April 13, 2003
Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday, as many of you well know, marks the beginning of Holy
Week, the most holy time in the Christian calendar. In this one week, we
experience triumph and tragedy, crucifixion and resurrection, despair
and hope. And today, we also get to experience the paradox of this
week—we get to experience this Christ being celebrated and welcomed
by the same people who days from now will yell “Crucify him, Crucify
him!” On this day, they greet him as their ruler, as their Messiah and,
yet, days later they will condemn him to the punishment and death of a
common criminal. The crowds of Jerusalem during that tense Passover
time expected a certain kind of savior and when they are disappointed,
they quickly turn on him. This kind of Messiah, this kind of God will not
do. On this day, in this passage, we witness Jesus entering the city of
Jerusalem triumphant—he enters the city as the talk of the town, the
buzz of the moment, the Messiah of the season—the One who is going to
free the Hebrew people from the shackles of Roman rule. But before he
enters Jerusalem, he tells his disciples to go to the city and find a donkey
and a colt for him to ride on—and they do, in fact, return with both
animals. The writer of Mathew, as we have seen in the past few months
is always concerned with connecting important events in Jesus life to the
prophecies found in the Old Testament. And so Mathew quotes a
passage from the writings of the prophet Zechariah—“Tell the daughter
of Zion, Look your ruler is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a
donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Zechariah hints here that
this Savior will not be on a handsome horse with a victorious army
behind him, but that he will enter on a lowly donkey, with a ragtag,
unarmed group of followers. What a sight that must have been?!—this
Jesus entering into Jerusalem on a donkey. The people of Jerusalem
probably knew of the Zechariah passage and they knew what symbolism
was being played out in front of their eyes. They come out to greet his
arrival into the city and they lay their cloaks on the ground before him
and they tear branches from the trees to wave in his honor. They shout
in their expectation and in their hope, they yell these words: “Hosanna to
the Child of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the
Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” Its funny that we so often
associate the word “hosanna” with praise, but the word actually means
“save”—so, you see, when the people shout “Hosanna” they are really
calling for this Jesus to save them, to save them from Roman rule, from
the crushing and painful heel of Rome. They want this Jesus to save
them from the misery and humiliation of being just another insignificant
piece of the Roman Empire. The whole city of Jerusalem is abuzz with
this expectation—the Scripture says that Jerusalem was in turmoil with
expectation about this Messiah arriving in Jerusalem. FINALLY, the
Romans are going to get what they deserve and Israel will have its
sovereignty restored. But, you know, there is irony here, there is so
much irony here, because we as readers know that days later, the
crowds will turn on him. Only days from this triumphant entry into
Jerusalem, the crowds, the masses, greeting Jesus here will scream out
words of death—“Crucify him! Crucify him!” That’s the irony here—the
crowds don’t have patience with this kind of Messiah—a Messiah that
preaches peace, not war. By the time the crowds of Jerusalem scream
the words “Crucify him!” they will have heard him teaching in the temple
and they will have realized that he was going to disappoint them—he
wasn’t going to be that great military leader that many in Jerusalem had
hoped for that particular Passover. And yet, this was the Messiah that
God sent—this was how God chose to reveal Godself to Jerusalem. But
they are so disappointed with this Savior and they take out their anger
and disappointment when they unleash the ugly words “Crucify him!”
Now its easy to look down on the fickleness of Jerusalem—its easy to
condemn them for being fair-weather followers, but I think that would be
a mistake. Why? Because we are a lot more like the crowds in
Jerusalem than we would like to admit. We too have certain expectations
of who God is and how we should meet God and what God should do for
us. And we too are often just like the fickle crowds of Jerusalem—when
we are disappointed by God’s silence or by how God has chosen to act
in our lives—or by how by God has NOT chosen to act in our lives. Who
hasn’t been frustrated by the silence of God at certain points in our
lives? Who hasn’t expected a certain response from God, and, instead,
we got another answer altogether.
This disappointment was real for the citizens of Jerusalem—as real as it
has ever been in our lives.
You know, I think the reason the writers of the Gospels include the story
of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem is because we need to be
reminded that the God of our expectations may not be the God of
reality. We expect a certain kind of God, and instead, we get a God who
acts in such unexpected ways. The people of Jerusalem were expecting
a certain kind of Savior—a militant Messiah—but what they got was the
unexpected—instead, they get the Prince of Peace. When we waved our
palms a few minutes ago, just like the people of Jerusalem did so long
ago, who were we expecting to greet with our hosannas? What kind of
salvation were we asking for when we shouted our own hosannas?
We celebrate Palm Sunday because we too wish to welcome this Christ
into our lives—we identify with the crowds in Jerusalem as they welcomed
the Messiah into their presence. But there is a way that we shouldn’t
identify with the Jerusalem crowds. They expected a certain kind of
Messiah, they expected a different kind of God, and when they didn’t get
that kind of Messiah, that kind of God, they quickly turned on this One
from Nazareth. In that way, we don’t need to be like the people of
Jerusalem. Unlike the crowds we find in this passage, we—you and I—
we need to let God greet us in any way God chooses to greet us. We
need to realize that if there is anything
that we learn from the Gospel, it is this: THIS IS A GOD OF THE
UNEXPECTED, THIS IS A GOD WHO TURNS OUR EXPECTATIONS
UPSIDE DOWN, and offers us something more
than our expectations. You see, the God whom you and I are in
relationship with is greater than the God of our expectations—
just as the humble Jesus who enters the city of Jerusalem on the back of
a donkey is greater than the military conqueror they were hoping for.
The danger of our expectations about who God is, more often than not,
is that our expectations limit God and they limit how we think God should
greet us, or how God should work in our lives. The people of Jerusalem
decided that the Messiah would be a certain kind of Savior, and when
God offered something greater than their expectations, they rejected it.
So it is with us at times. We too want to put God in a box, and when God
acts outside of our little box, when God doesn’t live up to our
expectations, we walk away. But the reality is that you and I are in
relationship with a God of the unexpected—and our expectations are
always going to be less than what God has for us. Truly, we need to
shout with the people of Jerusalem “Hosanna to the Child of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the
highest heaven!” But unlike the crowds that greeted Jesus that day, we
need to expect to be surprised by how God chooses to greet us andhow
God chooses to save. If we do that, I have no doubt that we will spend
the rest of our lives in complete and total wonder. Amen and amen.
