The Bible Lessons:
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 31:9-16
Philippians 2:5-11
2. Matthew 21:1-11
General Comments:
1. We'll be celebrating this coming Sunday as Palm Sunday, rather than as the Sunday of the Passion. We'll remember the Passion in its entirety on Good Friday, when we'll consider John's account of Jesus' Passion (His suffering and death).
2. Still, there is more than a few hints that Jesus will suffer and die in the events of Palm Sunday. The biggest hint is found in the welcome Jesus was given when He entered Jerusalem on the Sunday before His arrest. He was treated like a conquering military hero, something that totally ignored all that He had said about Himself. For people who wanted a political and military messiah who would throw out the Romans and rid them of their tax burdens, Jesus was bound to disappoint. Jesus wanted the people to come to terms with the fact that our biggest problems in life aren't "those people," but them...their sin, their selfishness, their impotence, their rebellion against the God they needed. No wonder they killed Jesus. To this day, we face every day, the same choice confronted by the crowd on the first Palm Sunday...whether to receive Him as the God over our lives or to kill Him.
Comments on Each of the Lessons
1. Isaiah 50:4-9a: A little background on Isaiah, from a pass I presented here in late November:
Isaiah was a prophet who lived in Judah (or Judea) during the eighth century BC. (For background information on Judah, the "southern kingdom," go here.)2. Chris Haslam, who, it should be noted, takes the three-author theory of Isaiah as the truth, has some interesting thoughts on this passage:
The Archaeological Study Bible says:Isaiah's primary ministry was to the people of Judah, who were failing to live according to the requirements of God's law. But he prophesied judgment not only upon Judah but also upon Israel [the Northern Kingdom, whose worship life centered on the city of Samaria] and the surrounding nations. On the other hand, Isaiah delivered a stirring message of repentance and salvation for any who would turn to God.The authorship of Isaiah is debated by Biblical scholars. Traditionally, the entire book was attributed to Isaiah.
By contrast, some scholars think that Isaiah had very little to do with it, that the writings were produced by a group of prophets who operated in the original Isaiah's "school of thoughts."
A third group of scholars believe that chapters 1 to 39 were written by Isaiah, son of Amoz. They attribute chapters 40-55 to a second Isaian prophet they refer to as "Deutero-Isaiah" and chapters 56-66 to a third author, who they call "Trito-Isaiah." Whatever the truth about authorship, two things should be kept in mind:
- Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Christians and Jews have always seen in Isaiah the Word of God.
- Those in the ancient Near East didn't share our views regarding authorship. It was considered perfectly legitimate for an author operating within the tradition established by a prophet or a rabbi to write in the name and the voice of that person.
The part of Isaiah written in exile (Chapters 40-55) contains four servant songs, sections that interrupt the flow of the book but have a unity within themselves. The first (42:1-7) begins “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen ...”; in the second (49:1-7) the servant, abused and humiliated, is commissioned anew; in the third (our passage) he is disciplined and strengthened by suffering; and in the fourth (52:17-53:12) even the Gentiles are in awesome contemplation before the suffering and rejected servant. In late Judaism, he was seen as the perfect Israelite, one of supreme holiness, a messiah. In the gospels, Jesus identifies himself as the servant (or slave), the one who frees all people.3. As I've indicated before, one good way to get the gist of a passage is to paraphrase it, put it in our own words. Here's how I've paraphrased our lesson from Isaiah this week:
In vv. 4-6, God has “opened my ear”; he has commissioned the servant as one who is taught, i.e. like a disciple. God has made him a “teacher” (a prophet) of the “word” of God, to bring God’s comfort to “the weary”, his fellow Israelites – who reject God. He has accepted this command: he is not “rebellious”. They have tortured him (v. 6), as they did prophets before him, but he has accepted their “insult and spitting”. In vv. 7-9a, in courtroom language, the servant says that, because God helps him, he is not disgraced; he confidently accepts the suffering (“set my face like flint”), and will not be put to shame. God will prove him right (“vindicates”, v. 8). He is willing to face his “adversaries”, his accusers – for the godly to “stand up together” with him against the ungodly. He is confident that, with God’s help, none will declare him guilty.
Every day, God wakes me up. "Get up," God says, "There are things you must have down cold so that you can teach others." I listen, so that with a single word from God, I can encourage those with flagging faith and weak wills.4. Psalm 31:9-16: One of the things that won me over from atheism to Jesus Christ some three decades ago was the Bible's realism. The Bible's men and women of faith--people like Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Naomi, David, and others--weren't perfect. They had crises of faith and they did wrong. Their stories are told without being sanitized.
When God wakes me, I don't bury my head on the pillow or wallow in the everyday concerns of life. And I don't yell at God like rebellious children refusing to get up when their parents call them to the breakfast table.
Instead, I became a real rebel, a rebel against the world's ways of doing things. I didn't strike back when the world struck me; I just turned the other way. When people pulled my beard on one side of my face, I gave them the other side. I didn't cover myself when they insulted me or spat on me.
God helps me and so I can incur such dishonor. God helps me and I am intent on doing God's will! God helps me and relying on Him alone for my honor is never a shameful thing!
One day, God will affirm that the course I've followed--the course that the world has scorned and insulted--is the One God set for me, set for all.
Who will adopt this way of life? Walk with me!
Who will stand against me? Let's have it out right now!
No matter what the world says or does, God is my helper! Who will dare to call, "Guilty!" those the Lord calls, "Guiltless!"?
I also love the realistic wrestling that people of faith engage in on the pages of the Bible. Job lashes out at God for his string of tragic misfortune. Moses doubts God during the wilderness wanderings. Abraham, not once but twice, palms his wife off as his sister, making her the concubine of kings, fearful that if the kings learned he was Sarah's husband, God would stand idly by as he was executed. Peter sticks his foot in his mouth...repeatedly
In the Psalms, we have songs of worship like the one from which our lesson is drawn. Here, the psalmist cries out for help in fearful circumstances. It isn't easy to follow God. But here, the psalmist declares confidence in God's help even in the face of hard times.
5. Philippians 2:5-11: Philippians is one of the most extraordiary books of the New Testament. It's a letter written by the apostle Paul to the church in the Greek city of Philippi. Paul founded the church, with the help of his traveling companions, during his second missionary journey, recorded in Acts 16:11-40. The letter was written in about 61AD in Rome, where Paul was a prisoner for his faith in Jesus Christ.
In spite of Paul's grim circumstances, the letter is filled with joy. That joy is rooted in Jesus Christ, Paul says.
6. In our lesson, Paul urged the Philippians to interact with one another with humility. Humility is a repudiation of selfishness and conceit, an embrace of mutual encouragement and servanthood. "Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit," Paul writes in the verses just before those of our lesson appear, "but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others."
This is subversive stuff. We all recoil at the selfishness we see in others. Yet we tend to rationalize that our selfishness is okay. But if everybody always looks out for number 1, chaos ensues, as we see in an American society that puts a high premium on indivdualism.
The call to follow Jesus is a call to think less of me, to think of God and others.
7. And as our lesson demonstrates, in calling us to love God supremely and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, God isn't calling us to do any more than He Himself has done in Jesus Christ.
8. The words of our lesson probably were the lyrics of a song the early Church sang when it worshiped together.
9. Matthew 21:1-11: It's interesting to note that this lesson begins on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, the very road on which Jesus set His fictional parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story, Jesus told about what happened to a man who was traveling in the opposite direction. The road was filled with rocky crags and hiding places and thieves often used it to terrorize travelers. It was an ominous place and may suggest, in a literary sense, the "ambush" that awaits Jesus in Jerusalem.
10. Each of the accounts of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday differs. For example, only John mentions palms. (Mark does speak of "leafy branches" as well as cloaks. Luke talks only about people's cloaks. Matthew speaks of cloaks and "cut branches.") Irrespective of the Gospels' differences however, Jesus is welcomed like a conquering hero.
11. However, Jesus' mode of transportation should have indicated something of His intentions. If Jesus had martial intentions, He would have entered the city on a steed. Instead, Jesus chose to ride into the holy city on a donkey, a symbol of peace, of the homely pursuits of everyday life untouched by military power plays.
12. The disciples and the crowd hail Jesus as the rightful heir of David. "Hosanna" is a Hebrew word meaning, "Save now." The word was customarily used in the liturgy for the Feast of Tabernacles, the Jewish festival of the harvest. (This is the word found in Psalm 118:25, quoted here by the crowd.)
13. The last verse of the Gospel lesson sets us up for what follows. Despite their acclamations, the crowd still doesn't "get" Jesus. The most they can say of Him as that He is a prophet. They have little notion that He has come to do battle with their sins. They only see Him as the instrument of their selfish, self-centered desires. Their disappointment with Jesus will lead the crowds, in just a few days, to call for His blood.
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