Sermon manuscript:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout
aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous
and having salvation is he.
“Behold, your king is coming to you.” This prophecy
was made hundreds of years before Palm Sunday. The fulfillment of this prophecy
explains all the rejoicing, the shouting aloud, that we hear about on Palm
Sunday. Behold, your king is coming to you. If you asked the people gathered at
the city gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday what they were doing, they would
have told you that the King was coming to them.
You can tell that this is what the people were looking for
by the words the evangelists have recorded from that day. In our reading from John
Jesus is called the King of Israel. Luke records the people saying, “Blessed
is the King who comes in the Name of the Lord.” Mark says, “Blessed is
the coming kingdom of our father David.” Matthew says, “Hosanna to the
Son of David.”
All these folks believe that Jesus is the king. He is restoring
kingship, instituted by God about 1000 years before this with King David. They
keep saying that Jesus is king in the Name of the Lord. This means that they
believe this is God’s doing. God wants Jesus to be the Davidic king. And people
are singing “Hosanna,” which means, “Save us now” or “Save us please!”
The evangelist Luke tells us that these people were disciples
and why they were convinced that Jesus is the king. He says, “As Jesus was
drawing near to Jerusalem, already on the way down the Mount of Olives, the
whole multitude of Jesus’s disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a
loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen.” The people were
convinced that Jesus was the king because of the miracles that he had done.
They believed this for good reason. Jesus fulfilled the Old
Testament prophecies about the coming Christ. Isaiah prophesied, for example,
that the Christ would open the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf would be
unstopped. The lame would leap like a dear that the tongue of the mute would
sing for joy. Jesus did all these things. So Jesus must be the king that they
had been waiting for. Having discovered that Jesus is this king is why they are
so happy on Palm Sunday. “Behold, your king is coming to you,” so “rejoice
greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!”
But let us fast-forward a few days after Palm Sunday. A few
days later Jesus is there. The word “king” is there. But the mood is altogether
different on Good Friday. Jesus was nailed to a cross. Above him a billboard
was commissioned by Pontius Pilate. The billboard said, “Here is Jesus of
Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” intending to mock him.
And Jesus, after crying out in a loud voice, after having
breathed his last, had the color drained from his face and body. Instead of
being a healthy and vibrant pink, his skin became greenish gray. His chest no
longer rose and fell with his breaths. He hung there limply and utterly
lifeless.
This was a horrible tragedy for those who believed in the
Jesus as King movement that seemed to have been going so well on Palm Sunday. A
great crowd of people had sung: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the
Name of the Lord.” Now their hopes were dashed. The man who was hanging
dead on the cross did not look like he was going to be making anymore people
leap like a dear or anymore mute people sign for joy. The writers of the
Gospels are clear about even the closest disciples, the apostles, losing their
faith. There is such a discordant note between the praises of Palm Sunday and
the sadness of Good Friday.
In a way the Jesus as king movement that had looked so
popular and up and coming on Palm Sunday never recovered. Even after the
resurrection and Jesus’s appearances to various disciples, we are told that
there were only about 120 disciples left. Only about 120 were meeting together
after Jesus’s ascension and before the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on
Pentecost. Where were the 5,000 who had been fed with the five loaves and the
two fish? Where were the 4,000? Where was the multitude rejoicing and shouting,
“Hosanna!” on Palm Sunday?
What happened is that they all came to the quite logical
conclusion that although they had hoped and believed that Jesus was the king, they
must have been wrong. That man they had believed in was crucified and died.
Dead kings can’t do much for anybody. These folks were probably resilient. They
probably just moved on to the next hope, the next dream for happiness and
fulfillment.
We can be a lot like those people too. Maybe we once
believed and hoped. Maybe we used to say from the bottom of our heart: “Save us
now, we pray!” but maybe it’s been a while since we prayed that. Or perhaps
we’ve moved on to other hopes and other dreams. It’s easy for Christians to put
into their back pocket: “Yes, yes, Jesus is king. That’s all well and good.
Everybody know that.” But now let’s get serious about what I really want out of
life: I want money, I want toys, I want popularity. Life is meant for being
happy—otherwise what good is life?
Thousands of one-time disciples of Jesus thought the same
way. They thought that Jesus was their meal ticket for bread, for independence,
for happiness. When Jesus died it appeared impossible that Jesus could continue
on in this way. What good is such a king then? Who needs him? What I need is
some more miracles. I could use some more of that bread. I could use a healing
or two. If he can’t do that, then what good is he? The assumption is that
because Jesus died, he can’t be a miracle worker anymore.
But Jesus didn’t stay dead, and he most certainly continues
to be as much of a miracle worker as he ever was. There is not a single promise
of God that has ever fallen to the ground. God keeps them all.
We must look at what happened to the king on Good Friday
differently than the great multitude who lost their faith in him. Jesus did not
cease to be the king when he was nailed to the cross and died. The billboard
that Pilate had fastened above his cross spoke the truth, even when Jesus was
stone-cold dead. Jesus the crucified is the king who died for you.
Jesus the king’s death is of the greatest possible
significance. By his death he destroyed the power of death. By the redemption
that Jesus wrought all of mankind is reconciled to God and put onto a new
footing. Through Adam sin entered into the world, and through sin, death. In
Jesus the grace of God, the righteousness of God is brought about for all
people. Jesus pulled out the roots of disease, decay, and death so that we may
attain final, perfect, and eternal healing.
We think we know what seeing is, but the only seeing we’ve seen
is this fallen and incomplete seeing. We think we know what hearing is.
Sometimes we hear beautiful, wonderful things! We haven’t heard nothing yet. In
general the only life that we have known is this fallen life. This fallen
earthly life is full of defects and diseases. We are in need of profound
healing!
By the death and resurrection of Jesus he has not become a
lesser miracle worker, but a greater miracle worker. His miracles are not a matter
of the past, locked away thousands of years ago, only to be known from books.
Jesus’s miracles are done now and will be done in the future.
Jesus forgives all of your sins now. Think of what a
tremendous thing that is! We talk about it so much that we forget how
extraordinary it is. Jesus forgives your sins. That means that God is not angry
with you. God is well pleased with you. Why? Because you’re such a great
person? No. If anything, you’ve probably not been all that different from the
disciples that we’ve been talking about who lost their faith in Jesus. God is
well pleased with you not because of anything that you’ve done, but because of
what Jesus has done as the great King. He died for you. He rose for you. You
are forgiven because of him. You may enjoy the miracle of having a good
conscience before God. The ruler of the universe is pleased with you for Jesus’s
sake. What are any of the miracles we hear about in the Bible compared to that?
There are more miracles that await us in the future. When we
die in Jesus, and when we are raised in Jesus, then we will know how Jesus does
all things well because great things will be done to us. No miracle and no
wonder that is recorded in Scripture compares to the healing, the cleansing,
the vitalization that is in store for you. The adventures of this life pale in
comparison to the adventures of those who live and die with faith in Jesus
their king. Paul says, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it even
entered into the imagination of the heart of man what God has prepared for
those who love him.” That means that no matter how hard we try to picture
heaven, we’re not even close. The eye, the ear, and the legs must become
infinitely stronger for the weight of glory that awaits us.
So if there’s something that I’d like you to remember from
this Palm Sunday sermon it is that Jesus, your king, is coming to you. The king
once entered Jerusalem with hosannas, loud hosannas. Behold, your king is
coming also to you. He comes to you not to do lesser miracles for you, but
greater miracles for you.
For good reason our ancient Christian liturgy has had us
Christians sing before the Lord’s Supper: “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the
highest. Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord!” We sing this
ancient song in preparation for our King coming to serve us with his body and
his blood in the Lord’s Supper. Jesus the king is coming to give us the food of
immortality, to forgive us —again, a much higher and profounder miracle than
any we ever hear about in the Gospels.
Behold, your king is coming to you. This is what the people
on Palm Sunday were so excited about. Jesus the king was coming to them. Now
Jesus, your king, is coming to you. Let us then rise and pray like the people
of old:
Hosanna! Save us now we pray! Amen!
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