Palm Sunday April 1, 2007 at Old Zion in Philadelphia
Palm Sunday April 1, 2007
Isaiah 50:4-9a Psalm 31:9-16 Phil 2:5-11 Luke 19:28-40
Blessed is the One who Comes in the Name of the Lord!
Today is Palm Sunday, celebrated by Christians around the world as the day Christ made his royal entry into Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the Holy City in our hearts and as Christians we acclaim Christ our Lord and Savior with palms and glad shouts of Hosanna to become one with him. “Yes, blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.” Oh, son of David, blessed are you who come in the name of the Lord! And blessed are those who come to him, come to this church, come to his table.
Our epistle lesson says to have the same mind as that was in Christ Jesus. That means we are to have his mind in our body. We are really also his body; we are the body of our King. A king has two bodies. Thus he speaks in the royal “we.”[1] We are his body and he is our Lord, because every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. That is the famous “Christ Hymn” of Philippians. Paul was quoting a song that the early Christians sang, much the way I quote songs in my sermons. We do not know the melody.
Jesus came riding into Jerusalem from the lower slopes of the Mt. of Olives, from Bethphage and Bethany, about two miles to the East the city. “The Mount of Olives is just east of Jerusalem; God was expected to appear there on the day of the Lord and become ‘king over all the earth’ (see Zech 14:4-9).”[2] The Messiah was to appear to the east of the city over the Mount of Olives.
Jesus sent two of his disciples ahead of him in advance to prepare his royal entrance. By his divine knowledge he tells them of the donkey and the foal, the colt of a donkey, that they are to get for him. When the owners ask them what they are doing, they are to say, “The Lord needs it.” The king had a right to use it as his royal prerogative.[3] The owners of the donkey foal or colt may have been Jesus’ disciples too. In any case, a huge crowd of pilgrims from Galilee on their way to the temple in Jerusalem attended him.
When the disciples bring Jesus his mount, they place their cloaks on it for a saddle, and place their cloaks before the animal, and give him a two mile red carpet treatment. There are precedents in the Old Testament. Jehu is proclaimed the king of Israel that way. To show that Solomon had become the king after David, he was given David’s royal donkey to ride when they acclaimed him the son of David, the new king. Jesus is also embodying the words of the prophet Zechariah, fulfilling his prophesy word for word by this Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem. Hear the words of the prophet written three or four centuries earlier:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off …the chariot, …the war horse, … the battle bow, … and command peace to the nations”
(Zech 9: 9-10).
Only the crowds around Jesus, the pilgrims going to the temple in Jerusalem, those who knew the prophets, knew what Jesus was doing. Those who had ears that could hear, ears that had been awakened, eyes that could see, and a tongue that knew how to sustain the weary with the word, they had the hearts that perceived and could understand. The anointed of God, the Messiah was riding into the Jerusalem of our hearts and ushering in the kingdom of heaven. So Christ needs to rule you from within your heart, if you confess that Jesus Christ is your Lord. He too will say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Hosanna in the highest.” “Hosanna” is a Hebrew word that means “Save, we pray.” Dear Jesus, come be our Lord and save us! When you give Christ authority over yourself, you will become one of the number of those who are being saved.
The various gospels tell this wonderful story in various ways. Here in Luke the word “hosanna” is not used and palms are not mentioned, although they are in the other stories. The palms acclaimed the new king with joy and celebration. He is the king of our hearts and we confess that he is the one sent by the Most High to save us. We are his people and God guides and directs our lives through him.
Now ask yourself, what could Jesus have been thinking? He was allowing himself to be proclaimed the king right in the city in which Herod, the Edomite, was the king and Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor. What were they chopped liver? (That is my wife’s favorite expression.) Herod, whom Christ had called a fox, was threatened and indeed intended to kill Jesus. But he need not have been threatened, because Jesus was making an overture to his heart, trying to win his heart for God, just like he keeps nudging our hearts reminding us that he is the Lamb of God. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high is God’s government over ours, God’s thoughts over our thoughts, and God’s ways over our ways. Jesus is the divine warrior riding a donkey, as symbol of humility and peace; yea, the colt of a donkey no less. He is not only the servant of God, the way Moses was, but also the suffering servant of God, the way the Prophet Isaiah described him.
The colt had never been ridden before. I do not know if a donkey has to be broken in like a horse. Do you know the famous poem by Gilbert Keith Chesterton? If you recite it your children, have them guess who is speaking:
When fishes flew and forests walked
and figs grew upon a thorn
Some moment when the moon was blood,
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
on all four-footed things.
The tatter’d outlaw of the earth
Of ancient, crooked will
Starve, scourge, deride me, I am dumb.
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour,
One far fierce hour and sweet.
There was as shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet!
When you recite this wonderful poem to your children, you can ask them, “Who is this poet talking about? Who is speaking?” They might guess it is about the donkey Jesus chose to ride into Jerusalem. Then you hug them and say, “If Jesus could use a donkey, then he could also use you.” We are all dumb compared to God.
Thus Jesus is no threat. He is winning our hearts by gentle persuasion. He emptied himself of his almighty power, and his omnipotence expressed itself in unconditional love. That was why he set his face for Jerusalem. He was willing to take three steps and go right to the cross, because of his love for us in order to win our hearts.
Did you ever think, the Chinese do not have to conquer us. All they have to do is open Chinese restaurants throughout the whole city and they have gotten us with their delicious food through our stomachs. It is an old trick. Many a woman has got her man that way. Some men are now getting their wives that way. But Jesus was getting us all through our hearts. He was winning our hearts for God, reconciling the world to God that way. With his unconditional love he was converting our hearts to God and when his Holy Spirit causes us to surrender and we finally holler, “Uncle!” because we realize we can’t break God’s hold on us, then we no longer control our own lives, nor can we control the lives of others, but we have to serve Jesus Christ our Lord since we now belong to God.
As Luther says in the catechism we all learned, Jesus purchased us “at a great cost, not with silver and gold, [that is not with money], but with his holy and precious blood” and now we do not belong to ourselves, but to God and we invite the Holy Spirit to rid our lives of all our prejudice and all our sin.
Now Jesus could become angry, even though “God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Joel 2:13). He became angry. “Zeal for the House of the Lord consumed him” (Psalm 69:9) and “Judgment starts in the House of the Lord” (1 Peter 4:17). He made a whip and knocked over the tables of the money-changers. “My temple is a house of prayer for all nations and you have made it into a den of thieves!” (Mark 11:17) he shouted.
A favorite professor of mine who was an expert on banks said that Jesus separated the two institutions, banks and churches that day.[4] If you have ever noticed, banks often resemble a temple with their lofty ceilings and high arches. In Trump Village all the senior citizens sat in front of their bank there on Fifth Street in Brooklyn. Bessie and Margaret from our church used to say, “They are out there guarding their money!”
Well, tearing up the temple did not do Jesus any good. The temple guard soon came and got him. And now we are thrown together to contemplate Jesus’ passion, his betrayal, his last supper, his scourging, his crucifixion and his resurrection in three days, that is, a short while thereafter.
Let us rejoice to participate in the suffering of Christ, for as St. Paul says, if we participate in a suffering like his, we will also be raised up in a resurrection like his.
Ah, in the cross of Christ I glory! Let us plant that cross squarely between our shoulder-blades and know, that that will be glory for you and glory for me!
In the cross of Christ I glory,
towering over the wrecks of time,
shouting out-loud, the marvelous story,
in lives, holy, Christ-like and sublime!
“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. Hail, Son of David! He’s the King of Glory! Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is the one that comes in the name of the Lord!” Amen.
[1] “Normally, it is not just the moral strategy but the whole outlook on life that must change. And this can be achieved only by recasting our interpretation of the world and of our place in it in terms of the sovereignty of God and of his kingdom.” Wolfhart Pannenberg, Christian Spirituality, (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1983), p. 26. When Christians ask me to remain solely with moral guidance for their individual lives in my sermons, I hold that Christ can not be preached as an individual apart from his kingdom.
[2] Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1993), p. 1997, n. 19.29
[3] Ibid.
[4] D’Anghel Rugina, my economics professor at Northeastern University, Boston, Mass, 1962-1967.
