Palm Sunday 23

Palm Sunday 4-2-23

Good morning One River,

Today is Palm Sunday and it marks the day on the Christian Calendar where Jesus makes his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. He’s King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We sing Hoshana, Hoshana in the Highest. This is, in its original form, God Save Us. It’s a desperate cry for help. We read that Jesus tells us that the very stones will cry out if others remain silent.

As we see Jesus come to the beginning of his final acts on Earth in this most Holy of Weeks. Most of the readers or hearers of these gospels are left with questions. Did the followers of Jesus truly know who he was? If not, when did they figure it out. We spoke briefly last week about the fact that Jesus, in his time on earth did all kinds of things, so the stuff he did that made it into scripture we should really pay attention to.

I don’t know if you all have noticed this before, but the Gospels seem to take about half their space explaining the first three years of Jesus ministry. Two have brief accounts of Jesus birth and John has a sort of Heavenly pre-birth account. Mark says nothing at all about Jesus’ birth. But in all four Gospels around the halfway mark everything slows down. We spend the remainder of each gospel on Holy week and the short time Jesus was on earth after his death. This would have been, and still is, a huge glowing sign to the reader. Pay attention! This is the important part. This week marks the beginning of “The important part”!

Last week we saw Lazarus raised from the dead. In part, and amongst other things, it was Jesus way of cleaning up the priesthood. The Gospel of John is a little chronologically disjointed from the other gospels, but right after Lazarus is most likely when this Triumphant entry would have taken place.

We’re going to jump back to the Gospel of Matthew for one of today's readings.

As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.”

This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet:

“Say to Daughter Zion, ‘See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’ ”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest heaven!” When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, “Who is this?” The crowds answered, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.”

This is one of the shorter tellings of the story, but the details are important. Some of this material you may have heard from me last year, but it bears repeating.

Jesus sends out the boys to get him a donkey. On its face this may seem a little odd. We’ve now been following Jesus for the better part of three years and this guy has always walked, everywhere. Last week we saw that he was in Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem about two miles away. Ok, so maybe let’s take a donkey for a brisk two mile ride. But no. Jesus waits until he’s at the Mount of Olives. This is less than half a mile from the front gates of Jerusalem.

Why would he need a donkey for the last, and shortest stretch we’ve seen him cover in scripture? Well…maybe it wasn’t a physical need.

This is another miraculous story of Jesus’ redemption for all of humanity. The first thing Jesus does is to tell the disciples to go get him a donkey. And wonders never cease, this is one of the few times they followed orders with no questions or interjections. Why was that?

Jesus is getting ready to tell us the biblical redemption story. It starts in the Garden with Adam and walks through scripture until this exact point in history and plays out into the future. Jesus tells the boys to go get the donkey, and in a reversal of Adam and Eve in the Garden, they obeyed. It was a much simpler and finite task, but they were able to successfully carry it out. Eden has been redeemed in this one act of obedience.

Now, if we were good Jews, we’d know that Zec the prophet had a poem about the incoming king of Zion. The King of Kings. He would come in riding a donkey and a colt.

If you’re familiar with the term Gospel and how this all worked, you’d know that Gospels are the announcement of conquering kings. The incoming tyrant would show up on the best and most beautiful white stallion in freshly polished battle armor, in the company of his entire army, to announce to his new conquest that he was their ruler and things would be better under that rule. Which it almost never was.

Despite the prophecy that Israel’s new king was coming in on a donkey and colt, and that Zec explained he would be a king of Peace. The Jews were convinced that this was a sign they’d be getting a military conqueror.

This is the Triumphant Entry that Jesus followers were preparing for. They cut the palm branches and laid them on the ground along with their cloaks. The text is explicit that they saw Jesus as a prophet. It is under that belief, of the militaristic conqueror that the people were looking to Jesus to set them free.

Which may explain how in such a short time, less than a week, they had completely reversed course and were ready to crucify him.

However, the clues to our Lord’s true entry are in the text. Why the donkey? The donkey signifies the people of Israel saddled with the burden of the wait of the Mosaic Law. A law they were incapable of fulfilling, or in this case, carrying. The colt, Jesus would have switched to right at the entrance to the gates of Jerusalem. This represented the Gentiles entry into the birthing Christian faith.

The donkey would have carried him down the steep decline of the Mount of Olives and up the steep incline to the Jerusalem gates. This represents the years of burden the Jews were saddled with the weight of the law. It represents the Jewish people with all their ups and downs. They were drawn nearer to God, only to again fall away and need to begin the journey again. But the colt, represents the gentiles that would be added to the fold, they would navigate the smooth path into the city. A relatively flat path. Their journey, our journey is much easier thanks to God’s mercy and sacrifice than our Jewish forefathers.

The donkey should have also been a clue that Jesus was not going to be the Christus Victor that the Jews were looking for. Nothing could be less representative of a conquering king, than riding in on a donkey. The working animal of the day. Nothing is more representative of the apolitical, nonhierarchical, working man’s mode of transportation and commerce.

Horses were a privilege of the aristocracy. The common person would not have had a horse, they were reserved for the rich and the military.

Jesus, riding in on a donkey and a colt, tells us the whole story of humanity. It tells us the story of the Judeo-Christian faith. We started, after the fall, with a great burden. But because of Jesus, that burden was lifted.

In this Triumphant entry, Jesus has redeemed the Eden poem and told the entire story of Jewish history, a law burdened people, that at his death in Jerusalem would switch to an easier burden.

“Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.” Mat 11:29

Now, make no mistake. I don’t think for a second Jesus’ followers, at the time had any idea what this meant. I think Jesus was playing 3D chess again. This entry was more for us, his future followers, than for the Jews of the day. They simply were not capable of reframing their preconceptions about the Messiah to see him as anything other than a military leader. It’s a story that had been told to them their entire life.

I want to try something.

I want you to close your eyes and think with me if you will. We believe in the Trinity. God the Father, the eternal Godhead, Jesus the Christ, his One and Only son, and the Holy Spirit, the multifaceted spiritual helper between both of them and us. We have spent the last 2k years reading and studying about these three, separate, yet together. It is the trinitarian essence of our faith. Picture it in your mind. Feel the love, warmth, concern for you and each of us. Feel the relationship.

Do you feel that? Ok, now I want you to look at them. Picture the three in your minds eye. What do you see? (you don’t need to answer). Can you feel yourselves in their intimate embrace?

Ok, now what if I told you there was actually four of them? There’s a fourth member to the trinity that you’ve never heard about, don’t know and can’t possibly understand.

Bam, now you know how these people felt. Only, for them it was real.

I don’t think we can truly appreciate the lack of framework the Jews of the day had for a figure like Jesus.

Even today we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make him into the God we want him to be. He is the central figure for Christians in their political preferences. There is no shortage of books on the shelf or talking heads that believe, or at least tell, that Jesus was a great political warrior.

I think I’ve shared before that I find this hard to believe. Jesus stayed so far away from the political class that he chose to clean the priesthood through Lazarus, instead of the current Sadducaical priesthood. He came from humble beginnings and made no real effort to interfere with the ruling Roman government. Jesus did the workings of a common Rabbi, speaking to the common people. But, he did none of the things we would expect to see from a God that came to reorder the political class of the day.

In fact, Rome wins in the earthly sense. In 73 AD, the Romans finally succeeded in driving the Jewish people fully out of Israel. Jews had no earthly home until after WWII. This, of course, leads to a whole bunch of modern conflicts.

Jesus came to minister to our spirit, by way of our earthly lives. He came to reorder our spiritual lives so that we can close the gaps in our families and communities. He did not come to be the conquering King of Kings. That’s for next time.

So, who exactly did the early church think Jesus was? What did they think he was here to do?

That brings us to our next reading.

Philippians 2:5-11

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death--

even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

Ok, several of you all have asked me recently about creeds. What exactly were they? Why did we have them? Where can we see them?

This is in Paul’s letter to the Philippians and it’s largely agreed upon from the scholars that this is a creed/hymn that was taught to Paul in the early days of his conversion. This is arguably one of, if not the, earliest example of Trinitarian Doctrine.

Look at the construction here. It’s simple, just 121 words in English, slightly less in Greek. It’s argued that this Creed was constructed in or around the Caesarea/Philippi area. Which is one of the reasons Paul chose to recite it here.

There is no claim here that Jesus was a closet politician deity. Jesus is God, He emptied himself of his power and chose to be born as a slave or bond servant (depending on your translation). The aristocracy, the political class for all their talk and bluster are not, and never have been servants. And they would never identify as actively being a slave. Although some today try really hard to convince you otherwise.

He was obedient to God, to the point of death. He suffered an excruciating, excrucato literally death on a cross. That’s where we get excruciating from. So that every knee will eventually bend, and every person will bow, to Jesus Christ as LORD, ALL for the glory of God.

This Jesus, this suffering servant so in love with humanity, would never get himself wrapped up in earthly political systems. He saw, even back then the corruption and self-seeking behavior for leadership that left him with only one choice. Go around it.

I try hard not to get too political in messages, because I often think it makes people stop listening. But things are heating up in the earthly realm and there’s another string of nonsense from both sides about how their Jesus would aline with their values.

If you’re Jesus agrees with your politics completely, then you don’t have Jesus, you have an idol.

My Jesus, our Jesus, was the second member of the Trinity. My Jesus, emptied himself of his power and was born a humble human baby. My Jesus spent the bulk of his adult life showing the masses a better way. Showing the people that politics forgot, that my God, our God loves them. To the point that he died for them. All of them!

Many of us here where crosses to represent our faith. Which is a good thing, no condemnation here. But we forget, in Jesus day, this was the worst way to die. This was unspeakable suffering. Jesus is one of the few cases in human history, where we have a record that he went into this situation knowing that this would be his fate.

I want you to think about that. God himself, in human form, chose to die in the worst way that humans could imagine at the time….all to save us from ourselves.

The story of Jesus Triumphant entry into Jerusalem on this Palm Sunday is not the story of a conquering King. It’s not the story of a political warrior. It’s the story of the entire bible in one singular act. A singular act of redemption combined with the narrative of the Jewish journey and the Christian future.

Jesus was leaving us his message right here. Which we would, of course, later write down and spend the remainder of human history arguing about.

Jesus left us the NT before it was even written down. In this one act.

Today begins Holy Week, the most sacred week on the traditional Christian calendar. Over the course of this week we’ll celebrate Jesus’ last supper and his instructional act of foot washing. Leaving us his great message to serve each other.

On Friday we’ll celebrate Good Friday, the day we mourn and remember that it was our great misdeeds both corporately and individually that made this colossal sacrifice necessary and then, Next Sunday we Celebrate Resurrection Sunday. Where Jesus’ work this time on earth is finished and He returns to order us to operate in HIS new future, a future we still enjoy today.

Today begins this Holy Week, today we celebrate Jesus triumphant entry into Jerusalem. But this triumph is not that of a conquering war victor. It’s not the triumph of a new president or King. It’s the triumph of a living God, taken human form, over the forces of evil and death brought on by our actions. Today we say Hoshana, Hoshana – God Save us! Hoshana in the highest! Thank you, Jesus!

Let’s pray!