Below is today's online worship from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. After that, you'll find the prepared text of the message for the day.
God bless you!
Matthew 21:1-11
A friend of ours was dying. She’d had a long battle with cancer and as I visited her in the hospital ICU, she said nothing most of the time. I thought for a while that she was unconscious. But it became clear that she knew I was there and that the morphine was doing little to ease her pain. At one point, she reacted to what was clearly a brutal stab of pain. “What can I do?” I asked her. “It just hurts so much,” was all she could say.
Within twenty-four hours, she had passed from this life and, knowing her faith in Christ, into the Savior’s loving arms.
But, as often happens in the face of such tragedy, everyone who knew my friend--her family, her co-workers, her friends--were left with questions.
What about all the prayers offered for her healing in Jesus’ name?
What about her friendship, virtues, talents, and wisdom now lost to us?
Had God abandoned her?
Had God abandoned us?
Was God impotent in the face of life’s deadly realities?
We ask questions like these often, especially today when, in the words of the old hymn, “despair engulfs earth’s frame.” Because of the coronavirus, many are more conscious today than they ever have been of the ongoing, daily primal battle between life and death, darkness and light, despair and hope.
In one form or another, the cry of the whole human race, shouted out to God by those who know Him through Jesus and by others who have no faith at all, is the same: “Save us! Help us! Deliver us from this evil! ”
We come today to Palm Sunday, also known as the Sunday of the Passion. The day commemorates both Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem days before His crucifixion and His passion when He would offer His sinless life as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
On that first Palm Sunday, the crowds in Jerusalem, unaware that by this time, Jesus has already predicted three times that He would be arrested, beaten, crucified, die, and rise from the dead, do know of the reports that Jesus has performed miracles and given people the hope that, at long last, this is the Messiah, the Christ, God’s anointed King, Who would set all things right, and meet their deepest needs.
As Jesus arrives, the crowds set branches down in His path, creating an ad hoc roadway of welcome. And, in a day when most people owned only one cloak, they lay their cloaks down before Him.
Jesus enters the city in the way that Zechariah had prophesied the Messiah would arrive in Jerusalem six centuries earlier: “See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9)
God’s people had suffered much.
And much of their suffering was self-inflicted, just as ours can be.
They had worshiped false gods like worldly success and power.
They had treated others unjustly, ignoring God’s command that they treat the immigrants among them with hospitality and love, developing ferocious prejudices against Samaritans and all Gentiles.
They exhibited religious snobbery, forgetting that they were not chosen by God to be His people as a light to the nations because they were better than anyone else, but simply because of God’s His grace, His charity.
But they had also suffered at the hands of other peoples and nations. They still were suffering at the hands of other peoples and nations.
They had been enslaved, conquered, forced to become refugees.
They had been robbed, exploited, pushed around, misused.
No wonder then, that as they see Jesus on what we now call Palm Sunday, they shout, “Hosanna [meaning, “Save us! Deliver us!”] to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
Here, at last, the people think, is the Messiah. Now, we needn’t suffer anymore. Now, the Romans can be sent packing. Now, God will use this Messiah to punch all our enemies in the nose and give us all that we want. Their despair, they believe, will at long last give way to hope.
But they are, of course, about to be disappointed, the way that you and I can be disappointed by God when He doesn’t do what we think He should.
Jesus hasn’t come to Jerusalem to conquer what the people see as their biggest problems.
Had Jesus done as the Palm Sunday crowds wanted, they all would have been free of the Romans, free of the dominion of other peoples, able to live in the land that God had given them.
But had Jesus chosen that course, they (and we) still would be slaves without hope: Slaves to sin. Slaves to death. Slaves to the darkness of eternal separation from God.
The crowd, like us much of the time, is playing a short game. They want benefits that, at best, can only last a lifetime. They want money, independence, good health, and times of ease now and they don’t want to change anything about themselves or submit to a Messiah Who they view as a kind of cosmic ATM, to get what they want.
They don’t want the Messiah to be their Lord, a Messiah who insists that the way to healing and wholeness is for us to die to ourselves and our sins so that we can embrace the life that only God can give to us, the life that God only offers us through this Messiah Jesus.
Jesus, by contrast, is playing the long game. He wants to bring us into the kingdom of God forever.
The Kingdom of God is the realm in which believers in Jesus Christ live even in this imperfect world.
It's the kingdom He gives to believers, in which we know that we are forgiven of our sin and that we are right with God for our faith in Jesus.
It's a kingdom that will only be brought to perfection when we, like Him, are raised by God the Father from the dead.
Friends, I have seen the kingdom of God, the hope of life with God most in places that most people might deem unlikely: in hospital ICUs, in funeral homes, in jails and prisons where men rightly paying society for their crimes nonetheless were filled with the light of eternity because of their repentance and their belief in Jesus.
In desperate moments, those who latch onto Jesus know what they really need.
Not money.
Not ease.
Not power.
They know they need what we need: Jesus.
Just Jesus.
Our real enemies are sin, death, and darkness. It’s these things Jesus goes to Jerusalem to conquer by His crucifixion and resurrection. And He does it for you and me!
The crowds in Jerusalem are largely uninterested in what Jesus offers to us: new life set free from ourselves, freedom to live with God forever.
This same disinterest exists today, even among some Christians.
As the gospel writer John says of Jesus and the reaction of the human race that He, God the Son, made: “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God…” (John 1:11-12)
The good news of Palm Sunday is that Jesus refuses to cave in to the expectations of the world.
He does the will of God the Father.
He pays the price for our sin.
He invites us into the kingdom of God for eternity.
In this kingdom, Christians live even when our lives aren’t comfortable.
Even when things don’t go as we hope.
Even when we have to walk away from sins we so desperately want to commit.
Even when our prayers aren’t answered as we want.
Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of coronavirus and death.
What Jesus goes on to do on Good Friday and Easter Sunday is our assurance that, no matter what happens to us in this life, God will meet the greatest needs we all have in Jesus.
He will forgive our sins.
He will give us the resurrection.
He will turn our despair into hope.
He will turn our mourning into laughter that never ends.
Amen
[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
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