the President is visiting a hotel, they clear the first three floors of the building and remove all electronics on those floors to prevent foreign agents from listening in on confidential conversations. Agents ensure he enters and exits from an unexpected entrance each time. As the motorcade travels between locations, hundreds of heavily armed law enforcement and secret service agents travel with him the entire way. Even medics are on hand with supplies of blood in case he needs a transfusion. Nothing is left to chance and every risk is considered and mitigated to its barest minimum.
All of these preparations can cost local governments $90,000 or more for a single visit, and the Federal government even more, sometimes up to $3 million if the city being visited is next to a coastal waterway that also has to be secured.(2)(3) All of this doesn’t include the many hours and months White House staff spend to develop itineraries, coordinate with local interest groups and politicians, and write speeches in advance of the event. It can be almost mind-boggling how much preparation goes into a single visit which might get a brief sound bite on the local news, and barely a notice to all but the most astute political observers.
And yet, these preparations also serve a greater strategic purpose than simply ensuring the safety of the leader of the free world. They are certainly essential to that end, but perhaps more importantly, they serve to project the power of the President and the country he represents, the United States. You will rarely find a more impressive sight in the modern world than 20 black vehicles traveling down a roadway carrying hundreds of armed men, Naval and Coast Guard vessels patrolling the nearby waterways, and Army helicopters patrolling overhead with Air Force fighter jets ready for a fight at a moment’s notice. The President of the United States can visit the most war-torn country on the planet in complete safety, and our Armed Forces stand ready to fight up to three full-scale wars simultaneously, anywhere on the globe.
This projection of military might is what political scientists call “hard power.” Both “hard power” and “soft power” (the use of humanitarian aid and development projects to make friends), are meant to demonstrate the United States’ capabilities to foreign powers who may be tempted to act in ways counter to our interests. Generally, the United States doesn’t flex its foreign policy muscles just to spend money (or at least we hope!) and it generally does not assist foreign nations just to be nice. Every act is weighed in the calculus of power, with the considerations and desires of the powerful first in mind.
ANCIENT POWER PROJECTION
The concept of hard power projection was not foreign to the rulers of the ancient world. Though they may have had different terminology, the language of power was one which they could all speak. This was true of the Roman powers which ruled over almost the entire Western world at the time of Jesus, and it was true of the regional powers over Judea and the local powers in Jerusalem. In fact, one act that originally was supposed to be an act of devotion on the part of the Judean king Herod Antipas, but which became an act of power projection, was his procession into the city of Jerusalem at the beginning of the feast of Passover through the eastern gate each year.(4) This procession was designed to strike awe in the throngs of pilgrims who filled the city to the brim to celebrate the festival.
The king would ride a mighty war horse, armor polished to gleam in the sunlight, with an escort of over a hundred armed soldiers and his most powerful nobles. It was like a yearly, mini-invasion of the city. The presence of Roman soldiers and his reception by Pilate guaranteed that everyone knew who the power really was behind the throne, but for that one day every year, the king was the center of the city’s attention. Since the city of Jerusalem was the heart of the nation from whom pilgrims were gathered, the king was the center of attention for the nation as well. As he entered, he would be greeted with the words the pilgrims sang to each other and with which the priests blessed them, from Ps. 118:26,
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! We bless you from the house of the Lord.”(5)
Before the Babylonian exile, this psalm was an enthronement psalm, sung to praise God for giving the people a righteous and just king.(6) But we know from the Gospels that Herod Antipas was far from righteous or just. What was supposed to be a festival of praise for the deliverance from Egypt which God accomplished, and all the acts of deliverance since, had become a crass display of power for the Judean King and his Roman overlords. The nobles, religious leaders, and Roman officials all lived in a razor’s edge, ever wary of palace intrigue or threats to their power from popular upstarts.
THE TRUE KING RETURNS
It was into this precarious political situation Jesus decides to enter in Luke 19. For the past several weeks of our series, he has been inexorably marching closer and closer to Jerusalem. Jesus knew exactly the danger that he was walking into. In fact, during his visit at the same time the year before, some of the Pharisees warned him in ch. 13 that Herod had heard about the throngs he was attracting with his teaching and manifestations of power, and he responded to them in vv. 32-35,
“Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless, I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following, for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.’ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! Behold, your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”
In ch. 13, Jesus left Jerusalem because it wasn’t yet the time for his final display of power over death and sin itself, but before he does, he expresses the deepest longings of his heart: that the people of the city named, “Foundation of Peace,” would with all their heart turn from their unjust ways and toward the true foundation of peace.(7)
THE MOST IMPORTANT DONKEY IN THE WORLD
It is to this desire that Jesus’ thoughts return as he enters Jerusalem for the final time in ch. 19. This time, he doesn’t enter the city with a rag-tag band of disciples only to leave quietly again. This time he makes preparations, and though it may not seem immediately evident to us, these preparations are even more extensive than those the President of the United States receives today. Intentionally fulfilling the prophecy of Zech. 9:9, where it says,
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
Jesus tells two of his disciples to go ahead of him, where they will find what translations call a “colt,” but which the Greek can mean the young of many different animals, and which was probably a donkey’s foal, tied up.(8) V. 30 makes it clear that no one has ever ridden this colt. Think about that for a moment. Its owners likely had other plans for the animal. Maybe they intended to sell it when it was old enough to work, or maybe they intended to use it themselves, but they had no idea that from the moment of its birth it had been set aside for a very special purpose. Something so mundane as a donkey has suddenly become one of the central characters in the greatest, most important chapter of human history! It was raised for no other purpose than this: to carry the King of the entire Cosmos on its back!
How often do we get bored with our every day work? With the mundane? How many of you have realized that what you do today, tomorrow, this week, may in fact be playing an essential part in God’s saving work? Some acts of service for the Kingdom may seem more glamorous than others, may receive more attention than others, but all are just as essential. Every member of the gospel team is just as important as every other.
As a pastor, I stand up here every week and all of you know my name. But Patti Heal, who has been helping in the office is just as essential to God’s work in our community as I am. Every volunteer who brought food for the homeless shelter, every family who cleans the church every week, our worship leaders Mark Madsen and JanElle Hoffman, Rollie Rogers who restored the copper writing on our cross outside, Harvey Baker who led worship this morning, and anyone else who I missed, every single person in this congregation this morning, is an important part of God’s saving work in Cortez and in the world.
THE CITY REJECTS REAL PEACE
And so was this donkey this donkey which Jesus had chosen to ride into Jerusalem. Back in the days before the Babylonian Exile, Israelite kings rode horses into war and donkeys in times of peace, and it’s this message of peace which Jesus brings to Jerusalem now.(9) Where Herod’s message of domination by force was clearly communicated by his own entry under armed guard into the city; Jesus entry is marked with the singing of what scripture says is a “multitude of his disciples.” Hundreds, even thousands are caught up in the moment. They throw cloaks onto the rode in front of him, in an ancient gesture going back to the kings of Israel, when the people would throw their cloaks on the ground so that he wouldn’t have to walk on the bare dirt.(10) Those who don’t have cloaks don’t want to be left out, and they begin stripping the surrounding trees bear of palm fronds to lay in front of him. These fronds were symbols of celebration, especially during the festival of Sukkot,(11) and the crowds eagerly wave them in the air, singing the words of that old enthronement Psalm 118, but this time including v. 25 as well as 26,
“Save us, we pray, O Lord!
O Lord, we pray, give us success!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
We bless you from the house of the Lord.”
“Save us!” they shout. “Hosanna” they cry! “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” they shout, echoing the proclamation of the angels at Jesus’ birth. But Jesus knows the depths of their hearts. And in this moment of triumphant entry, he is overcome by a deep sadness. His desires haven’t changed since ch. 13. He still longs for the day when the city would turn from its sin, from its wickedness and embrace the only true hope for peace, from which the city takes its name.
But Jesus knows they won’t. In v. 41, he begins to weep over the city and he cries out, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
These words would be fulfilled just 35 years later, when the Romans under whom the nobles and king of Judea sought protection, would build ramparts around the city, starve it into submission, and massacre its inhabitants, completely razing the city and its magnificent temple to the ground. This would happen because the people of the city, and therefore the nation itself, refused to repent of their unjust practices and all the ways they had rebelled against God, trusting in the powers of men instead. When they finally were fed up with Roman rule, they trusted in the strength of their own arms to try to overthrow them, and were crushed because of it.
I wonder what the multitude of disciples must have thought at this sudden outburst. At this cry of mourning in the midst of celebration and triumph. In barely a week, every one of those disciples would either lose interest, or would run in fear, when He is betrayed and arrested. In barely a week, some of them would be crying out for his crucifixion and the release of a murderer instead. In barely a week, their attention would be grabbed by the next great spectacle, and he would be all but forgotten by some of them.
OUR CALL TO REPENTENCE
And yet, this entry into the city truly does mark the beginning of His triumph. In the coming week we will celebrate Good Friday and Easter, when Jesus’ final showdown with sin and death would be completed. It marks his final steps toward the sacrifice which redeemed us all. But for many today, maybe even some of us here this morning, we are oblivious to our need for repentance, oblivious to the coming Judgment waiting for all who refuse to turn to the true King of Peace for help. Maybe we think we are strong enough to face our problems ourselves. The people of Jerusalem sure thought they were strong enough to overthrow the Romans themselves, and look where that got them.
Jesus is the true King of Peace, and he is the only source of real peace we can ever hope for in this life. People try to find peace many ways: through their family, through work, sometimes even through alcohol and drugs. They may try to escape the dreariness or conflict in their lives through entertainment, through the little screens we all carry in our pockets. But in the end, none of these are an adequate substitute. None of these will bring the kind of deep, lasting peace Jesus provides.
So this morning, I want everyone to look at the palms in their hands. If you didn’t get one yet, grab one on the way out. Let it be a reminder of our celebration of the returning King in triumph! But let it also be a reminder of how easy it is to forget the sacrifice, the call to repentance, the depth of Jesus’ desire for our salvation as we get wrapped up in the concerns of every day life. If you haven’t yet, take this opportunity to return to Jesus. You can pray right there in your pew, you can pray at home, you can pray in the car, no matter where you are; Jesus is ready to receive you with open arms! There is nothing more he desires than to see his people turn to Him and be saved.
FOOTNOTES
(1) The following details of a Presidential Visit are pulled from Jess Bolluyt’s “When Donald Trump Travels, This Is How the Secret Service Keeps Him Safe,” on Showbiz Cheatsheet. Published Nov. 28, 2018. Web.
(2) Duluth News Tribune. “Presidential visit price tag nearly $90,000: City, county bear financial costs for Trump’s recent trip to Duluth.” Published June 30, 2018. Web.
(3) Naylor, Brian. “Government Watchdog: Trump's Trips To Florida Costing Taxpayers Millions,” on National Public Radio. Published Feb. 05, 2019. Web.
(4) “Annotations,” in The Wesley Study Bible. Ed. by Joel B. Green. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009), 1273-74.
(5) Unless otherwise noted, all scripture is from the ESV.
(6) Liefeld, Water L. and David W. Pao. “Luke,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Revised Ed. Vol. 10. Ed. by
Tremper Longman III & David E. Garland. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007, 291.
(7) Allen, Joseph, et. al. “Annotations” in The Orthodox Study Bible (Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 2008), 1405.
(8) Gilmour, S. MacLean. “Exegesis, Luke,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 8. Ed. By George A. Buttrick,
et. al. Nashville, TN: Addington-Cokesbury Press, 1952, 336.
(9) “Annotations,” Wesley Study Bible, 1273-74.
(10) Liefeld & Pao, 291.
(11) Allen, 1309.
Delivered Palm Sunday, April 14, 2019 - Cortez (CO) Church of the Nazarene.
