A slight disclaimer: What follows is the basic text (minus the occasional digressions) of a sermon that I preached at Comox United Church, Comox, B.C. on April 10, 2022. It is not an essay. It is written to be spoken and in a manner that reflects my preaching style, which I suspect might be described as “informal.” Nor does it have the full assortment of citations, acknowledgements, and footnotes normally (and quite reasonably) expected in a more formal work. Please forgive the grammatical peculiarities!
Blessings
Phil Spencer
Luke 19:28-40 “Disappointed With Jesus?”
Over the last few weeks a number of us have been reflecting on Janet Gear’s Theological Banquet, which is a series of videos to help us grow in our capacity to have conversations about what we believe and how we might serve together in pursuit of the mission of the church. Amongst the things we’re trying to learn is how we each might have some different expectations of how we function together, because we usually do arrive with differing beliefs, and I would hope, complimentary approaches. I think Palm Sunday’s a good example of the danger inherent in some of the expectations we can bring.
“After he had said this ….” That’s how our Gospel reading for today began … “After he’d said this …” and we’ll be needing to come back to that. But for the moment, let’s just leave that, and look at the next part of that opening verse, which reads, “After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.” Now, the backstory to that statement is this: Jesus and a dozen and probably more of his disciples are on their way to Jerusalem, which is where they’ll celebrate the Passover, the yearly commemoration and celebration of how God had decisively acted to free God’s people from slavery and oppression in Egypt, that liberation being something that they just couldn’t do on their own, there needing to a significant intervention by God. Pilgrims from all over were converging on Jerusalem, making their way to the Holy City for this celebration of the central story of the Jewish people: God freeing them. Estimates of the numbers of pilgrims who’d be making that trek in Jesus’ time vary—I’ve seen everything from 50,000 people to 2 million—so I’m not sure what the number actually was, but what I do know is that the city had to have been overflowing with all manner of people from all around the Mediterranean world. It was surely a place that was bubbling with excitement, with religious and nationalistic fervour, for it was about freedom and being a free people, a nation formed by God and celebrating Passover in Jerusalem was something that the faithful tried hard to observe.
I used to have a large and old map of Israel hanging on the wall in my office before I retired. It was produced in the 1890’s—and it used to belong to my mother-in-law who used it when she taught in the Catholic school system. It was kind of cool because it was a 3D map—you can see and even feel all the elevations and depressions—the physical contours that make up the countryside of Israel—and one of the things that’s immediately obvious is that when we read in the Scriptures (like we did this morning) about “going up to Jerusalem,” you actually did have to go up to Jerusalem. In the previous chapter we read that Jesus had been in the ancient city of Jericho, which is near the Jordan River, and located about 250 metres below sea level. Jerusalem, however, is about a thousand metres higher than that, and so Jesus and company clearly had to do some climbing in elevation to get to their destination. Pilgrims to Jerusalem would traditionally sing some Psalms as they neared the Holy City. There were 15 Psalms referred to as “Songs of Ascents ("Songs of Going Up”) and they’d be sung along the way as they walked up the paths and roads.1 Our Psalm reading today—Psalm 118, while not one of the Songs of Ascents, is a song of thanksgiving—and it could well have been sung as the faithful entered into the Temple. I can easily imagine them calling out, “O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!” and “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the LORD.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d point as they called out, “This is the gate of the LORD; the righteous shall enter through it.” It would be a fitting song to sing at journey’s end, though I’m not sure if they sang that lyric, verse 22: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” On the other hand, it surely does seem to fit with our journey to this point in the Lenten season, doesn’t it? That rejection of the cornerstone is but 5 days away and some of the roots of that rejection are found in today’s events.
Luke tells us that Jesus and friends had come near the communities of Bethphage and Bethany which makes sense because they’re located just a few kilometres east of Jerusalem, which would mean he’d likely have to pass through them coming from Jericho—they’d be “on the way” and he’d come to the Mount of Olives, a ridge just to the east of the capital city. It’s here that he instructs two of the disciples to head into the village in front of them to find and bring back a colt that’s never been ridden, the term “colt” being a reference to either a horse or a donkey in this context, though when Matthew shares this story he clarifies that it’s a donkey, making certain we readers see this as a fulfilment of the Messianic prophecy made by Zechariah some 500 years before. Jesus gives very specific instructions as to what to do if anyone questions their actions, if anyone wants to know why they’re taking the animal. If they’re stopped, they’re to say, “The Lord needs it.” Sure enough, someone does stop them, and they say what they’re instructed to, and as they’d been told, they’re free to return with the colt. I admit that I’ve always found this to be a rather mysterious element of the story, that is until I ran across a wise and practical Biblical commentator who suggested that it was likely just something Jesus arranged beforehand. After all, this is all taking place within a very short walking distance from Mary, Martha, and Lazarus’ home in Bethany and the Gospels suggest that he’d been there a number of times, so the opportunity was there to make the appropriate arrangements for the foreseeable moment when Jesus would be required to confront the powers that be.
So, they put some cloaks on the beast’s back and Jesus saddles up and heads the now short distance into the city from the Mount of Olives. When Matthew and Mark tell this story they both describe how some people spread their cloaks on the ground in front of Jesus, and others cut and placed palm branches on the road before him, but curiously, in Luke there’s no mention of palms—just cloaks—prompting some to suggest that once every three years when we read the story from Luke that maybe we should call this “Cloak Sunday.” Or maybe not.
The crowd is definitely getting up for Jesus’ arrival—Matthew says everyone was getting excited and calling out, though the Gospel-writer Luke notes that it’s “the whole multitude of disciples” who call out—oddly only the disciples get mentioned, for some reason. Anyway, those disciples “began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power they had seen” and they call out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!,” which is a variation of verse 26 of the Psalm reading for today, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD.” When Matthew and Mark recount this event, they remember the whole crowd calling out “Blessed is the Son of David” and “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.” It’s a line that the Church has traditionally incorporated into our prayers when we have communion in the part referred to as the Sanctus:
Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.
We sang it here last Sunday. And also, “Hosanna”—Mark and Matthew include that cry of the crowd—hosanna, which means, “Save us!” So, it seems that there’s a bit of Palm Sunday—a bit of welcoming—in our celebration of communion. But again, Luke’s just a little different and the difference is important because it makes clear something that’s at the heart of what’s happening in all the Gospel-writer’s telling of the story for this is the most obviously political of all of the Sundays we celebrate on the Christian calendar. It’s about who is ultimately in charge—it’s about power and who has it, and politics is all about the application of power. Luke says the disciples yelled out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The Greek word he uses here is basileús which means sovereign, prince, king. Blessed is the Sovereign One who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna! Save us!
The people—and that includes Jesus’ friends, the disciples—they wanted a monarch. They wanted a leader to save them, to save them from their Roman occupiers, to save them from the influence of what they perceived to be a godless world that was being thrust upon them and was seemingly interfering with the faith they held. They desperately wanted—desperately needed—a Messiah to deliver them from this terrible situation they found themselves in. God had done just that some 200 years before, if I remember rightly. The crowd, they certainly remembered Judas Maccabeus, the Jewish priest who’d led an uprising that had successfully expelled the Seleucid Empire, that Greek empire who’d occupied Israel, they remembered Maccabeus, who’d pushed the pagans out of the Temple, they were looking for another hero to do just the same. And when Maccabeus had come to the city … yes, the people had waved—you guessed it—palm branches. The day that Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, just on the brink of Passover, the people were again looking for freedom, and the disciples were looking for freedom, and they were all reasonably expecting a king, a powerful political leader to bring it about.
I began this morning by quoting the first verse and saying we’d come back to it—and we now will. Our Gospel reading began with: “After he’d said this …” and that raises the question, “After he’d said what?” Curious, I looked back and discovered a parable that Jesus told—one very similar to the famous Parable of the Talents found in Matthew 25, and one I referenced last week. This one, often referred to as The Parable of the Pounds features a nobleman who leaves sums of money in the hands of his servants while he leaves to go to another country to receive royal power. Upon his return having successfully got that royal power, he summons the servants and they proceed to give back the money plus what they’ve managed to earn with it through some sort of investment or trade. To those servants who made some money the king rewards them, but to the one who just gives back the original amount because he’d hidden it because he’d been afraid to lose it and the king erupts in anger and goes on rather colourfully and dramatically about how he’d punish those who’d crossed him. Now that story was about a political leader—that was a leader that people could understand! That’s who they were expecting. This was a king who got things done, and power was used … powerfully, coercively.
On Palm Sunday the disciples and the people were excited at the hope they had in this possible Messiah from the Galilean countryside, after all, he was clearly a prophet who spoke out on the themes of liberation of the oppressed, someone who worked miracles, healed, commanded nature, who called out the powers of church and state, who preached about freedom! But somehow, by the end of the week there was nothing left but deep disappointment, disappointment with who Jesus really turned out to be. They were expecting a ruler who’d free them from the burden and the shame of an oppressor named “Rome” and were disappointed with someone who’d free them from the burden and the shame of an oppressor whose influence and power makes Rome to be, at best a mere footnote, an historical backdrop. Jesus completely turned our notion of power on its head. And I confess that I’ve always struggled with understanding how the crowd turned on Jesus, how one of the disciples actually betrayed him, and how the others proved themselves to be deniers and cowards. Really, how could they be so fickle? But then I look in the mirror and it makes some sad sense.
Have you ever been disappointed with Jesus? I know I have. You have this picture of who he is and what his intentions are for you, what you’re expecting, hoping that God will do and for some reason, God doesn’t. You come looking for clear and simple answers in a complex world, seeking security or prosperity, looking for freedom from pain, wanting affirmation for who I am, seeking healing from affliction, looking for surety and loss of doubt, or—as our text for today demands that we consider finding the political muscle together to finally set this world right. And we know what’s right, don’t we? You might even see signs that you’re in the right place—encounter some examples of others who’ve received … something … and you could even get some needs met. Then … disappointment, the realization the God might actually be up to something else, something more, may be calling us in a much different direction than what actually brought us to Jesus in the first place.
Today is Palm Sunday, the day when we may just start to see that the King isn’t actually us and our expectations. The disappointing news, and the very good news is this: Jesus Christ is sovereign, and this journey we’re on with him—as this week will surely illustrate—it will inevitably take us to some unexpected places. Thanks be to God. Amen