Rebecca Florence Miller
Note: I preached this sermon in 2009, as a young pastor in North Dakota. I share it with you today, with just a small amount of editing. You can read the text for this Sunday here.
The long-awaited day had arrived. Since Jesus had begun His ministry, whisperings about Him had been heard all through the land of Israel. There were people who guessed He might be the Messiah, the coming Deliverer who was prophesied about in the Old Testament. So when He got on a colt and rode into the city of Jerusalem the week of the Passover celebration, when the town was bustling with celebration and out of town visitors were everywhere, it seemed like perfect timing. Everyone around, a big crowd of people, were caught up in the excitement. They spread their cloaks and palms beneath Him, treating Him with honor like a King.
The long oppression of the Romans, was it finally over? The crowd in Jerusalem saw the Messiah, the promised Deliverer, to be a military hero. They thought that Jesus would clobber the Romans and set them free from their oppression. So they waved palm branches (political and nationalistic symbols, like waving an American flag would be today) and they cried out, “Hosanna!” which means, “Please save us!” But they were blind to their need for spiritual deliverance. All they wanted was their homeland back again. All they wanted was a Jesus on their own terms.
Jesus for His part was deliberately fulfilling an Old Testament promise about the Messiah, doing this in order to push the envelope with the Jewish leaders, doing this so they would move toward the crucifixion. He knew that the Jewish religious leaders would see His actions as directly related to Old Testament prophecy, the prophecy that we read this morning in Zechariah 9, “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
That’s why Jesus deliberately sent His disciples out to find a colt. He wanted to exactly fulfill Old Testament prophecy in order to get the religious leaders’ attention. He knew that they would do anything to preserve the little bit of power they had by cooperating with the Romans. He knew they would see Him as a challenge to their power, and He knew that they would try to kill him, that He would be crucified and rise again. Acts 2:23 says, “This man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross” (NIV). In other words, God knew exactly what was going to happen when Jesus rode into Jerusalem in fulfillment of Old Testament Scripture. Jesus was going to get Himself killed…at the hands of the religious people.
The religious people were the instigators in the crucifixion; the Romans were just the means of execution. All too often, just like the people of Israel, we blame our troubles on “those worldly people” who don’t value old-time values and old-time religion…all the while, we miss the fact that we too are the problem. We push this truth away because the truth hurts. Sin is not something we can just externalize to people outside the Church. It is something present within us as well.
We have a tendency to try to make Jesus do and be what we want Him to do and be. We try to make Jesus into the God we want Him to be, instead of the God that He is. We want a leader who does everything for us without requiring anything of us.
We do this in several ways. First of all, when we—like the crowd in Jerusalem that welcomed Jesus with palm branches—confuse our nation with God’s kingdom. The people of Israel just wanted their nation back again. This is not so very unlike those in the Church who spend all their time and energy trying to make the United States into a Christian nation, as if God’s kingdom could be found in an earthly government.
Obviously, God cares about the government and can use it to do good in the world, and we ought to do all we can to see that that happens. But there has snuck into the Church an angry, fists-in-the-air, defensive attitude toward the world as if nonbelievers out there are trying to steal our country from us.
What if, instead of expecting the world to act like the Church, we acted like the Church should? What if we taught and served and loved in such a way that people sat up, took note, and began to ask us (as Peter suggests), “What is the reason for the hope that is within you?” When we fail to do this, we are just like the people in Jerusalem when we demand that Jesus give us political power and a Christian nation instead of realizing that the Church functions best as a loving minority, serving and reaching out to a broken world. That’s how the Early Church worked!
We also act like the people in Jerusalem when we praise God at Church but deny Him by our actions the rest of the week. I think most of us would have to admit to this. It is easy to come to church and sing songs of praise and act religious, but when we return to our homes and work places, all too often we treat our family and co-workers badly. We act selfishly. We break each of the Ten Commandments. We don’t read our Bibles and pray. We don’t care for the needy as we should. We don’t forgive. We don’t share our faith in a loving way with those around us. We are quick with the Hosannas but slow to follow through.
Finally, we act like the people in Jerusalem when we show up to praise God when it is convenient for us instead of having year-round faithfulness. The people of Jerusalem were all excited to praise Jesus when it was convenient for them, when they thought He would be a military leader who would set them free from Rome. But when He didn’t move fast enough for them, when He began to lead in the manner of service and sacrifice instead of taking out the Romans, they quickly became a part of the fickle crowd shouting, “Crucify Him!” The same is often true of any Christian who preaches to us of the way of the cross: we want to crucify them and silence them rather than hear them. It is hard to hear that Jesus calls us to service and sacrifice instead of glory and power.
The bottom line is, we are all implicated. There is no escape for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We turn away from Jesus. We are not faithful. We are His betrayers. We are the ones who will shout in a few days’ time, “Crucify Him!” We are the ones who drive the nails into His hands and feet.
But here’s the good news: when we face our naked selves and see the depth of our sin, when we see how far we have wandered from God, our creative and surprising God takes even our failure and sin and turns it around and uses it as a tool in His hand to save and redeem us. Acts 2:23-24 says, “This man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him” (NIV).
God knew what we would do. God knew we were going to kill Jesus. So He took that very thing, that most evil of things that we did, and turned it around. Jesus humbly emptied Himself, as Philippians 2 tells us, took on our sin and brokenness, and then rose again, proving that He had conquered sin, death, and the devil.
Christ came for you. He rode into Jerusalem for you, even though He knew you were only offering convenient words of praise, even though He knew you would desert Him when the going got tough, even though He knew you would turn away, even though He knew that you would discard Him and kill Him.
But He still rode into Jerusalem for you. He did it because His love is an insanely powerful kind of love. It’s a love that embraces the unlovely. It’s a love that pulls in the unfaithful. It’s a love that chases down the rebellious. Romans 5:6-8 says, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
He died for you even before you were a believer, even when you turned away from Him. And He still loves you when you wander from Him. He will keep seeking you, seeking to restore relationship with you. He will never give up on you. Because you, you who are His betrayer (and I who am His betrayer), are precious to Him. He can turn even your sin and brokenness around and use it as a tool to set you free from sin, death, and the power of the devil. To make you His own. To bring you out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light. To adopt you as His child. And this giving of Christ for you and for me, though we do not deserve it, is the very Gospel, the very good news. Darkness and evil cannot triumph over good. The selfish seeking of power and dominance and glory cannot triumph over one simple act of love. Amen.
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