Sermon: Palmarum (Lent 6) – 2023

2 April 2023

Text: John 12:12-19 (Matt 26:1-27:66, Zech 9:9-12, Phil 2:5-11)

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Hosanna!  Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!

Today is Palm Sunday, when we remember our Lord’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, being welcomed as a King with Hosannas.  But today is also Passion Sunday, where we flash forward to what is to come later in this Holy Week.  For we cannot separate our Lord’s kingdom from His passion.  We cannot look to Jesus on His throne in glory at the right hand of the Father without calling to mind His being on the cross crying out to the Father, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?”

For indeed, our Lord is a King, but He is a different kind of King.  He wields power, but a different kind of power.  He destroys His enemies, but does so with a different kind of destruction.  And as He told Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world.” 

And even as we flash forward to our Lord’s arrest, trials, tortures, crucifixion, death, and burial, we also flash back to the prophet Zechariah, who prophesied this royal entry of the Son of David more than five hundred years before.  We also flash forward to our own time, when we consider what all of this means for us, dear friends.

Zechariah bids us to “rejoice greatly,” because our “king is coming” to us.  He is “humble and mounted on a donkey.”  The Messiah will not ride on a steed of war, but will enter David’s royal city like David’s eldest son, King Solomon, who rode his father’s donkey as a sign of his legitimate rule as king.  For the Christ will come, also a Son of David, and He will replicate this royal ride into Jerusalem.  Our Lord’s disciples “did not understand these things at first,” says St. John, our Lord’s closest friend, “but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about Him and had been done to Him.” 

One thing Zechariah did not prophesy was that the Messiah would ride into Jerusalem just after raising a man from the dead.  For this is our King, dear friends.  He is a different kind of King.  He is a King that dies in order to raise the dead.  And the crowd “continued to bear witness” about Lazarus being raised, even as they followed their King to Jerusalem: “Hosanna!  Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”

But not everyone is ready to receive Him as King.  The Pharisees grumble.  And they will indeed conspire and “plot together” with Caiaphas, the elders, the scribes, the chief priests, the Council, and one of Jesus’ own disciples: the traitor Judas – not to mention the Roman authorities – all in a futile attempt not to bend the knee to their King.  For as St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, because Jesus is God “in human form,” who “humbled Himself” even by “death on a cross,” therefore “at the name of Jesus,” the “name that is above every name,” “every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.” 

This means, dear friends, that in time, all will acknowledge their King, even those who conspired to kill Him.  They will find out too late that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of David, and the Son of God.  And for this reason, we must “have this mind among” ourselves, to be humble.  For our only boast is in Jesus, our King, and not in ourselves. 

Our Passion account begins with Jesus reminding His disciples about the Passover.  This is not just an annual holiday to get a few days off work, dear friends.  This is the annual remembrance of the Lord’s deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt, a passing over of death because of the blood of the Passover Lamb.  And as John the Baptist prophetically declared, Jesus is the “Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.”  This Passover is the fulfillment of all of the Passovers in history.  It is to be the last one, the real one, the one that Jesus fulfills at the cross.  And we receive this New and Greater Passover in the Lord’s Supper, in which we eat the flesh of the Passover Lamb and drink His blood, so that the angel of death passes over us, dear brothers and sisters.

But even as Jesus is planning to transform the Passover, His enemies are plotting to “arrest Jesus by stealth and kill Him.”  They don’t realize that they are part of the plan.  The Jewish priests are making their one last sacrifice, the sacrifice that will save the world.  Like their ancestor Joseph prophesied, they meant it for evil, but God used it for good.

And so the Lord shares His last, and His first, Passover meal with His disciples.  “Take, eat, this is My body,” says Jesus.  “Drink of it, all of you, for this is My blood of the covenant… for the forgiveness of sins.”  And even as the Lord has given us this gift of life, one of the Twelve delivered Jesus unto death.

Our Lord is arrested and put on trial before Caiphas, who seeks liars to falsely testify about Jesus.  While committing blasphemy himself, this false high priest accuses the real High Priest of “blasphemy.”  And here we also see Peter deny Jesus, and Judas repent of betraying Jesus.  But Judas’s repentance is in vain.  His sorrow will not save him.  He should have sought forgiveness from Jesus, from God, and not from the chief priests.  For they offer him no forgiveness, even as the Law does not forgive us today, dear friends.  When we repent, we must turn to Jesus in according to the Gospel.  St. Peter will receive such forgiveness after Jesus rises from the dead. 

Next, the Jews bring Jesus to Pilate, the Roman governor.  For they cannot put Jesus to death themselves.  Only their Roman overlords can administer the death penalty.  Our Lord’s trial before Pilate is amazing.  Pilate knows that He is innocent, but is powerless to release Him.  Even the might of the Roman Empire is unable to veer from the Lord’s plan to being Jesus to the cross to save us.  Pilate gives his verdict of “innocent,” but then allows Him to be crucified anyway.  Who has ever heard of such a thing?

The Roman soldiers play their part by confessing Jesus as King, even though it is in mockery, at least for now.  They too will truly bend the knee and confess Him to be Lord.  As Jesus hangs on the cross, the chief priests speak prophetically: “He saved others, He cannot save Himself.”  And they speak the truth.  For in saving us, Jesus does not save Himself.  He does this willingly.  He is a different kind of King, dear friends.  Instead of ordering his people to die for Him, He dies for His people. 

And there is darkness at noon.  Who has ever heard of such a thing?  Confused bystanders think that Jesus is calling for Elijah to save Him.  They don’t recognize that He is praying Psalm 22 in the Aramaic language.  He dies.  His enemies gloat, not realizing that they have just been defeated.  Satan’s head has been crushed.  Sin has been atoned for.  Death has been destroyed once and for all.  The final Passover Lamb has been sacrificed at the final Passover.  The true High Priest has offered Himself for the sins of the world.  The King has been crowned and enthroned, and His rule is eternal.  But to those watching, this looks like Jesus has been conquered, even as the world appears very strange at that moment. 

The temple curtain mysteriously rips in two “from top to bottom.”  In the darkness, there is also an earthquake.  “Many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”  The centurion and his soldiers then confess, not in mockery: “Truly this was the Son of God!”  They have bowed the knee.  They have confessed “to the glory of God the Father.”

One of the council members – “a disciple of Jesus” named Joseph of Arimathea, bravely asks for the body of Jesus.  Our Lord’s body is wrapped in a shroud and placed into Joseph’s new tomb. 

The “chief priests and Pharisees” are still afraid, as they should be.  They ask Pilate to seal the tomb and place a guard.  “So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.”

How laughable, dear friends, that these puny men should think that they could keep God in a tomb with a wax seal and a few soldiers.  What delusional minds they have, ironically putting their faith in Caesar, the Gentile who calls himself “the son of god,” instead of receiving the gift of their own prophesied King, who is truly the Son of God – even as Caesar’s soldiers confess.

And this is where Matthews’s testimony stops, for now, dear friends.  And we will pause and ponder this Holy Week what it means for us that our Lord and King, our Passover Lamb of God, “goes uncomplaining forth” to the cross and to the tomb.  For we know what happens that Sunday morning when the women go to anoint the Lord’s body after the High Sabbath.  The first day of the next week will indeed be a new day in not only a new week, but in reality, a new age. 

Our King is coming, dear friends.  He is coming again.  And this time, it will not be “humble and mounted on a donkey.”  He has come to save us.  And so here, in His presence with us, let every knee bow, and let every tongue confess, that “Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Hosanna!  Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!

Amen.

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