Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today is an odd Sunday, liturgically speaking, in that it
begins as Palm Sunday and it jump-skips only to end as if it were already Good
Friday. Growing up, the Sunday before Easter was always Palm Sunday. The church
also had a parochial school, and my classmates and I would enter the service
singing the first hymn as the children who welcomed Jesus so long ago. “All
glory, laud and honor, to You, Redeemer King, To whom the lips of children,
Made sweet hosannas ring” (LSB #442, refrain). When we left the service, we did
so in anticipation of what would be remembered and retold later in the week
with Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. It was a week-long build, heading towards
the Institution of the Supper, Jesus’ death, the three-day rest in the tomb,
and then the Resurrection. Now, today is called “The Sunday of the Passion.” Trying
to shoe-horn it all in, it feels that Palm Sunday only gets a brief nod while
our attention is pulled to the culmination of Jesus’ suffering and death.
But, I checked, looked back over the last 6 years, and every
year I passive-aggressively pushed back, pastorally speaking, by preaching the
Palm Sunday event. This year, I gave in. This year, we’ll spend our morning
pondering Jesus’ Passion.
To be sure, we’ll spend more time on Jesus’ Passion this
Thursday and Friday, particularly how Isaiah foretold what Jesus would endure
in His last hours. I hope you join us those holy evenings. We’ll save the “how”
Jesus accomplished our salvation for those nights. What I want to do with you
this morning is use the Passion we read today and take three small moments that
illustrate the “what” – what it is that Jesus came to do. In the scope of the Passion, these are almost
overlooked. Certainly, they pale in comparison to the actual crucifixion and
death of our Lord. Yet, these show us something of what it means that Jesus is
the Christ, the anointed one. If you have your bulletin, you can follow along.
The first is here, in v. 6-15, summarized this way: “So,
Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having
scourged Jesus, he delivered Him over to be crucified.” Jesus is our
substitute. He stands in our place. Nothing about it makes sense. Why would the
holy, sinless Son of God allow Himself
to take the place of condemned sinners? Yet, that is what He does. The
narrative of Barabbas shows this in microcosm.
Barabbas was guilty
of murder and insurrection. At least he had the privilege of a proper trial and
legal conviction. He was – literally – guilty as charged, and the charges
deserved death. He was heading to his own crucifixion, his own much-deserved
death. Even civil, secular governments know this: lawbreakers of the worst kind
deserve the ultimate punishment. Jesus is innocent of the charges – so innocent
that, the other Gospels tell us, the so-called witnesses could not agree. Herod
and Pilate declared Him innocent five separate times. He should have been set
free and never even touched with a whip.
With jealousy-fueled-hatred, the Jewish leaders riled up the crowds,
demanding Jesus be executed while demanding Barabbas be set free.
In that moment, the innocent is made guilty, even though he
did no wrong; the guilty is made innocent, even though he did every crime he
was charged with. It’s the great exchange: Jesus takes the place of sinners.
Not just Barabbas, but sinners of all time. And, not just the great and
grievous sinners that we look at with suspicion and disdain, but the great and
grievous sinners with whom our loved ones live with day in and day out. I mean
you and me, sinners all. You and I, along with Barabbas, are set free from the
damnation our sins deserve and Christ takes our place. He is our substitute.
And, by God’s grace, through faith in this miraculous substitution, our sins
are so forgiven that the Father doesn’t look at us with suspicion and disdain
but with warmth and compassion, the love of a Father for His dearly beloved
sons and daughters through Christ our Lord.
The second moment is in verse 31 and 32. “So also the chief
priests with the scribes mocked [Jesus] to one another saying, “He saved
others; He cannot save Himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down
now from the cross that we may see and believe.” The irony is that the chief
priest was spot-on. In His crucifixion, He not only is our substitute, He saves
the world. Although He prayed to the Father, if possible, that the cup be taken
from Him, Jesus did nothing to try to save Himself. From early in His ministry,
He said in simple words that He must go to Jerusalem, suffer and die at the
hands of the chief priest and Jewish leaders.
Also, interestingly, the chief priest uses Jesus’ title. His
name is Jesus. Jesus means savior. His title is Christ, in Greek, or Messiah,
in Hebrew. They mean the same thing: anointed. He is anointed to be the King of
Kings and Lord of Lords. His throne would not be one like Herod, or even one
like the chief priest would use. His throne would be the cross. While the chief
priest may have wielded the power to take Jesus’ life, they could not destroy
Jesus’ power. Jesus, of course, would
come down from the cross, buried by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and the
women. Three days later, He would rise from the dead. While the chief priest
never believed, as far as we know, many others – including you and me – do
believe, by God’s grace, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The third moment is in verse 38, when “the temple curtain
was torn in two, from top to bottom.” That curtain had existed for centuries,
since the first tabernacle was assembled in the desert of Sinai thousands of
years earlier. It stood as a barrier, so that the worshipping Israelite would
not get too close to the Holy of Holies, the place where the shekinah,
the presence and glory of God, rested. It was so glorious and holy, in fact,
that the high priest could only enter the sacred space on one day of the year,
yom kippur, the day of atonement. There was elaborate sacrificial ceremony with
the priest successively confessing his own sins, the sins of priests, and the
sins of all Israel. Clothed in white linen, he then entered the Holy of Holies to
sprinkle the blood of the sacrifice and to offer incense. The ceremony
concluded when a goat (the scapegoat), symbolically carrying the sins of
Israel, was driven to its death in the wilderness.
With the curtain split apart – I love how the old King James
said, “rent asunder” – there was no longer a barrier between man and God. The
sacrificial system was complete. Animals no longer had to be slaughtered; grain
and milk no longer had to be consumed by fire. God’s people have complete and
free access to the Father through Christ’s death.
While we look in anticipation to these holy moments, rightly
remembered later this week, I would be remiss without this note about Palm
Sunday.
There are three major moments in the lives of God’s people
when palms come into play. In Leviticus, when the children of Israel was instructed
to celebrate the Feast of Booths, or Sukkoth, they were to include the waving
of palm branches as a way of giving thanks to the Lord for His blessings over
the previous year. In the Gospels, the palms were waved during Jesus’ triumphal
entry, along with the cry of “hosanna” – help us, save us. Both illustrate life
under the cross, this side of heaven: giving thanks for His gracious gifts
while also praying for His mercy. The third place is in Revelation, when the
heavenly host waves the palms with celebratory shouting, singing praises to the
Lamb who has won the battle. No longer praying for mercy and grace, the shout
of Hosanna is, truly, one of victory. “Salvation belongs to our God who is
sitting on the throne and to the Lamb!”
This Palm Sunday, this Sunday of the Passion, we are in between
those moments. Sukkoth found its completion in Jesus’ tabernacling among us.
Palm Sunday led to His crucifixion, redeeming us. And, now we wait with eschatological
hope for the great day of Resurrection when, with all the saints in heaven, we
will join in the eternal Palm Sunday and Resurrection celebration, as we will witness:
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the
elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the
throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and
thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!
Amen.” (Rev 7:11–12).
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