The Glory of a King in the Crucifixion of a Criminal: The Upside Down Way of Kingship

John 12:12–16 NIV

12 The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. 13 They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the king of Israel!” 14 Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written: 15 “Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.” 16 At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.

John 18:33–37 NIV

33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” 34 “Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?” 35 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?” 36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” 37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

All four Gospel writers record for us the Palm Sunday entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem just one week before his crucifixion. And all of them tell the story of that entrance a little bit differently. That shouldn’t trouble us in any way at all. Not for a moment should any of us think how maybe Matthew got the details a bit more accurately than John did. Or how maybe Mark’s account is the best, and Luke’s a bit less trustworthy. Not at all. Don’t ever let people convince you that the Bible can’t be trusted because after all the Gospel writers themselves can’t seem to get it right! No, not at all. Each of the Gospel writers are not only concerned with actual historical events, but they’re even more concerned with what these events mean.

The life of Jesus, his miracles, his teaching, his ministry had so much depth and riches to it....what I mean by that is that is was so meaningful…that it took four different gospel writers each bringing their own unique emphasis to it, to capture the significance of all that Jesus said and did....and even four writers couldn’t do it completely.....

[John’s comment on the world not being big enough to contain all the books that would be written]

But we have these four Gospels and together they give us a wonderful, multifaceted, understanding of who Jesus is and what he came to do....

And this mornign we consider just a few aspects of John’s account....

Now all four Gospels have Jesus coming through the Eastern Gate of the city and of the which is also the eastern gate of the temple. [PICTURE OF TODAY’s eastern gate.... “Golden Gate” Gate of mercy”]. Now this is not the gate that Jesus entered into.... remember the Temple of Jesus’ day was destroyed in 70 AD.... and in the centuries that followed, at various occasions the ruins were rebuilt..... we don’t know with certainty, but the Golden Gate that we just saw was built sometime during either the 6th or 8th century....and much later in the 16th century was sealed with brick....

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....talk about the cemeteries built beside the Eastern gate....

I mention that because, even to this day, this gate, this side of the Temple has end times significance!

[Show picture of archeological reconstruction of the eastern gate]....imagine Jesus entering.... remember, he’d been ministering for 3 years....quite a following.... lots of expenctance and anticpation built up around this man...

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Ezekiel 44:1–2 NIV

1 Then the man brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, the one facing east, and it was shut. 2 The Lord said to me, “This gate is to remain shut. It must not be opened; no one may enter through it. It is to remain shut because the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered through it.

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… we can imagine the sense of end times.....eschatological enthusiasm, of biblical proportions.... where they people, having heard or seen all that Jesus taught and did are believing, this must be the Messiah....this must be the one who has come in the Name of the Lord to liberate God’s people…to liberate us from the Romans.....recall Romans always had guards / soldiers standing around the wall of the Temple courts....they even had a fortress, the Antonio fortress on the North Western corner of the temple....a visible reminder to the Jews that they were always under oftentimes watchful eye of Rome, under the oppressive hand of Caesar.

Could this be the moment when the Messiah would come and liberate us? Could this be the One who would usher in God’s heavenly armies to secure a glorious victory for us? Of course they had in mind a military victory....brute force and violence.

They had in mind the methods of the Caesar’s of this world......military conquest. Victory by violence. Glory through CONQUEST.

[talk about Tom Holland]

Way of Caesar

“The more you live in the minds of the Romans, and I think even more the Greeks, the more alien they come to seem, the more frightening they come to seem. And what becomes most frightening really is a kind of quality of callousness that I think is terrifying because it is completely taken for granted. There’s a kind of innocent quality about it, nobody really questions it…Caesar is by some accounts slaughtering a million Gaul’s and enslaving another million in the cause of boosting his political career and far from feeling in anyway embarrassed about this, he’s promoting it, and when he holds his triumph, people are going through the streets of Rome carrying billboards boasting about how many people he’s killed. This is a really terrifying alien world and the more you look at it, the more you realize that it is built on systematic exploitation… In almost every way, this is a world that is unspeakably cruel to our way of thinking and this worried me more and more.” (Tom Holland)

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unbelievable/2020/09/tom-holland-i-began-to-realise-that-actually-in-almost-every-way-i-am-christian/

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We can imagine the crowd in Jesus’ day as they cheered him on for his Palm Sunday ride, being energized by at least in part this way of Caesar’s Glory through CONQUEST.

But that is not Jesus’ way. The way of Jesus is Glory through CRUCIFIXION.

Notice how John presents these events....

1. Riding on a COLT (All Gospel writers).... humility, meekness, peace.

2. Anointing Story

But John also sets up this story of Jesus entering Jerusalem in a way that no other Gospel writer does....encourage to read in Small Groups this week..... John has an anointing story placed right before our text...

Anointing of a KING....maybe not so surprising....Kings were regularly anointed by a prophet in the OT. Think of Samuel anointing the future King David...

John 12:1 reminds us of the story of Lazarus....I mean Jesus in chapter 11 just raised a man who had been dead for four days.... Jesus had given Lazarus LIFE.... but here in this anointing we read that Mary is anointing him to prepare for his burial!! It’s as though John is writing this to say to us..... Jesus came to give US life.... but he does that by dying our death....

John 12:7 NIV

7 “Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. “It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.

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This is unique to John.... John presents to us a very different kind of King than the kind the world or that WE expect....

Yes, Jesus is a King....and yes Jesus is being anointed as a King.... but the glory of this king will not come through CONQUEST, but through CRUCIFIXION.

Now I think if you and I are honest with ourselves, this idea of Glory coming through Crucifixion and not conquest is not something we can easily accept. It really does feel kind of UPSIDE DOWN to us, doesn’t it..... Can a Kingship and a Kingdom built upon humility and meekness really have any lasting impact at all?

And this will take us to the second text we read this morning from John 18 where Jesus encounters Pilate.

Now, I want to take us back to Tom Holland again.....talks about Holland’s slow progression BACK towards Christianity.....

BY ERIK STRANDNESS

Since Holland found the world he lived in to be so radically different from that of ancient Rome and Greece, he asked himself where those values came from? The West’s commitment to values of  human dignity and equal rights, of caring for the weak, and upholding the victims of injustice....didn’t spring from a vacuum.  After extensive study, he concluded that they grew out of Christianity and that ‘most people are oblivious to the way in which the West’s Christian heritage has shaped modern education, healthcare, music, art, literature and the scientific revolution, to name but a few’.

Holland wasn’t suddenly bowled over by a blinding light of divine revelation but was gradually shaken out of his historical complacency by the skull–rattling after-shocks of a Golgothan earthquake. He was stunned to find that a small Jewish sect that worshiped a condemned criminal and who held to a relatively small corpus of sacred writings had radically changed the world.

“Compacted into this very, very small amount of writing was almost everything that explains the modern world and the way the West has then moved on to shape concepts like international law, concepts of human rights, all these kind of things. Ultimately, they don’t go back to Greek philosophers, they don’t go back to Roman imperialism. They go back to Paul. His letters, I think, along with the four gospels, are the most influential, the most impactful, the most revolutionary writings that have emerged from the ancient world.” (Tom Holland)

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Holland sensed a background cultural radiation that he could only attribute to a Christian ‘Big Bang’, and as he looked back in time he found that it all began at a point where God and man were intensely concentrated in a Jesus singularity. He also discovered that not only was it responsible for a Big Bang but also a Cambrian-like explosion that radically transformed traditional institutions and gave them a distinct Christian morphology.

“Well, if we’re talking of Paul, I think of him as a kind of depth charge, deep beneath the foundations of the classical world. It’s not anything that you particularly notice if you’re in Corinth or Alexandria and then you start feeling this kind of rippling outwards and by the time you get to the 11th century, in Latin Christendom, everything has changed. Paul’s significance is that he sets up ripple effects of revolution throughout Western history.”

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The pivotal moment in world history was when Jesus went toe-to-toe with Pilate. It was the ultimate showdown between the power of man and the power of God and the world would never be the same.

Pilate asked Jesus if He was a king who should be feared. Jesus then drew the distinction between His Kingdom and Pilate’s by explaining that if His Kingdom played by the rules of the world, He would have kicked Pilate’s butt long ago. Pilate is incredulous because he sees standing before him a flogged criminal claiming to be a king. The heavy boot of Roman power is about to crush Him and yet Jesus tells Pilate that his authority is an illusion.

John 18:36 NIV

36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

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Ironically, Pilate then releases the full force of Rome on Jesus only to unleash the full power of God’s Kingdom. Jesus’ greatest power play turns out to be a passion play. It is on the cross where the world’s power meets God’s weakness, the world’s wisdom meets God’s foolishness, and despite the apparent Roman victory the stumbling block becomes the foundation.

The reason that Christianity has so dramatically affected the world is because Jesus’ death and resurrection inaugurated a Kingdom that Pilate found unbelievable. A Kingdom powered by a sacrificial love that gets more powerful every time it surrenders. Pilate thought he had put an end to this movement because the Roman playbook suggested that the best strategy was to kill the opposition’s King, but what Rome discovered was that every time they cut the Body of Christ the blood just spread more Gospel seeds.

Jesus cut the loop of violence and resentment and revenge and bitterness....refusing to repay evil with evil but to always repay evil with Goodness and selfless love.

Tom Holland: “I Began To Realise That Actually, In Almost Every Way, I Am Christian.”

LAST UPDATED ON: OCTOBER 28, 2020 AT 10:47 AM

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 BY ERIK STRANDNESS

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unbelievable/2020/09/tom-holland-i-began-to-realise-that-actually-in-almost-every-way-i-am-christian/

We all have our sphere of influence...... how can we embody this kind of King…this kind of Kingdom in our daily lives.... are there people you need to be reconciled with....people that you have resentment, anger or bitterness towards.

Now let me conclude by connecting this all back to baptism.....

And let me say something about our identity in this new kingdom.

Pastor Eduardo Davila tells this story:

I have here an extremely important document. We all have important documents: a marriage certificate, the title to your car, your birth certificate. This one is my naturalization certificate.

My family and I came to the United States as political asylees, leaving the remnants of a country ravaged by war and destructive socialism that did not deliver on its promises. When we came, we had Nicaraguan passports. We were able to come to the US, but we were not given full citizenship. We were not protected by the US. We were not allowed to vote.

But all that changed in 2008, when we walked into an office in Miami, took a few tests, and swore an oath of allegiance to the United States. We were granted full permanent citizenship status. We were fully in.

During the whole process, one aspect that stuck with me was realizing the seriousness of a statement that then-President Bush wrote: “We are united not by race or culture but the ideals of democracy, justice, and liberty.” Beautiful.

Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:19 that "Now you are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family." Praise God! When you come to Christ, you are no longer a stranger or foreigner. You have the full blessing and protection of the kingdom of Christ. You are no longer undocumented. You no longer need to fret over where you belong or how to survive.

At baptism, you renounced your old citizenship and swore allegiance to Jesus, and you were given a naturalization certificate. You are now part of the new humanity: you are no longer strangers and foreigners. Once a citizen of a different kingdom, your ruler was your vices, addictions, and fears. Your ruler was the prince of this world. That is what you left behind when you were baptized and chose to submit yourself to Jesus as your new King. Source:

Rev. Eduardo Davila, Sermon: “The Church as a New Humanity,” SoundCloud.com (2-10-20)