The Resilient King

Luke 19:28-47

Read Luke 19:28-47

Luke 19:28–47 NIV

After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’ ” Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They replied, “The Lord needs it.” They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. As he went along, people spread their cloaks on the road. When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. “It is written,” he said to them, “ ‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’” Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him.

Let’s Pray.

What a way to enter into a week, huh? I have always loved Palm Sunday. Much of the time Sunday feels like the end of the week for me and the cycle kicks over every Monday morning, but for some reason, Palm Sunday always feels… different. It always feels like the start of something. The true start of a new week and not just any week, but a remembrance each year of the most incredible 7 days the earth has ever seen and today feels like the start of another amazing Holy Week, amen!?

And I wanted to do a really focused study for us this week, so we have a 4-part sermon series that we are hitting in ONE week and we’re kicking it off today. We’ve been talking about resilience all year and how God has called us to be His resilient people, but none of that resilience matters none of it even exists if it didn’t start and, be compelled by, and end with God’s Resilient Love, and there is no other week in history where we can more clearly see just how resilient God’s love truly is! I mean think about it! We kick it off with this entry into the city where Jesus rides into a city that longs to kill him, and he does it as a king. He shows the world that he is still willing to rule it and to claim it even as it prepares to reject him to the point of killing him.

I know that each year we talk about Jesus’ triumphant ride into Jerusalem, and we talk about the symbolism and the imagery that happened in this story to foreshadow what would occur, to point to Jesus as the true King riding into David’s city. This story is loaded with symbolism, references to messianic Old Testament prophecies and scriptures, as well as varied methods and feelings of reception from the people of Jerusalem, from the Pharisees, and from Jesus himself. But why does it all matter? Jesus never got to be “king” in the sense that we tend to think of kings as having an earthly rule, but all of them point toward the king that he was going to be and – here’s the part that I want us to talk about this morning – there are a lot of different kinds of rulers. That’s why Palm Sunday is so important for us to talk about every year because it reminds us of what kind of ruler Jesus is going to be, because he was born to be a king.

He was born in the city of Bethlehem where Micah tells us the Messiah will come from, he is born in the line of David and God’s covenant with David tells us that it will be one from David’s line that sits upon the throne. From the very beginning everything pointed towards Jesus being a king, but there have been a lot of kings in the line of David and most of them were absolutely awful.

We have David himself who was the best in the bunch, but he certainly wasn’t perfect. David always had a little to keen of an eye for the ladies and power corrupts even a man after God’s own heart. Solomon was wise, but he was greedy. From there it spirals into all of these horrible kings who only served themselves which seems to represent most of the “kings” we have today. We don’t call them kings, we call them politicians, but we still see these flaws and this brokenness today.

So, again, I come back to why this is so important. It answers the question of what kind of king Jesus is going to be, because we see the truest form of a king when they have their back against the wall. Most kings try to save themselves as they see themselves as being the kingdom, but the best kings put their kingdom above themselves.

We see this throughout. As Jesus rides into Jerusalem in what would be his Triumph, he doesn’t come in on a chariot with a procession, heck, he doesn’t even ride in on a full-grown horse, but a donkey – a symbol of peace. Jesus wasn’t going to be a king of conquering and conquest, coming home to be showered with praise for something he did for himself rather than his kingdom. No, he was going to be a king of peace.

And it isn’t that he has commanded any of this reception that he is receiving to happen the way most kings did at the time – it was essentially a requirement for all of those in the kingdom to come and see the king back in after returning from a conquest – but, instead, allowed the people to choose to love him rather than force them to “love” him. And in their choosing they show us what kind of king they know Jesus is going to be. So, they lay their garments – the clothes that they’re wearing – they lay them across the donkey for Jesus to have a saddle and they lay them before him as he rides into Jerusalem, not through the main gate, but through the East Gate. The gate where, when he was praying on the Mount of Olives, he could look through that gate and see the temple. The gate where the sacrificial lamps entered, not kings. Jesus was going to be a humble king who only ruled over those that chose to love him and chose his leadership.

And we see very quickly that not everybody was going to choose his leadership. In fact, some then and some still today, were so adamantly against his leadership, against this king who did not glorify himself but, instead, glorified God and lived in service as a man and as God! They couldn’t believe that people would choose to follow a man like this, a man who would debase himself so willingly! Kings are meant to have respect and authority, to be above everything else as the shining example of what man can attain, not a humble servant! So, they didn’t just tell him to shut down his ride into the temple, they chose to kill him. They couldn’t even realize that it was Satan himself who was whispering in their ear, but in their disgust with this humble king, they wanted to kill him.

And what I realized this week as I was trying to find something new, something different that I could bring to light in a story that I’ve heard at least 38 times and preached for than a few, was that all of this – all of these humble things that Jesus did to announce what kind of king he would be and to fulfill the scriptures that he knew – they made the Pharisees underestimate him. They didn’t see these things as pointing to him as king, they saw it as a dirty little show being put on by dirty little people – women, slaves, peasants, shepherds, and fishermen. These were the people that followed Jesus. Not the wealthy, the glamorous, or the people of importance. So, when they started plotting to kill Jesus while he was in Jerusalem, they didn’t know who Jesus really was, and I don’t mean that in terms of seeing him as the Messiah. Even his disciples didn’t truly understand that until Sunday had come, and the tomb was empty. I mean they thought that they were playing chess, and he was just playing checkers.

Do any of y’all play chess? It’s been weird, but over the past few years I’ve become enamored with watching chess matches and learning the game. It is an incredible game that takes so much brain power to play at a high level. Setting traps at the beginning of a game that don’t truly manifest for 5, 8, or even 15 moves. They see that far in advance depending on the board and game it all out to the point where most games end with a friendly handshake while most of the pieces are still on the board. They both just… know, that the game is over. They both know that a checkmate is on the board. The player that made the move knows it from the second it happens, and it really comes down to how long it takes the other player to figure it out.

This is so common in fact, that it has made its way into popular culture for hundreds of years. The idea of the one who knows sitting and waiting for their opponent who is in distress to finally come to the same conclusion and figure it out. It was this very idea that gave a man named Moritz Retzsch to paint this famous painting simply titled “Checkmate”. (show painting on the slideshow)

Now, this painting is interesting, and I love that it speaks to this morning’s sermon so perfectly. This is a painting that shows Satan on one side of the table holding his face with a sly smile and eying his opponent across the table. We see these villainous and wicked icons all around the table showing us that we are playing the devil’s game, and the person is totally trapped. There are reptiles on the walls, a spider on the table, skulls all over the painting, and the angel looking morosely and sympathetically upon the opponent who sits in stark concentration as all of his pieces are off of the board and defeat is already at hand, he just doesn’t notice it yet.

This is where the Pharisees thought they had Jesus – their king – when he road into Jerusalem. He was pinned in the corner; the game was already lost to Jesus, and he just didn’t know it yet. Jesus seems to back this up for them as they try to shut him down and he responds with, “Even if I was to tell them to be quiet the rocks would cry out.” They believed that Jesus just didn’t know he had lost, he was just too stupid to see it.

But there’s a funny thing about chess and an even funnier story about this painting.

At one point in time this painting was hanging in the Louvre in Paris, France. We don’t know the exact date of its creation as it was found amongst Retzsch’s paintings when he died, but it hung in the love for almost 100 years beginning in the mid-1800’s. About 40 years after it was hung with the title “Checkmate” there was a group walking through the Louvre touring the paintings and amongst this group was a man named Paul Morphy. Paul Morphy was not your average art enthusiast coming to see the Louvre. Paul was the current Chess World Champion. He played chess professionally and Morphy, intrigued by a painting that featured his game, stopped to admire it for a while. The story goes that he stood there for about 30 minutes before he walked over and grabbed the tour guide. He asked the tour guide if he could please speak to the manager of the institution or somebody in charge because there was an issue with the painting. The tour guide, freaking out that a priceless work had been damaged, asked him what was wrong and Morphy said, “This painting has to be renamed. It’s name is incorrect.” The guide looked at him quizzically and Morphy, pointing towards the painting said, “The king still has one more move.”

The Pharisees didn’t realize that Jesus was playing chess too and even though Satan thought he’d won on Good Friday, even though the world thought that their player, their king was sitting in an assured checkmate, the King still had one more move.

And it’s in his words that we see that he knew his move the entire time. It’s a move that you can’t make on a chessboard, but it’s the only move he had in the chess game of life.

He lamented where the world was. He lamented what Jerusalem had become and what would happen to it – destruction which happened in 70AD – if they continued on this path. But Jesus isn’t the kind of king who saves himself. He’s the kind of king who willingly lays down his life so that Jerusalem might be destroyed, but the Kingdom would live on eternally with its humble, peaceful, welcoming, loving, and saving king.

So let us wave our palm branches, sing with all we have, lift our hallelujah, and praise King Jesus. All hail King Jesus, our eternal king.

Let’s pray.