Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – All Saints, 2022

1 Nov 2022 – All Saints Day

Text: Matt 21:1-22

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

On the heels of His closest followers squabbling over which of them were going to be King Jesus’ top advisors (Matt 20:21-28), His time has come to enter Jerusalem.  It is the time of His coronation.  And although Jesus has plainly told His disciples three times that it will not be what they envisioned – that He will be arrested, put to death, and rise again – they are still wrapped up in the excitement of the coming of the kingdom as they imagine it, rather than as He has revealed it.

Jesus is being received as the King.  He enters David’s Royal City as the “Son of David” – as two blind men in Jericho, whose vision He had restored, had just confessed before the “great crowd” (Matt 20:29-30).  And with a “great crowd,” our Lord dramatically enters Jerusalem in the same way as His ancestor King Solomon, the first son of David: borne through the gates “mounted on a donkey.”  This is how the Messiah was prophesied to come and establish the kingdom, as one of the final prophets Zechariah had written (Zech 9:9). 

When an event has changed the course of history, we often compare it to Julius Caesar “crossing the Rubicon.”  Caesar wrote, “The die is cast.”  His great gamble was now something that could not be undone.  But compared to the event of our Lord entering Jerusalem to be crucified for the sins of the world and to rise from the dead on the third day, the Royal Entry of Jesus makes Caesar seem, by comparison, to be a low-level government worker, the Rubicon to be a puddle, and the vast Empire to be ruled by Rome for centuries to be nothing more than a few forgotten ruins of marble dug up by treasure-hunters.  God does not toss dice.  He is in charge of the events of history as they play out.

For the crossing of the Gates of Jerusalem by the King of the Universe would not just change history, but rewrite the narrative of the universe.  We number our years not according to Caesar, but according to Christ.  Julius Caesar would also die violently at the hands those who would betray him, but in the end, his life ended in tragedy, whereas our Lord’s bloody death redeems the sins of the world, and He will also rise from His own death to take up His eternal reign at the right hand of the Father.

But on this original Palm Sunday, the Scriptures were fulfilled, even as the “great crowd” and the disciples are in a state of denial about the events to come, culminating one short week into the future – when their lives and the history of the world will be forever and irrevocably changed.  The children cried out: “Hosanna to the Son of David” to the annoyance of the chief priests and scribes.  Singing praise to our God and King is so natural that it is the children who are not deterred by adult expectations.  As the Psalmist prophesied, and as Jesus points out to the experts in the Scriptures: “Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” 

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”

 Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.