Palm Sunday 2019: The Humble King

Well, happy Master's Sunday.

I mean Palm Sunday.

Matt made it here.

That was a big deal for Matt to be here while golf is going on.

Very big deal.

I didn't expect that.

Miracles happen, redemption.

So uh some of you have probably been keeping up with this morning.

I hadn't kept up with it, but uh it is Master Sunday and Palm Sunday together.

Uh the Master's chairman apparently didn't look at the church calendar, uh, but it is both today.

It's down to like Molinare, uh Fanu, uh they're out on the course right now.

Tigers in there, which is a huge deal, right?

We all know you didn't know the other two guys, but you know Tiger.

And so Tiger, just to keep you up with your uh trivia, golf trivia, 14 majors, right?

But he hasn't won a major in 11 years.

And since then, kind of his life fell apart.

He's kind of rebuilt his life, he's had like four knee surgeries and four back surgeries, but he's like today, like he could he could do that, like he could do this.

This could happen, right?

Like, and he could he could hit that final putt on the 18th green, and it could actually he could win his 15th.

I mean, there's like huge redemption, he's back 11 years, right?

And then what happens at the Masters is is that that champion, they they they walk up the hill from the 18th screen, they walk up a little hill.

Perfect grass, by the way, just amazing.

Walk up a little hill, and they walk across the lawn over to the cabins and where they report their scores.

And all along the way, the crowds just, I mean, it's just crowds and crowds and crowds.

I mean, everybody starts running to get here, and then just this little walkway appears that the golfer, the champion, walks through.

And it's ecstatic for this this guy won.

This is the champion, this is the hero, and he's going to claim, he's going to claim his victory, is what he's going to do.

And this is the scene in John 12.

This is the scene.

It's this sort of ecstatic atmosphere, and crowds are coming because here's this Jewish rabbi who's teaching and has miracles, and he's starting to be well known, and he's showing up, and crowds are showing up, and they're lining the streets and they're cheering for him.

And so this story's huge.

And this story's huge for us.

The reason why it's huge for us is this story leads into what's called Holy Week.

This week we have we have Palm Sunday, we have Monday Thursday, that's where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples.

Good Friday, that's where he dies on the cross, and we have Easter, Resurrection Sunday.

So this story, if we can get this story, it's huge for us because we can begin to understand God.

But remember, this scene today, this Palm Sunday triumphal entry, this scene is full of irony.

Because kings ride on horses, and Jesus is on a donkey.

So it's a symbol of humility, it's a symbol of peace.

Right away, we sort of know like something's up, like something's off here.

These people want him to be a hero, they're cheering, but he's on a donkey.

Something's going on here.

So I'll reread a bit of the story, John 12, 12 through 15.

The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem.

All right, so he's on his way.

So they started crowding around.

So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the king of Israel, cheering.

They can't believe it, it's unbelievable.

And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as is written, Fear not, daughter of Zion.

Behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt.

So a few points.

Point number one is this is people are fickle, and we are people.

So this week I was working on this sermon.

I had all my notes in Microsoft Word documents, so I can get all my research into a Microsoft Word document.

It's all in there.

It's like eight, ten pages of just like is convoluted.

And then I go back in and I start to form it, and I'm forming it, and I'm I'm kind of in the zone.

It's Tuesday morning, and I'm in the zone.

I'm working away, I'm pounding away, I'm going at it, and I'm I'm feeling good about this.

This thing's coming together.

I'm feeling I'm feeling inspired.

I'm at peace.

My life is good, my marriage is good, my parenting's good, my finances are good, I'm at peace with God, everything's good, I have great friends, life is great, this is good, this work is good, and then that little blinking cursor, right, that I'm typing with blink, blink, blink along the way, blink, blink, blink, and then it just turns to the little round thing, right?

And it's just going around and around and around.

I'm like, uh oh.

I hadn't I hadn't saved anything about an hour.

Sit there for a little bit.

Sam's in his office next to me.

We have a very thin wall, so I'm saying words, but it's keeping them very quiet.

I don't want him to hear the words I'm saying.

I go to the restroom, come back, giving it some time, right?

I'm gonna give it some time, is what I'm gonna do.

So I'm gonna solve the problem.

Come back still, that little that little round thing.

We hate it, don't we?

God, we hate that thing, and it's just around and I'd sit there, go, okay.

Well, you know, document recovery, right?

Right?

Auto recovery, we're familiar with this.

All of us had this moment, so I'd turn it off.

I know I'm rolling the dice a little bit here, but uh, there's nothing else to do at this point.

So I said, turn it off, turn it back on.

Christy calls me at this point, not the greatest marital conversation of the year.

We'll just go ahead and say that, and then tell her what was going on.

I just let it out on her, what's you know, my emotions.

And so then I get it back.

17 documents pop up, right?

So you're like, oh, okay, so it's either one or 17, and so I figure out is number one the most recent or number 17?

Well, number 17 is the most recent, so look at that.

I lost about 45 minutes of work, and I am so angry.

Anybody?

Okay, I am so angry.

No peace.

My life is horrible.

My finances, my parenting, my marriage, I hate my friends, I hate Steve Jobs, I hate Bill Gates, anybody who's in front of me.

I mean, I am angry, I'm frustrated, I have to redo all this work.

And I was pretty sure that work was amazing.

Like that, that work I lost, the most amazing work.

Everything from now on is not gonna be as amazing as that work was.

Takes me about 30 minutes to kind of work my way back to where I was.

Fickle.

I mean, what a stupid thing, right?

Isn't that amazing?

I mean, and that that was just me on Tuesday morning, right?

That wasn't even a big deal.

Like that one even like, you know, I had some trauma or like I ruined my life or blew my life up with some behavior.

That was just like my computer froze.

And that's what that's what it did to me.

We're fickle.

We're so quickly moved from one position to the next because something happens.

Or he said that, or she said that, or that thing happened, or I'm tired, or I'm frustrated, or I'm angry, I'm hurt.

Have you ever been so wonderfully loving to someone?

And you think to yourself, pretty loving guy.

And like 10 minutes later, you're like, how could I be that unloving to the same person that I was so loving to?

Or you're so giving, and then like the next day you're just like hoarding as much as you can, right?

Or you're so unselfish at one moment, then you turn around and you're like, how wow, I'm incredibly, incredibly selfish at the same time.

Or you had the right view of God, like you're like, I am really walking in the Spirit of God, I'm hearing the redemptive, loving voice of God in my life, and I am I am under the blood of Jesus for my full sufficiency, and I and my guilt is solved, my shame is solved, and I'm walking in that victory, and then all of a sudden it's just like the voice of judgment and condemnation.

Fickle, we are fickle.

People are fickle, and we are we are people.

That's number one, because that's what happens with these people.

John 12.

Hosean out, like Jesus, we are for you.

And then Friday comes.

They're not there.

Now, maybe some of them are there, and they're the ones yelling, crucify him.

We don't know.

Some of them may overlap, but we just know they're not saying the same thing they were saying on Palm Sunday.

People are fickle.

Number two, people project on God.

And again, we are people.

You're actually supposed to be a part of that.

You didn't want to admit it, you're not ready yet.

Okay, we'll work on that.

You remember film strips?

Anybody remember film strips, like 1980s film strips?

My mom was a media specialist, she managed the film strip machines.

Did you ever get picked to do the film strip machine?

You were the kid in class, got picked.

Did you ever hate the kid who got picked to do the film strip?

So a film strip machine, right, is before smart screens, a little bit at maybe the same time as overhead projectors, but uh before like televisions weren't in the classroom yet, and and there's a little machine, it came on the cart, right?

It was about this big, and a light came up through it, it went out that lens and it went onto the screen at the front of the classroom.

And then you would slide, you take the film out of the little case and put the film in there.

You had a tape machine, you press play, and then the narrator of the you know, Amazon rainforest or whatever would narrate the Amazon rainforest, and then it would beep, and then you, if you were the chosen child, you do you turn it, you flip the dial, so that image would change inside this little machine where the light came up through the image and projected it.

So the light would shine up, catch the image, and project it.

And that's the point.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is that we put our ideas of God in front of the light and adapt Him to be what we want Him to be for us.

You go, well, Russ, maybe you're projecting right now.

Very possible.

Hopefully not.

Hopefully, the closer we get to the scriptures and the context of the scriptures, hopefully the closer we get to the narrative of the entire scriptures over the redemptive God, that we're getting closer and closer to the right idea of God.

But here are three common just misperceptions projections that we can see in the story.

And the first is like a prosperity projection of God.

And this is this is what we basically is going on with the crowd.

They want a political king.

They're tired, they're under the burden of the Roman Empire, they're weary.

And here's this guy who seems to have a lot of influence, a lot of power, a lot of social power.

There's a pretty good chance this guy could do something for us.

He could overthrow this burden in our circumstantial life.

Right?

This prosperity projection would say, well, you know, God's here to make all my circumstances better.

And the problem with that is like God makes some circumstances better, and then some circumstances never get better, or some circumstances got better for a little bit, and then they got worse, and then some got worse, and then they got better.

And that's the problem.

And it just doesn't work because everything doesn't always get better.

There's the power projection.

I don't know whether I should have called it the power projection or like an enemy projection.

It makes God out to be your enemy because he is here to take your autonomy and your power, therefore, he's an enemy of me.

He's not here for my joy and wholeness.

He's here, he's here to take away my power.

And this would be how we see the government and the officials here that want to move to crucify him.

They're a threat to my system and my power.

And we easily think that if we lose our power, we will lose peace.

And the problem, of course, is have you ever had enough power where you were at peace?

And so that doesn't really work.

There's the moralism projection.

We see this in the Pharisees in this story in this holy week, right?

If I obey the law that I'm gonna uphold, I'm gonna hold to this, I don't need Jesus to fulfill it for me if I'm gonna do it.

If I just get my act together enough, just enough, then God will accept me, absolve me, forgive me.

That doesn't work.

Because you've never been obedient enough.

You've never had your act together enough.

We don't even know what enough is.

But we dabble in all these.

We dabble in all these prosperity and power and moralism projections, and yet, and yet, the great story here is that God, God is faithful to us while we don't always understand Him.

A few weeks ago we bought two Chase lounges.

I mean, that's a boring sentence, right?

I wrote that sentence, like, ah, that is a never a life goal.

Let's just say that.

Never a life goal to own two chase lounges.

But we're there.

We've done that.

We have two chase lounges in our home.

And so I came home from work one day, and apparently, if you get two chase lounges, you also need pillows to go on the chase lounges.

And so we have some pillows for the chase lounges.

I didn't know we needed as many.

I'd never I needed one pillow in my life.

I did.

That's all I needed, and now I need more pillows in my life, and so we have a lot more pillows in our in our home now.

A lot of pillows actually in different places, and they're they're layered.

That's also something you do.

And so I came home from work one day, and uh the chase, the the pillows on the chase lounge had been moved.

One was on the bay window, the other one had been moved to the master bed.

The pillows on the bay window had moved to the chase lounges, and then also another radical move, uh the pillows on the couch had been moved over to the swivel chairs.

Right?

A whole rearrange happened.

Christy loves a rearrange.

I can say that she's not here, she's out of town, she's a safe distance from me this morning.

I could have left these pillows in their place, in the box on the front porch, actually, for the rest of my life.

I could have and been very happy.

I actually just don't like to rearrange things.

I just can keep something where it's at forever.

Won't bother me a bit.

But here's the thing, and I kind of hate to admit it.

It actually looks better.

It's actually better.

That took me about two weeks to admit back to Christy.

It took me two weeks.

But it does look better in some silly story, but sometimes sometimes things just have to be re-rearranged to get it to where it needs to be.

And we're we're that, because we're people who are fickle and we're people who project and we're people who are unfaithful in general a lot of times.

Stuff has to be rearranged in us.

Whether it be a motive or a behavior or our language, or even our understanding of God.

And then this is what conviction and confession and repentance are about.

It's about us being rearranged.

Sometimes stuff just getting thrown out of the house.

These rearranges happen.

All this is going on in John 12.

Because these were weary people.

Didn't understand Jesus.

And either they got to rearrange their thinking about Jesus and who he is, or they're just gonna be disillusioned and walk away.

But what's incredible here is that in their fickleness and their projection, he's faithful.

It's a crazy story.

I mean, this Holy Week is a crazy story.

He he faithfully marches through a people he understands are not understanding him, and then he goes and he washes his disciples' feet, of which they don't understand what's going on.

And he is he's God himself in flesh, humbling himself.

And then he's on the cross and he forgives and absolves a criminal.

The criminal didn't have time to like prove himself like he meant what he said, and he says, You're forgiven.

He says, Father, don't hold this against them.

They don't know what they're doing.

He's loving his enemies.

Point number three is that God is faithful to us.

We all we all want to know what God is like.

And maybe this morning you don't want to know what is God like, you don't really care, but I guarantee you one day you will want to know what God is like because your marriage is gonna break apart, or you are gonna break apart, or the job's not gonna work out, or you're gonna lose the money, or you're gonna owe the money.

You're gonna be lonely, you're gonna be ashamed.

And you're really gonna want to know what God's like.

It's gonna really matter.

The writer of Hebrews says this Jesus, Hebrews 1.3, Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.

So if you want to know, this is what's so great about this week and about Jesus, if you want to know what God's like, just look at Jesus.

We can just look at Jesus to know he's the exact imprint, one who upholds truth and then over and over again redeems and loves and forgives because he is faithful to us.

Theologian Fleming Rutledge says that Palm Sunday is the Trojan horse.

She says that Palm Sunday is the Trojan horse of the Christian calendar.

You remember this?

There's a war a long time ago, 12th, 13th century BC.

I think they made a movie, Brad Pitt was in a movie about it.

If that gives a little bit of relevant, nobody saw the movie, but it happened.

That movie happened.

And so it was a 10-year war, and the Greeks are fighting the Trojans.

The Trojans are in their city of Troy.

They're holding, they're good, they're sustainable.

They're in the walled city.

The Greeks cannot get to them.

And finally, the Greeks build this big empty horse, right?

Remember this story?

They put a bunch of men in it.

They sail away, they let the Trojans see him.

They sail away.

Oh, they leave.

And the Trojans say, We've we've won.

We've we we've and they open the doors, they pull the horse in as like a you know, this is a trophy of our victory.

They all go to sleep that night.

And during the night, the men come out of the horse, they open the doors, the Greeks sail back, they all come in, they take the city.

Right?

And so we get this term that we we hear a lot just in common culture.

It's a Trojan horse.

That's a Trojan horse.

And it means it's an illusion, it's a trick.

It appears to be one thing, but then it ends up being something entirely different.

The triumphal entry is a Trojan horse.

It appeared to be Jesus was coming to claim victory by power and force.

But he's not.

God wanted to be known as a humble king.

It's a parade into weakness and into death.

Hebrews 10, 19 through 23, I close with this.

Therefore, brothers, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He opened for us through the curtain that is through His flesh.

And since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.

For he who promised is faithful.

Our brothers and sisters, Hosanna, for he has delivered you.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for your grace and mercy, and thank you that you came to redeem walking straight into weakness and unto death, as to take the death we deserve, to know the shame we feel, to know the weakness we feel, to absorb all of our sin, that we do not have to pay for it.

We do not have to work out of our guilt or shame.

We do not have to work into our worth or forgiveness or righteousness.

The blood of Jesus is enough.

Thank you for this ironic story this morning that rescues us because you are a humble king that desires to rule our hearts with truth, grace, and love.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.