Palm Sunday

21 When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” 4 This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

    5      “Tell the daughter of Zion,

    Look, your king is coming to you,
    humble, and mounted on a donkey,
    and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7 they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

    “Hosanna to the Son of David!

    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
    Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

10 When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” 11 The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

In the Church of England we have a peculiar way of reading the Bible in Sunday services – we follow a thing called the lectionary, which tells us what chapters and verses to read each week. Now, I have two issues with the lectionary: one is that it gives some parts of the Bible more importance than others, which that means anyone whose only contact with the Bible is in these services will never hear some chapters, and will hear others year after year.  The second issue is what we have today: two readings put side by side that aren’t supposed to go together, and that’s fine, except that putting them together misses something really important.

The first reading, that we heard comes from the twenty-first chapter of Matthew and the main idea behind it is that Jesus is welcomed by the people. They call him the Son of David—a title that meant the Messiah, the chosen one—and they use the word Hosanna, which means “Save us, we pray”.  The people accepted Jesus as the one who would save them.

The second reading, performed wonderfully by the Sunday School, is the Passion, or the suffering, of our Lord. Now the main point here is to show us everything that Jesus went through before and during the crucifixion, and who is it that demands Jesus be crucified? The people, the same people who were just welcoming him with cloaks and palm branches.  What’s gone wrong?

There’s a large chunk of the Gospel missing. We use Mark’s account of the passion in our Palm Sunday service because it’s shorter, but it’s in Matthew’s Gospel too, and there the passion story starts in chapter twenty-six. Five chapters later.

There’s five chapters, and five days between these two passages. But still in just five days the people go from welcoming Jesus as a conquering hero, to demanding his torture, humiliation and death.  What happened in those five days?

Well, we know what happens with the Pharisees, Sadducees and the other religious leaders: they feel threatened by Jesus’s teachings, they try to trap him with difficult questions, make him look foolish, and so undermine his authority, but they keep failing and just make themselves look foolish. So, between chapter twenty-one and chapter twenty-six they plot to kill Jesus; and they convince Judas to betray him.

But why does Judas agree to it? And why do the crowds ask for Barabbas to be freed instead of Jesus, why do they ask for him to be killed? We’re told that the religious leaders stir up the crowd, but why do they go along with it?

I think the answer is in the first of our readings, and it has something to do with the palm crosses that we now have. In the Old Testament there are stories about a dynasty of evil kings in Israel: Omri, Ahab and Jehoram; their line is ended by a man called Jehu, chosen by God to be the new king of Israel. In the second book of Kings, chapter 9, verse 13, we’re told of Jehu’s coronation:

3 Then hurriedly they all took their cloaks and spread them for him on the bare steps; and they blew the trumpet, and proclaimed, “Jehu is king.”

“They spread their cloaks”, just like the crowds did for Jesus.  The people of Jerusalem were expecting Jesus to be like Jehu: some kind of warrior who would wipe out the Romans, free the Jews and make Israel great again. But after five days I think they were starting to doubt that he would do it, probably doubting that he was the Messiah, and so they gave up on him. Turned their backs on him and took sides with the Pharisees and Sadducees.

One of the reasons that Jesus died is that he wasn’t the type of Messiah that the people wanted, because they were thinking too small. They were thinking about the people of Israel in the year 32 AD, they weren’t thinking about the whole world for all eternity.

Now it’s easy for us to condemn them, but I have a question for you, a question that I want you to think about for a moment.

When you talk to God, what type of God is He? Is He a personal, pocket-sized God who you ask for things on behalf of yourself and your friends, or is He the ‘All Mighty’, the all-knowing, eternal creator of everything who loves us individually, and who has loved every person who ever lived and ever will live?

The quality of our prayers is determined by the quality of our God, and I suspect it also affects the quality of our actions.