Missing Jesus: We Need Palm Sunday Because We Forget ~ Luke 19:28-44

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 recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

This is one of my wife’s favorite Sundays. It’s the Sunday when we praise God’s salvation. It’s the Sunday when we watch Jesus weep. It’s the Sunday when she cries in church. She cries, she says, because she forgets. She forgets how easy it is to misunderstand the God she loves. She’s right, you know? Palm Sunday is the day when we hallelujah our hope, cry our pain, marvel at what we don’t remember and remember what we so often forget. It’s hallelujah-ish and humbling. It’s the reminder that we so easily miss Jesus, when explore what we so easily forget.

          1.    Palm Sunday reminds us that we often forget Scripture.

It’s important to realize that Jesus is being very intentional with all this business about a donkey, riding into Jerusalem and the disciples know it. What’s happening here is a sort of biblical trivia and charades all rolled up into one – a whole host of unspoken, dramatized Scriptural clues that Jesus’ audience immediately pick up on that most of us don’t. They see that Jesus was acting out Scripture and declaring himself to be king. “How many biblical texts are being referenced?” Any guesses? Conservatively, at least 7. 

First, Jesus is acting out Zech. 9:9 – which speaks of a humble king riding into Jerusalem on a donkey to save God’s people – it’s a description which identifies the messiah – the long awaited king who would bring Israel out from political domination and restore God’s kingdom. By the way, have you ever read Zechariah?

That the people understand what Jesus is doing is revealed by their own response of praise taken directly from Psalm 118:26 which heralds the One who comes in the name of the LORD who will cut off Judah’s enemies. It was a messianic psalm which praised the king – a sort of Biblical call and response to Jesus’ acting out the Zechariah text.

But there is more! There are more subtle allusions like Genesis 49:10-11 – Jacob’s blessing of a coming ruler who “ties” a donkey to a vine; 1 Kings 1:38-40 which discusses Solomon riding to his enthronement on a donkey; 2 Kings 9:13 – which speaks of the people placing their cloaks on the ground for Jehu after the Lord pronounces him king; Is. 55:12 – speaks of the mountains bursting into song and the trees clapping their hands, and finally Zech. 14:4 – tells us of God standing on the Mount of Olives ready to fight on Jerusalem’s behalf to become King over all the earth.

It’s a humbling array of texts which speak of a promise and a people steeped in the Scriptures awaiting the messiah who would usher in the reign of God. All of this should leave us a bit feeling like a fourth grader in graduate level astrophysics class. We’re simply chewing on our pencil while we wait for lunch or recess. The spiritual response of (move fingers up and down on lips - bbbbbbbbbbbb).

My point is that Palm Sunday should expose us to a reality that is all too easy to forget – not that we simply fail to do what we should do but that we often don’t even know what we should know. We haven’t learned enough Scripture, haven’t read it as thoroughly as we should. We need Palm Sunday to help us recognize that before the Bible is a hard word, it is often a forgotten one.

I have a friend who shares a funny story about a forgotten word. In her family, like most families, they had their own phrases for things, particularly a strange way of describing someone who was being wishy-washy. They would describe that person as “farting in the mitten.” If someone was waffling on whether he wanted to got eat then go to the movies – he would be told, “Come on, stop farting in the mitten!” When this friend became college age she used that phrase with her new-found friends who looked on her with utter shock and disgust, causing her to ask the question now on everyone’s mind. Why do we say that? So she began to explore with her family the odd origin of the phrase. Where did it come from? No one seemed to know. “Didn’t grandmother say it?,” one of her siblings remembered. It wasn’t until she moved to Europe, however, that she heard something that left her laughing hysterically. When one is being wishy-washy in German you tell them to stop “driving in the middle” which sounds like “Fährt” (fart) nicht “in der mittel” (in the mitten).” That’s what her German grandmother had been saying all along. They had forgotten the words.

 

Why does this matter? Because Palm Sunday reminds us that our God is a God who does everything by the book – and guess what, there’s a lot going on in this book. One of the most significant reasons we miss God, is that we haven’t learned God’s word, we haven’t taken it to heart. The Bible, in other words, is your “Wanted Poster” for recognizing God. But Palm Sunday reveals that spiritual discernment is even more challenging than simply knowing the Bible.

          2.    Palm Sunday reminds us that we can know our Bible and still miss Jesus.

The scariest part of this story is that these good readers, the “multitude of disciples,” Luke tells us in vs. 37, who catch the Zechariah reference and respond with a Psalm, still don’t get it. So Palm Sunday leads us even further down the rabbit hole of the reality that the problem is deeper than our knowledge of Scripture – it exposes the myth that even if we know our Bibles well, we never miss God.

Luke goes to great lengths to reveal that the disciples don’t get it – in vs.11 of ch. 19 he tells us they thought the kingdom of God would immediately appear and be the destruction of Rome. Even after Jesus’ talked about turning the other cheek, taking up one’s cross, they believed that spilling Roman blood would save them. It was the irony that Jerusalem, which means the “city of peace” did not understand what makes for peace. They believed that military might would be God’s glory but in AD 70 Jesus was proven right as the Roman General Titus destroyed Jerusalem.

Palm Sunday also reminds us that our God often doesn’t live up to our expectations. We struggle to understand why God doesn’t act as we would want Him to, behave the way He is supposed to. It reveals that those who praise him are also quite willing to betray him when we encounter something that we don’t like – that cuts across the grain of our personal beliefs, our political hopes, our own ethical visions. Jesus himself was aware of this – in vs. 14 he cryptically describes his hearers, the disciples, no less, as citizens of a country who “hated” the one sent to them saying, “We do not want this man to rule over us.”

Jesus doesn’t betray us but sometimes his message can feel like betrayal. It grates

against a desire to define ourselves by our nation, by our kinship, by our own vision of peace and prosperity. But he has declared that there is only one side for peace, one side for salvation, only one who is King. Jesus rides in on a donkey and tells us that there is no side but mine – and then he weeps.

Why should we remember this story every year? We need to remember this story because it intersects with ours. They are us. How do I know this? Because we still don’t get Scripture or understand our own suffering let alone his. Because I still so easily praise Him and believe that someone who follows Jesus will have an easy life. Because many of us still believe that we can bomb our enemies to find “peace on earth and good will towards men.” Because we still often refuse to believe that power is located in the cross. We want Jesus to stop his crying and do something to fix our world – refusing to realize that he has done it. And we are reminded – we just don’t get it. But I would like to finish with two encouragements. I want to tell you that there is grace even inside of ignorance. There is a Hosanna – even when Jesus weeps.

Hosanna! We don’t get it – but we still can praise him.

This is a story about praising someone we don’t understand. About worshipping with Scripture on our lips and failing to fully grasp what we are saying. In many respects that’s what worship is. The author Kathleen Norris writes, “As a poet, I am used to saying what I don’t thoroughly comprehend. And once I realized that this was all it was – that in worship you are asked to say words you don’t understand, or worse still, words you presume to think you have mastered well enough to accept or reject – I had a way through my impasse.”

Even though they get it wrong, Jesus still doesn’t silence them. Even in the depths of our ignorance, praising him is the right thing to do.

Hosanna! We don’t get it – but we can still be saved.

Their praise gets it right, “Blessed is the King who comes in the Name of the Lord.”  He is THE king not simply OUR king. Jesus did not run for president. He rules whether we like it or not. He weeps for what is true whether we weep or not. And his kingship turns out NOT to be what they or we always imagine. But their misunderstanding doesn’t change his ability to save us. Jesus may weep but he will not stop!

Palm Sunday reminds us that we can jump into the Christian life with both feet and even more abandon, ever mindful that our failure to comprehend is hardly God’s failure to act. He doesn’t allow their ignorance to thwart his plan, to change his mind. They didn’t get that the cross would be their victory but their failure to recognize Jesus didn’t stop God.

Friends, even if we don’t recognize his coming. He still will win. Hosanna!