The Royal Entrance
Passage Luke 19:28-48
Speaker Cavan Wood
Service Evening
Series Easter Hope with Dr. Luke
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28 After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, 30 ‘Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” say, “The Lord needs it.”’
32 Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. 33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’
34 They replied, ‘The Lord needs it.’
35 They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. 36 As he went along, people spread their cloaks on the road.
37 When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:
38 ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!’
‘Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’
39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’
40 ‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.’
41 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it 42 and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes. 43 The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. 44 They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognise the time of God’s coming to you.’
45 When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. 46 ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘“My house will be a house of prayer”; but you have made it “a den of robbers”.’
47 Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him. 48 Yet they could not find any way to do it, because all the people hung on his words.
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.
And let us pray. Father, we thank you for your word. Thank you for its power to us. Help us to reflect on the meaning of this story. Help us to be challenged by it and to be filled by your spirit, to live it out in our day to day lives.
Amen.
I don't know if you've ever met a celebrity. I'm really bad at it. When I've bumped into people who are even vaguely famous, I get a bit tongue tied. And people will tell you that when I've tried to do selfies, I end up inadvertently video calling people rather than actually just taking a plain, safe selfie. Now, meeting a celebrity is one thing.
What has really struck me. So I'm not going to name any celebrities because half the audience, you won't know them, and half of the audience will be really impressed. So I'm just thinking of two people in my mind who I've met recently who were vaguely famous in the they happened to be Christians. And what struck me about them was their humility. They engaged with me and talked to me about my life and my experiences.
They didn't just tell me about how great they were and that I thought was really impressive. Humility is right at the heart of this passage. When Jesus comes into Jerusalem on a donkey, yes, he does come to announce the power of the kingdom of God. But think about it. It's a donkey.
It's not the most elegant of creatures. I believe there's a G. K. Chesterton poem about that poor donkey.
A caesar of Jesus' day would have come with chariots and horsemen and battalions. But Jesus comes into Jerusalem in a humble way, seeking to be a servant of his father, living out a prophecy from Zechariah nine about the Messiah coming into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. It's not about his own sense of worth. It's about what God has called him to do. It's about living out that he is a humble servant.
Know, as Jesus comes into Jerusalem, the two of the temptations that he faced earlier on are being right there again. He could have easily fallen for two of the temptations. There's the temptation to do a miracle. Luke has it that there were a group of people there who wanted to follow Jesus because they were really impressed when they had seen his miracles. So there was a temptation to just, let's do another miracle immediately to impress people.
There was the temptation to turn this into a political event and to seize power, to make the Messiah the kind of political leader that the disciples really are still struggling with. They still kind of think Jesus is that kind of messiah. And they're gradually being taught that he's a different type of leader, that he comes to lead and to serve. So he comes in great humility. The response of the crowd is worship.
They sing, they celebrate, and as Antonia said, they use words from the psalms. As Jesus is coming towards Jerusalem, they're excited and excitable. This is a crowd that is full of people determined to hear what Jesus has to say and to celebrate. Perhaps they don't even really understand the power of what they're saying when they say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. I don't really get it yet.
Crowds can be enormously powerful. Meetings of people.
I'm not a great sportsman, but the times I've been to Wembley Stadium have normally been to see somebody sing or perform. And when you are a large crowd singing, it's really powerful, really powerful. And I've often thought, if you're a songwriter and then you just stop singing, and the whole crowd is singing back your song, there's a powerfulness to that, isn't there? So they are rejoicing, they're a powerful crowd. They're singing, they're worshipping.
But do they yet fully understand what they have in front of them? No, they don't. They grab hold of the palms to celebrate, to praise Jesus. They worship. But they haven't quite yet understood what Jesus is about.
They're still thinking that perhaps he's going to launch some kind of bid for power, and he has to show them during the week that it isn't about political power here. This is about the power of God to change and transform lives. They quote and they sing scripture, but they don't quite yet get it. And that is true of us sometimes that we are able to quote scripture, we are able to sing God's praises, but we don't fully understand the purposes of God. And sometimes some of those purposes are quite difficult.
Many of us may have been reading the book recommended on lamentations during Lent. And the big theme of that is, how do you deal when there are those moments of suffering or difficulty or confusion that don't make obvious sense? How do you deal with that? Well, you need to know the Lord that you're following. You need to know the power that he can bring.
True worship is a bit like a muscle. It needs to be practised. We need to come together for worship, and we also need to make worship key to who we are. Worship isn't just our service here this evening. Worship is actually all that we do and say and live to Christ's glory.
And we need to meet together so that we can get rid of some of those ideas we might have that are not really from God or from scripture. So we meet to refine each other as he works in us by his spirit. So those people worshipping, worshipping. But do they truly see it yet? Probably not.
But let's not be too judgmental, because even though we know much more of the story than they do, we don't know everything about God and his purposes and his love. This morning I was in a church and I was struck by one man's prayer in particular. And he said this. He said, right, just help us to do what you want us to do. I thought that was great, because quite often when I go to prayer or to worship, I've come with my shopping list of what I know I'm doing in the next week, and can God please bless this?
But he started the other way around. He was saying, what can I do? Not this is what I'm going to do, but what can I do for you? Now those things can match and marry. But it was a sign of that man's humility that he started from, what does God want me to do?
You see, Palm Sunday is the culmination of a long period of thinking and reflection. This has been planned, this has been thought through. The moment has come. And there are moments in our lives when things have to change. And I suppose the trick, not really a trick, but the spiritually mature person can know when that time is that you can live in a certain way.
And then things have to change. So you have to go for a new job, you have to end a relationship. Something has to change.
Palm Sunday was thought about. It was planned. It was there in jesus' mind, perhaps from the very beginning of his ministry, as he began to realise what it involved. And then in Luke, he talks about turning his face towards Jerusalem, deliberately going to fulfil God's purpose. So there is some planning, there is some thoughtfulness here.
There's a fulfilment of prophecy. As I've said from Zechariah, Jesus knows what he's doing. The disciples are still not really clear what's going on, and they're going to find the week very tough, but they will understand it on that Easter Sunday, or begin to understand it then. Also in our passage, we have the moment when Jesus actually weeps over Jerusalem.
There's a compassion here. He knows that in a few years time, about 40 years or so, under 40 years from when he's speaking, Jerusalem will be destroyed by the Romans. They will tear it to the ground. And he weeps over that situation. He knows that there is going to be difficult times ahead for his country and for his people.
He is weeping for a broken world, a world that he will go to die for on Good Friday. We need as Christians to make sure that our hearts don't become callous and don't become unmoved by the powerful images we may see on our TV screens of war and famine and disaster. Recently, the film 20 Days in Maripol won the Oscar. It's a harrowing account by some documentary makers about the first 20 days or so of the ukrainian war. It made me understand war in a war in a way that I've never understood it before, and it did greatly move me.
Now, I'm not necessarily recommending it for everybody because it's very heavy stuff, but are you constantly moved by the things that you see that you should be moved by? Are you weeping as Jesus weeps? Moved as Jesus would be, by the lack of compassion, the lack of justice, the lack of righteousness that there is. So Jesus' compassion comes at us, and also something sometimes quite difficult for english people of a certain disposition to cope with. And that is anger.
There is a righteous anger that we see in this passage, too. When Jesus goes to the temple, he cannot stand what he is seeing there. The abuse of the buyers and sellers in the temple. They are exploiting, particularly poor, pious people in what they're selling for sacrifice. They are going against the teachings of Isaiah and Jeremiah that he quotes at them.
Jesus cannot bear that in this place, which should be about purity and righteousness, people are putting their own selfish desires above others and exploiting the goodwill of other people. So he has to confront them with the truth. And the truth will upset people, and the truth will cost you if you have to speak the truth to somebody. And the truth has a time, this is the right time for Jesus to speak about what is going wrong in that temple. And the truth here has an authority, because it isn't just rooted in some kind of own personal fit of peak.
This is actually the son of God confronting human beings, abusing a place that is sacred to God, and abusing other people. Truth is really difficult for us to live with. When I was a student, one of the popular cliches was to say, I'm going to go and speak to somebody, and I'm going to speak the truth in love. Now, what this basically meant was the person you were going to go and speak to had slightly annoyed you, but you were going to jazz it up a bit and make it a spiritual thing and say, I think, brother or sister, that the fact that you stole my tea bags, or whatever it was, is a sign. Or the fact that you were quite annoying at that party or whatever it was.
Now, that isn't what speaking the truth in love is about. It isn't about we find people slightly annoying and we tell them off and we pretend it's got something to do with God, when actually it's our lack of patience, not necessarily from God. Speaking the truth in love is confronting difficult situations and saying, what truly loving situation would be. So for here for Jesus to go to the temple, the loving thing would be not for the people to abuse the poor and the wanting to find God by putting ridiculous, dickless limits on them. So I have four challenges that come at us from this passage, I think, and I've forgotten totally, to use my PowerPoint, and I forgot this.
Could you get to the last bit where I've got four beads? That's the one. Thank you very much. Well found. Right, okay, so here are some challenges.
Now, we cannot live any of these out, apart from in the power of God. So that's why I put it right there at the bottom. But for me, this passage is about, firstly, it's about humility. Christ could have come into Jerusalem on a mega warhorse with mega chariots and could have boasted about his power. He actually comes as a humble servant king.
And if humility is good enough for the son of God, then it is certainly good enough for each of us. And that means that we don't become proud and obsessed with our own rightness as a person. We look to God. We should be worshipping people. Worship starts in us, directing our hearts towards God.
And it is something that we may do by worship here today in singing, in prayer, in silence, whatever it might be. But it doesn't stop here. This is the beginning of your service this week for God, not the end of it for us. It's also about being compassionate. It's about learning to cry and to be moved.
Now, if all we do is to be moved by the plight of others, that's an improvement. But I think, too, we're called in some way to find different ways for each of us to do something about that. So it may be to pray for somebody, it may be to give to something, it may be to go to camel Felix in a few months time, whatever it might be, to actively show that compassion that's rooted in our love for God. And it's also about being a truth teller, not being prepared to put up with the lies and injustice we see around us. Our God.
Our God is about truth and light, and we need to live that out as his people.
Let us pray.
Father, help us to be humble. Help us to be worshipping, compassionate, and to tell the truth in the power of the spirit. We thank you for what was accomplished on Palm Sunday and all that follows in the Holy week to come. Amen.