Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Philippians 2:5-1
Matthew 21:1-11

Palm Sunday is an interesting day – happiness tinged with grief itself filled with joy; with Christ’s passion coming, Palm Sunday is full of irony that itself is made ironic by the Resurrection. Let’s not act like we don’t know the story, what we are to live through this next week: Jesus enters Jerusalem. hailed as king by the crowds. He will teach throughout the week in the Temple. He will meet with his disciples in an upper room on Thursday, be arrested during the night, crucified by the Romans the next day, be buried before the Sabbath. Then on Sunday God will raise him from the dead, and deaths reign will be broken. Sin, death, and Satan will have lost in the resurrected body of Jesus. Somehow through our readings today we have to let ourselves get caught up in the story, to find our place truthfully, to live out of this story as the story of all creation. The story begins with the shouts of the people as Jesus enters into Jerusalem.

1. Praise Yahweh, the God of Israel! God has brought the King into the Kingdom in Jesus!

In the years before Jesus, Herod the Great, king over Israel, died. Two sons got into a dispute afterward. When Archelaus, the oldest son, heard that his father had died, he dressed like king, came from outside Jerusalem and processed through the town. He made the not so subtle claim that he was the legitimate heir of Herod. Although he had not king been named king by the Romans, everyone in Jerusalem heard his claim. The King had come into his kingdom

We can’t miss what was going on the first Palm Sunday. Yes, it sounds humble, but this is a royal procession; it is Jesus’ claim to kingship. Jesus has come to Jerusalem. Across the valley, he comes up on a donkey. People had heard him talking of kingdom. Now here he is. An instantaneous procession springs up. The king has come into Jerusalem. Israel is to be restored around His rule. God has brought forth God’s reign in the body of Jesus. The end times, the messianic reign, has begun now. Justice will spring forth from Jerusalem. Jesus fulfills the promiseof the prophets. The real king has come.

Hear the shouts: Hosanna to the Son of David. Yah saves!!! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! A true, just government comes! The kingdom! It’s a political rally, a street demonstration. God is doing something new! Yah saves – it is not some otherworldly salvation of souls separate from bodies, nor some inner spiritual renewal so people can experience bondage and like it! No! Yah saves!! The kingdom has come in the body of the king, in the body of Jesus. Hosanna to the Son of David! The messianic age has begun!

2. Yet in the background a haunting counter melody takes place. Within a week, humanity will have rejected this king with his kingdom.

“He was despised, rejected by humans; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised . . . and we esteemed him not.” We can handle the first part of Isaiah’s prophecy. It describes what Jesus encountered in the next week. There is the whole list of grief, rejection, sorrow, encased within the repetition of “he was despised.”
We can feel the self-righteousness growing up in us . . . he was despised, despised for the claims about this kingdom, despised for the political renewal he brought to Israel, despised for the claims he made about himself. We can feel the anger in us, feel the sense of injustice directed against others. How dare they? How dare they crucify the Son of God who came into Jerusalem to establish God’s kingdom? If I’d of been there, I would have led the revolt against these people, forced them to confront their injustice, their exploitation, their cruelty, and coerced them to accept Jesus. Typical empire. If only we were in control, we could elect Jesus as King! We’d give him the authority to rule!

But then we hear, “we esteemed him not; we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. We like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The text cuts close to our hearts. We see our problem: we want to authorize Jesus as king. We want Jesus to be king to make him beholden to our agenda. When we discover that we can’t separate Jesus’ political order from his body, from his kingship, from the fact that God, not us, elected this King, we recognize that we are just as guilty calling for his crucifixion as Pilate, the council of the High Priest, the crowds who are bought off for a few coins. We can’t make Jesus go our way; we don’t authorize Jesus. We can’t pick and chose what we like and what we don’t in Jesus.

Our problem is that we don’t really want to give up our own authority over our lives, our own ability to define what is important to us and not, our own ability to define the relationships that we enter, that we really want to use Jesus as a way to get more influence for ourselves. Therefore, together we stand and shout with our voices “Crucify him; Crucify him!” To the cross – he’s not on our side. Get him out of here! We see ourselves calling for Jesus’ crucifixion; we esteemed him not.

3. But the amazing thing is: God doesn’t shut us out of the kingdom. God uses our very sin, our rejection of Jesus, as the means to call us into God’s kingdom through Jesus’s faithfulness to God seen on the cross.

“He shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities. He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” Through our rejection of Jesus’ royal claim, our participation in the sin that led to Jesus’ crucifixion, God is able to restore us to justice through Jesus’ faithfulness. Let’s take the mystification out of Jesus’ death for our sins – He died for our iniquities, he bore our sin literally. By rejecting his claims, by rejecting his kingdom, by rejecting that God elected him and refusing to submit to the revelation of God – by our sin – Jesus died on the cross. God did not will for Jesus to die. God willed for Jesus to be obedient in institution God’s kingdom – and Jesus was. Because of our sin, this entailed his death. Jesus became obedient, even unto death, even death on a cross.

Jesus did not give up on the kingdom, suddenly shift agendas, nor did he try to coerce us into following him. He accepted the violence of our sin, trusting God to be faithful. In his resurrection, we see that indeed, God is faithful; justice, obedience to God is possible. Jesus opens the path as the first-fruits of the new creation that many, even those who crucified him, might be made just through him! God takes our sins into the body of Jesus and redeems us as Jesus makes intercession for us in God’s mercy.

Jesus’s faithfulness calls us into the kingdom. It calls us today even more than before to say “Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Jesus taking our sin into his body reorients our lives because the king has come, our political commitments, the claims made upon our lives by the powers of the world around us no longer have any teeth – they are only human claims, children playing a fantasy game. We may live justly, because in the broken, bloody body of the king, God opens a way for us into his kingdom that shall not fail, for He shall reign for ever and ever. For God has exalted him and one day, may it be one day soon, every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father! God takes our rejection of God’s own revelation in the King, Jesus, and calls us in God’s mercy, into the righteousness, the justice, the kingdom. The kingdom has come! Our sin has not stopped it; indeed, God converts our sin into God’s righteousness through the Son by the Spirit’s present with us today.

The king has come. This morning, though we have esteemed him not, the Spirit nonetheless keeps calling us into the kingdom. Here at this table we eat and drink in the Kingdom, participating now in the graciousness of God’s kingdom in Jesus. Here we experience again the entry into Jerusalem: Hosanna, hosanna in the highest! Here again our still voices cry, “Crucify Him, Crucify Him!” And here God’s voice nonetheless rings out as at the end of days: “Come with all the saints into the joys of my kingdom.” Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Come, friends, and be thankful.