A King's Entrance

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, happy Palm Sunday to you. Thank you for joining us in worship today. It’s good to see you all here.

I have a few announcements I’d like to mention this morning from your bulletin.

The men’s group will meet tonight at 6:30.

It’s also time for our Annie Armstrong Easter offering for our missionaries. Our goal this year is $2,500. Please give as you are able. And speaking of giving, as part of our town churches initiative of coming together to share Christ’s love with our community, we’ll be taking a special offering next Sunday to help off-set money our local children owe for their school lunches. Please prayerfully consider giving to that. You can just mark your checks or envelope with “school lunch fees”, and we’ll be sure to get that where it needs to go.

Don’t forget our Easter potluck breakfast next Sunday morning at 8:30. Come hungry and with your favorite breakfast dish for everyone to try. Coffee and juice will be provided.

Our church council will be meeting tomorrow evening. If you’re on the council, please try to attend.

And don’t forget our Good Friday service this coming week at 6:00. A little more information on that will be given during today’s sermon.

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father, we thank you for the life You’ve given us to live. When we witness a beautiful mark of Your creative hand, let us remember that Christ was with You, too, when the world began with the sound of Your voice. He came to earth, and watched the same sunrise we now see. He looked into the stars, and now looks down upon us with love. With grateful hearts we praise You, God, both for who You are and who we are in You. Let the power of Christ’s Palm Sunday entrance remain in us. When we are fearful and anxious, help us to recall the Peace with which Jesus rode into the city, so soon to be crucified.

Help us to act with faith and trust in the face of fear, both known and unknown, knowing You are incredibly close. For we ask this in Jesus’s holy name, Amen.

Sermon

We’re beginning our celebration of Easter week today with what’s known as Palm Sunday.

There’s kind of an Easter checklist that pastors have to preach about — you have Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. To most of us, that’s the Easter story as a whole, even though there’s much more to it and a lot that most of us rarely consider. That’s why even though this is a Christian’s holiest time of the year, it’s almost like Christmas in that the scriptures we read and the sermons we preach have been read and preached so often that it’s hard to see them with fresh eyes. We’re going to try to fix that this morning. We’re going to look hard at Palm Sunday and try to see it with fresh eyes.

Jesus entering Jerusalem is the first major event of his last week on earth, and it’s filled with so much symbolism about who Jesus is and what his earthly purpose was. Let’s turn to the gospel of Matthew, chapter 21. We’ll be reading verses 1-14:

Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.”

This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying,

“Say to the daughter of Zion,

‘Behold, your king is coming to you,

humble, and mounted on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’”

The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.

And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”

And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.

And this is the word of the Lord.

Jesus never did anything without a reason. That’s especially true in this passage of scripture. Everything he does here is very deliberate. Every action carries a deeper meaning, and Jesus does all of it to show the people there — and us — who he is and what he’s come to do. He shows us here three things that Easter forces us to reckon with — He is a savior who will confront us, he is a king who will confuse us, and he is a Lord who is coming for us. Let’s take a look at each of those.

First, Jesus is a savior who will confront us. If you look back through the beginning and middle of Jesus’s ministry, you’ll find a pattern repeated over and over. Jesus will seek out someone who is sick or injured, he’ll cure them through a miracle, and then he’ll say what? He’ll say, “Don’t tell anyone.” He might say something like, “Go show yourself to the priest, but don’t tell anyone else. Don’t tell anyone what I’ve done for you.”

That doesn’t sound right, does it? If you’re the savior of the world here to announce the good news, wouldn’t you want as many people as possible to hear that good news? If you have the power to give sight and hearing and cure every disease, wouldn’t you want people talking about the miracles you can do? Wouldn’t you want as many people as possible talking about the great things that are happening, things that no one’s ever seen?

But instead Jesus is telling people to keep all of this private. He’s trying to limit what people say about him publicly. He’s preaching, he’s performing miracles, he’s healing the blind and the lame. He’s telling the disciples that he’s the Messiah, but he’s trying to keep word of that from spreading among the people.

Here’s why Jesus is doing that: the more people talk about all these great things he’s doing, the more pressure the religious and political leaders are going to start feeling to put a stop to it. It’s fine if Jesus is going around preaching and spreading the gospel. Not much danger there. But if he’s performing miracles — if people are talking about the power that he has and especially if they’re saying the Messiah has come — then the people in charge are going to be pushed to arrest him. Or worse, kill him. Because at that point Jesus becomes more than a teacher or a prophet, he becomes a threat to people’s power.

Jesus couldn’t let that happen yet. It wasn’t time. He had a lot more to do. But all of that changes in these verses as he’s coming into Jerusalem.

Remember what I said last week about studying scripture. You always have to place the passage that you’re focusing on in context with what takes place right before and right after. Right before this scene in Matthew chapter 20, there’s an interaction between Jesus and two blind men. It’s just a few verses, verses 29-34, but they’re very important.

At the end of chapter 20, Jesus and his disciples are leaving Jericho and heading toward Jerusalem. Along the way they’re going to stop by Bethany to have that dinner party with Lazarus and Simon the leper that we talked about a few weeks back. A great crowd is following them. Two blind men are standing by the side of the road, and when they hear Jesus is passing, they cry out, “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!”

Do you know what “Son of David” is a term for? It’s a term for the Messiah. The crowd tries to hush the men. “We don’t say that out loud,” these blind men are told. But they cry out even louder — “Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!”

And Jesus stops. He asks the two men what they want him to do, and they answer that they want their eyes to be opened. So Jesus heals them of their blindness, and the two men follow him.

But do you know what Jesus never says here? He never says, “Don’t tell anybody.” Because that part of his ministry is over now. The time has finally come for people to talk and to share. The time has come for everyone to know who Jesus is.

And now as Jesus, the disciples, and these huge crowds near Jerusalem, Jesus sends two of his disciples on. He says in verse 2, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me.”

Everyone else walks into Jerusalem. Jesus rides in. Now for the first time, he’s publicly placing himself above the rest of the people. He’s showing them that he’s someone far more powerful and important.

Word of his coming spreads. The crowds that are walking with him into the city are met by more crowds coming out of Jerusalem to meet him. They want to take part in what’s happening. They want to welcome the Christ in. They’re welcoming Jesus not as a prophet, but as the Messiah.

In verse 8, they spread their cloaks on the road. Others cut branches from the trees and spread those on the road. They’re shouting “Hosanna!” in verse 9. “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

We say that word a lot during Easter, don’t we? Hosanna. We sing that word and pray that word, but do you know what that word means? It doesn’t mean Lord. Doesn’t mean Messiah. It means, “Save us.” Verse 9 is a direct call to Psalm 118:25, which says, “Save us, we pray, O LORD! O LORD, we pray, give us success!”

And immediately upon entering the city, where does Jesus head? He goes to God’s house. In verses 12-17, Jesus cleanses the temple, overturning the tables of the moneychangers, cleansing it of sin. We don’t see this part of Jesus anywhere else, do we? He’s angry. He’s even violent, because God is not being honored. He says, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers.” And listen — Jesus isn’t mad because God’s not being honored by the people who aren’t religious. That’s what you expect from people who don’t believe. Jesus is mad because God’s not being honored by the people who are religious. They don’t have an excuse.

And notice what Jesus says here. He’s already not told the two blind men he’s cured to stay quiet. He’s already come into Jerusalem as a king. And now he calls the temple “MY house.” The only person — the only person — who can call a place “my house” is who? It’s the owner of that house. So if Jesus is calling the temple his house, that can only mean one thing — Jesus is God.

In coming into Jerusalem this way and cleansing the temple, Jesus is publicly telling everyone that he is the Messiah. He is the true king. He’s confronting everyone there, especially the political and religious leaders of Jerusalem, and here’s what he’s saying to them — you’re going to have to either crown me or kill me. They can’t do both, and they can’t do neither. They’re going to have to pick one.

You cannot read Jesus’s words without hearing him say the same thing to you. “What are you going to do with me? Are you going to crown me, or kill me? And I your Lord, or am I a fraud?”

He’s coming right out here and demanding an answer. The religious leaders have been chasing Jesus for years. Now he turns everything on its head and comes right for them. He says, “Worship me or murder me.”

C.S. Lewis puts it this way: He says, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

That’s how Jesus is the king of confrontation. He forces you to accept either get all of him or none of him. That’s what Palm Sunday means.

But if we’re not careful, Jesus can also be the king of confusion. We’ve talked about this before, how we have this picture in our minds of what God is supposed to be like and what He’s supposed to do, and when God ends up being and doing something completely different, we start doubting Him. Our expectations of God don’t always line up with the reality of God, and the result is confusion about who God is or even if God is there at all.

We’re so sure that God’s going to do something. He’s going to heal that disease or fix this situation. We’s going to let something happen or not let something happen. And then He doesn’t. God ends up doing the exact opposite of what we think He should do.

We see that time and again in the life of Jesus. All through the gospels we see people trying to fit Jesus into a box. And time and again, we see Jesus refusing to be put into one. God cannot fit into the tiny box you want to put Him inside. In one sense we can know who God is through the person of Christ and scripture. But do you think that’s all God is? If you think you can read the Bible and know everything about God, you’re wrong. God is infinite. God is eternal. You’re going to spend eternity with God and still not learn everything about him, because He already existed for an eternity before you were ever born.

In this passage we see that Jesus won’t fit into anyone’s box, and it all has to do with what Jesus rides into Jerusalem on — a donkey, and a colt. Now we have to talk about this, because what’s going on here is very important. First, Jesus sends two of his disciples into the village and tells them to get this donkey and her colt. And he says, “If anybody says anything to you, tell them that the Lord needs them.”

What right does Jesus have in taking this donkey and her colt? Animals were expensive in Biblical times. Families depended on them. And here Jesus is taking a donkey and her colt from somebody. Maybe the owner of these animals is a believer. Maybe not. Either way, how is Jesus justified in taking these animals? And we’re never told whether the person who owns these animals ever gets them back.

The answer is in what he tells the disciples to say — “The Lord needs them.” The Greek word there is kyrios. It means master. It means the owner of a thing. What right does Jesus have in taking these animals? I’ll answer that in two words: He’s God. Jesus is completely justified in taking these animals because Jesus is the Lord, and the Lord is master and owner not just of the donkey and her colt, but of the person who owns the donkey and colt, and the road they’re all standing on, and the city they’re all about to enter.

God owns everything. That’s how he can take a colt who has never been ridden, a wild colt, and ride it through a city of screaming people and have that colt be as calm as a dove. Because Christ is Lord of nature. Everything is his, and if you’re a believer and think that some things in your life are God’s but other things are yours, those things you think are yours will be the very things God says you have to surrender over to him. He’ll confront you with those things and say, “I want that. I want your family. Your money. Your health. I want your job. I want your financial security.” He’ll do that so you can find out if He’s really your Lord or not.

But again, Jesus is being symbolic here as well. The donkey and colt are representative of the Jews, who were used to the yoke of the law, and the Gentiles, who were represented by the colt. He’s riding into Jerusalem to show that both the Jews and Gentiles would be united under his spiritual rule.

But there’s even more going on here, and it’s all around the way a king would return to his city after a great military victory.

Roman emperors would ride into Rome after a great victory with a spectacle that had to be seen to be believed. Everyone in the city would line the streets, shouting adoration. There would be music and celebration. The emperor would ride on a chariot pulled by a stallion.

The whole episode would be so extravagant that a slave would always ride in the chariot with the emperor, and that slave’s only job was to whisper in his master’s ear over and over again, “You are only a mortal.”

But Jesus isn’t riding a fearsome horse here, is he? He’s not riding a stallion. He’s not coming for war, he’s coming for peace. He’s not coming as a conqueror or a victor. He’s turning everything on its head. This isn’t the way a true king makes an entrance.

But Jesus is doing it this way to tell us something about himself and something about us. He isn’t coming to rule, he’s coming to save. And he’s not going to save by taking power through force, he’s coming to save by losing power and dying. He’s going to triumph through weakness so that his followers, you and me, can only receive salvation by repenting and admitting our own weakness.

Jesus didn’t say, “Look at the way I lived my life, how moral I was, and then you go live in the exact same way because that’s how you get to heaven.” That’s what a lot of people think, and they’re wrong. Jesus didn’t say, “Do good works and be like me,” because that would only mean salvation would be for the strong. And guess what? We’re not strong.

That’s why salvation is so dependent on grace instead. It’s free because we’re weak. We can find that confusing. Something so great is never free. That’s not how we expect and all-powerful and holy God to act. But it’s exactly how a loving God would act, because a grace that’s free and doesn’t depend on how strong you are is a grace that can let anyone, no matter who they are, reach heaven.

But here’s where Jesus riding the young donkey into Jerusalem speaks about us. Here’s where we most often get confused about God. What is this crowd that is welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem expecting? They have to be expecting something. We all expect something from God. We all go to God and say, “You need to give me exactly what I think I need from you.”

What do these people think they need from God? They’re shouting, “Hosanna, save us!” But save us from what?

From the Romans? Yes. From their sins? Yes, in a way. They believed their sins were why God allowed the Romans to take over. They wanted saving for their sins, but only so they could be freed from their oppressors.

That’s what the Jewish people had so wrong. They thought they needed God to bring judgment on the Romans. What they really needed was someone who would bear the judgment for their own sins. They thought the Romans were ruining the world, but their own sins were ruining the world every just as much.

You see? The people laying down their cloaks and palm branches and welcoming Jesus are only thinking of the present. God’s thinking of eternity. They’re thinking about the end of Roman rule. He’s thinking about bridging the gap between heaven and earth so that one day Christ could return and put an end to evil once and for all without putting an end to you and me in the process. They people are thinking about today. God’s thinking about every moment after. That disconnect between what we think we need from God and what God knows we need from him is exactly why these people can be waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna” here but turn away from Christ in just a few days.

Palm Sunday is the perfect image of our constant struggle between what we think we need and what God gives us. When you come to him in faith, he’ll always give you what you need. But he will often confuse you in the way he does it. God will always exceed your expectations in the long run, but in the short term what he allows and what he gives can look very confusing.

But always remember this — God is never absent, God is never wrong, and God always acts out of his love for you. When you pray, God always gives you exactly what you would have asked for if you knew everything that he knows.

So Jesus will always be a king who confronts us by making us choose whether to fall down and worship him, or walk away from him. And he will always be a king who confuses us so long as we see him as a God who provides only for the moment instead of for eternity. And lastly, he is the coming king.

The crowd thinks Jesus is coming to put everything right on earth, to do away with all the injustice and suffering that they have to live with every day. But that’s not the case. He’s not coming to put things right on earth, he’s coming to put us right with God.

Palm Sunday looks ahead to Christ’s second coming. As Jesus enters Jerusalem, the people place their cloaks on the ground for him to ride over. Others cut branches from palm trees and lay them out or wave them as he passes. Do you know what that signifies?

Psalm 96 is about a new beginning. It’s about making things right through the restoring of both the earth and ourselves. And in verse 12, the writer says, “Let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.” These people are waving palm branches in the same way that Psalm 96 says the trees will be singing. Isaiah writes in Isaiah 56 that the trees of the field will be clapping their hands.

The blessedness that the people of Jerusalem are asking for from the Messiah is the same blessedness that will accompany Christ when he returns. When the true king comes back to put everything right, nature will work perfectly again. There will be no more sickness. No more violence. No more wants. Everything that’s wrong with the material world will be fixed. Everything will be what it was always meant to be.

But the only way Jesus can return to earth without destroying everything — including you and me — is if he rides into Jerusalem not as the king we want him to be, but as the king he is. Not as a conqueror, but as a sacrifice.

This is the time of year when everyone, regardless of what they believe, is forced to ask the one most important question of their life. Matthew says that when Jesus enters Jerusalem, the entire city is stirred up. The Greek word there means to shake like an earthquake. That’s what Jesus does.

He confronts you. He strips you of all those ideas about what he should look like and how he should act in your life, about what he should give you and what he should take away from you. He forces you to look at him in the way that he truly is and makes you ask the same question that everyone in Jerusalem asks that day. It’s written right there at the end of verse 10 — “Who is this?”

Who is this? That’s the question Jesus confronts you with. “Who am I?” he asks. “Am I your Savior, or am I just someone whose name you hear every Sunday? Am I the God you ask for things from, or am I your Lord? Do you want me to fix your circumstances right now, or do you want me to get you ready for eternity? Do you come to me with your hand out, or with your heart out?”

That’s what you need to be thinking about this week. And we’re going to help you think about it in a special way. When you walked in here today, you should have gotten a small nail. If you didn’t, you can pick one up in the back on your way out. It’s kind of an old-looking nail. We did that on purpose, because it’ll make you think of what happened about two thousand years ago. And it’s kind of a messy nail. We did that on purpose too, because it’ll help remind you that no matter how put-together you think our lives are, we’re all still a mess too.

I want you to keep that nail with you this week. Tuck it in your pocket or your purse. Keep it by your bedside or in the cup holder of your car when you’re driving. Have it with you while you work. Run your finger along it. Feel how rough the sides are and how sharp the point is.

And while you’re doing that, ask yourself that question in verse 10. Ask yourself who you really think Jesus is. Take a good look at the king as he is instead of the king you want him to be. Let him confront you. Make him show you the place he has in your life. And if it’s not the place he should be, if he’s not the Lord of everything to you, then you better get started fixing it.

Let him confuse you. Don’t shy away from those times when Jesus doesn’t make any sense. Don’t hide and don’t run away. Run straight at him. Because it’s when you don’t think he’s there that he’s never been closer to you, and it’s when you think he’s turned away that he’s looking right into your eyes saying, “I love you, and you are mine, and there’s nothing in heaven or on earth that will ever snatch you out of my hand.”

Pour all of your burdens into that nail. All of your questions and your hurts. All of your hopes. And after you’ve carried that nail around for about a week, I want you to come back here on Friday evening for our Good Friday service, because we’re each going to take our nail and hammer it into the cross right here. We’re going to do that and we’re going to be reminded that Jesus is coming back. He said, “I’m going to make things right. I’m going to fix everything in your that’s torn, and I’m going to repair everything in creation that’s broken, and it’s going to happen so quickly and completely that you won’t be able to contain your joy.”

Jesus didn’t ride into Jerusalem, to the place of his death, as a conquering king. But I guarantee you that’s exactly how he’s going to return. And if you don’t know that king but want to, I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father, Palm Sunday is a reminder of the unexpected, yet fully anticipated, King of Kings. Jesus did not look like the Messiah Your people hoped for. The way He entered the Holy City of Jerusalem on that day, riding a young donkey as a sign of peace and fulfillment of prophecy, didn’t match with their expectations of a military conqueror. Much of our daily lives don’t align with our expectations either, Father. So much of our lives don’t make sense. This Palm Sunday, let us embrace the unexpected entrance of our Savior, Jesus. Let us apply this incredible truth to our lives. He came to bring us Peace. He is peace. Father, how quickly we forget the Peace we possess in Christ! Remind us, minute by minute, as we navigate difficult days and trying times. Father, we need Peace to live life to the full, as Jesus died for us to live. For it’s in his name we pray, Amen.