March to Jerusalem

Reading from the book of Mark.

And they were on the road going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them, and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.

And taking the twelve again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles, and they will mock him and spit on him and flog him and kill him.

And after three days he will rise.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to Church this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

I'm looking forward to these next couple of sermons, this one and next week, we are at the center of Mark's gospel, and this is the turn where Jesus' ministry shifts towards his movement to Jerusalem.

So that's what we'll be looking at this morning.

But before we look at our text, would you pray with me?

Holy Father, we thank you that it is through Christ in us that we are able to come to you, that we receive from him the forgiveness of sins because of the atonement that he made.

That we are able to sing praises to you, Lord, and that you promise to inhabit our praises, that you attend us as we come to you.

Lord, we thank you for your loving kindness towards us.

We ask that you would give us a clear picture of who you are and how you have revealed yourself to us in Jesus Christ and your word.

I pray that we would see him in his march towards Jerusalem, that we would be inspired by it, amazed by it, even fearful with the crowd of the stakes.

Lord, but that we would understand what it is that you are marching towards, and we would see the depth of your love towards us in that.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

This week's text is the third time that Jesus announces his death to the disciples.

And they understand it just about as well as the first two times that he announces his death.

It is not Alexander the Great's death that left him weeping with no lands left to conquer.

In fact, although he accomplished so much, it is right at his death that his kingdom almost immediately splinters and falls apart.

And the disciples are on a kingdom journey with Jesus, and they understand that to be their role.

And so Jesus announcing that they are marching towards his death makes no sense for all that they think they're participating in.

But we'll see that there is this final thing that Jesus announces in each of the times that he foretells his death to the disciples, and that is that he will rise again.

This is almost impossible to understand.

The three death announcements of Jesus are bound thematically.

And we see them united together in the context in which Jesus foretells his death these three times to the disciples.

And you can see it in the story.

So the first time that Jesus announces his death to the disciples is right after Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ.

And when Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, Jesus says, Great job.

And I'm going to be killed.

And Peter is not a fan of that.

And so he brings Jesus to the side, and he's like, sometimes you've got to keep Jesus in line.

And he brings Jesus to the side, and he rebukes Jesus for saying this.

And Jesus says to him, Get behind me, Satan.

He's saying, you can't understand what I'm telling you to.

And you're misunderstanding so deeply that you've aligned yourself with Satan by standing in opposition to my death.

Jesus would go on to say, if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

And that seemed to really thin out the crowd.

The second time that Jesus announces his death, the disciples learn from Peter's mistake and they don't say anything.

They are silent and they are confused.

But when they leave the place where Jesus had announced his death to them, they strike up an argument amongst each other on the way, and their argument is about who will be greatest in the kingdom of God.

And the reason that they're having that argument is because they're trying to recapture what it is they think this kingdom journey is about.

They're trying to resolidify for one another that, okay, this is, we are following the one who will be our king.

We are on a journey from glory to glory.

And in this journey, uh we're gonna have to figure out which among us is the greatest.

And so they ignore this foretelling that they are marching towards death that Jesus describes, and instead they try and console themselves with this idea that they are really just headed towards glory.

So we see that Peter resists the sacrifice that it that Jesus is marching towards.

And the second time that Jesus announces this, the conversation becomes just about re-establishing their ordinary mode of thinking about a kingdom and establishing who would be greatest in that kingdom.

And this context is just the same.

Last week, we didn't touch on this verse much because I took up too much time with the other verses.

But it ended in the verse that comes just before the text that we're looking at this morning is Mark 10.31, and it says, and Jesus says in that, but many who are first will be last, and the last first.

That's a strange way to think about a kingdom.

And then right after this, when Jesus foretells his death this time, what we'll look at next week, Jesus explains that even the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

And he explains that in answer to James and John arguing with Jesus.

In fact, it's not even really arguing, they're just kind of doing some backroom politicking with their mom about how to sit at either Jesus' left hand or right hand when he finally enters his kingdom.

They're trying to position themselves in positions of glory.

In each of the contexts in which Jesus foretells his death, the disciples resist the death and they try and reestablish what their ordinary vision of glory is.

Because it's a strange and disorienting thing when your king and your leader say he is marching towards death and you are following him, and they want to get rid of that story.

But Jesus is showing them what will be the very pattern of the Christian life, which is a pattern that begins with death.

It goes death, resurrection, and then glory.

The kingdom of God is the only kingdom that begins with the death of its leader.

And that's an inverted, upside-down, very strange kingdom, and it's hard to grasp.

But Jesus is not setting up an ordinary kingdom.

Jesus is not like the next Alexander the Great, or the next Napoleon, or the next, I don't think there's that other guy like that.

Jesus is Jesus is setting, he's not just setting up a rival kingdom that will perhaps be the best of the other kingdoms in the world.

And so you should hit your wagon to it because it's got a shot to succeed over the other kingdoms of the world.

No, Jesus is coming to conquer the whole world.

When he is done, he will say things like, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

That's an incredible claim.

But the way that Jesus does that is very different from the way that any of the other kings have set out to do that.

Many kings have gone before, and they have killed many people to establish their kingdoms.

Many kings have died for the sake of their kingdom.

But when their kingdom was established, something remained.

Death was still present.

They were left just as vulnerable once their kingdom had been established as they were before their kingdom had been established.

Christ is doing something far deeper.

When Christ is done with his mission to establish his kingdom, he will die, but he will bring death down with him.

What I want you to see is that Christ is the inevitable king.

Christ is the in he is the maximal story of kingdom.

Did you guys follow minimalist art in the 60s like I did?

Well, what happens with the minimalists is they're trying to like rebel against the aesthetic that had developed, which was uh uh artists were were trying to pour out their soul onto the canvas so that if you were looking at a painting, you'd be able to intuit what is happening in the interior in the interior life of the artist.

And the minimum the minimalists came along and they s they said, I want you, I want you to engage with art as just the object, just the object itself.

And so they would make these paintings and they would just it would just be black.

And it they would make the uh they would make the uh edges of their paintings like really thick so that they would protrude out into the room.

They're trying to make you deal with it as an object.

And what was happening is when you're when you're making this progress towards this inevitable direction, it's like, okay, something has to happen.

If we're dealing with this just as an object and we're painters, well, we're moving towards something.

And two things happen with minimalism that that when you look at the narrative, they just feel inevitable.

One of them is just hanging a blank canvas.

That's about as minimal as you can get.

And the other is that that blank canvas people would it would uh take uh and they would create these these sculptures in the middle of the room that were just a cube.

They would just take like a metal and weld it together until it was just it, it's just an object in the room, where you would look at it and be like, what does that mean?

You'd say, I don't nobody knows what it means.

That's the point.

You're just dealing what we're showing is that all anything really is is just an object and there's no meaning anywhere.

Which is a noble pursuit of the artist to show that.

It's not a noble pursuit, just so that we're clear.

But if you knew where it started, you knew what the project of minimalism was, you could guess where it would end.

Blank canvases and just meaningless things in the middle of the room.

It was inevitable.

When you understand the kingdom that Christ is establishing, when you understand the way our stories work, all of our stories, the way that they work, then you will see that Christ is the inevitable king.

There is no story beyond his.

Odysseus goes down to the river Styx.

And he crosses the river and he goes and talks with some shades, the original shade throwers, rescues some people.

When we have these stories in our heroes, what I'm saying is Jesus is not the first of our heroes to go into death in order to rescue.

But what's the maximum version of that story beyond which no other story can be told?

It's when he kills death.

There is no story you can tell beyond that story.

All of our kings, all of our understandings of what it means to march towards a kingdom, all of our hope of what a kingdom could be, find they are inevitably fulfilled in Jesus.

What story do you tell beyond that?

What story do you tell beyond the one who kills death itself?

That is what we see.

And the disciples, they aren't thinking in these maximal terms.

They're thinking of it like an ordinary kingdom.

They don't understand the depth of issue that Jesus is coming to resolve.

And so they don't understand when he says that he is marching towards his death.

So let's see what it looks like when Jesus marches towards this death, this maximal example of what a king in a kingdom could be.

Mark 10, 32 says, and they were on the road going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them, and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.

Finally, we're going up to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is always an ascent.

You always go up to Jerusalem.

It's on hills, but that's not the only reason why it's an ascent.

It's an ascent because this is where the temple is.

This is where God dwells among his people.

This is the center of the spiritual life of the Jews.

And in that we go up to Jerusalem.

This is the city of hope.

The Psalms are structured in this way.

We see in Psalms 120 through Psalms 134, those are called the songs of ascent.

And they're songs that are meant to be sung on your way to Jerusalem.

And in it we hear things like this.

In Psalm 122, verse 1 says, I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the Lord.

Psalms 122:1

And you would sing phrases like this together as you would march up to the house of the Lord.

You are ascending in your spirit to the place where God is.

And so they are going up to Jerusalem.

This is Jesus' ascent to the city that is on a hill, the spiritual ascent to the source of all life, the worship of God Himself.

But preaching on Jesus is, of course, completely overwhelming because we are always dealing with these like maximal examples and wild inversions.

And we see that because Jesus' ascent to Jerusalem, he will describe to his disciples now as a descent into death.

They are going up to the celebration of the Passover in Jerusalem.

Perhaps thinking of this travel that's been built into them with these songs that reverberate.

And like you could imagine what like walking down uh Tennyson shopping on Christmas or during the Christmas season, you hear, you know, who has a beard that's long and white, and that will be in your head.

And uh and while you're hearing these songs, the the person that you're with is explaining, you know that that we're on a journey towards death right now.

And you it's this this dissonance that's that's almost impossible to to grasp.

And that's what the disciples are seeing.

Jesus' ascent into Jerusalem will be his descent.

Jesus's being raised up in Jerusalem will be being raised up to death.

See, when he is, when when all of the kingdoms of the world are upside down and under the dominion of Satan, and Jesus' intention is to write them, then he must go down to the very depths so that it might be pulled up again and the world might be righted.

And that is his project.

It is not to merely establish an alternative kingdom like the others, it is to right all of the kingdoms of the world, so that they would find their right orientation in him.

To do that, he goes down to the very depths to destroy the deepest enemies.

His ascent is a descent.

And the people behind him are mixed.

Jesus is walking in the front towards Jerusalem, and then we could imagine the twelve are close behind, and then there's a crowd of people that followed Jesus all over that are with them as well.

And the text describes, it says, and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.

They, as the twelve, and they're amazed at what they're seeing in Jesus.

Because they do have this sense that they are walking towards Jesus' greatest enemies.

Jerusalem is the center.

It is like the Dr.

Evil's volcano lair where all of the henchmen are sent from that Jesus has experienced throughout his ministry.

When he's encountering the scribes and the Pharisees, he's encountering people that are sent from Jerusalem to get a handle on what's going on with this Jesus event.

And now Jesus is walking towards these headquarters of all of his enemies.

And it's a strange unity that his enemies have found.

Because it already Jesus, in this sort of strange way, is establishing a unity between the Jews and the Gentiles.

But it is a unity which says, this man is bad.

And that's something that we can unite behind.

He is dangerous and a threat to all of the order that we think we've established here.

So the disciples see him.

And I want you to see Jesus in this image because he is walking in front of them.

He is the king who is marching right into the heart of his enemies.

And the disciples walk behind him, like okay, and they're amazed.

We'll follow him.

We'll follow him to where he will take us.

Although he is taking them to a very dangerous place.

You know, it's been a while, but every once in a while I have to do this.

Lord of the Rings has this moment where Gandalf is about to take uh the fellowship into the minds of Moria.

Not great.

And the all everybody is everybody in the group is like, come on, not the minds of Moria.

And uh Aragorn even would didn't really want to go, but Gandalf makes this decision, and everyone is terrified that's following him, that's following Gandalf into the mines of Moria.

And Aragorn says says this to them He says, Do not be afraid.

I have been with him on many a journey, if never on one so dark.

And there are tales in Rivendell of greater deeds of this, of greater deeds of his than any that I have seen.

He will not go astray if there is any path to find.

He will not go astray if there is any path to find.

He has led us in here against our fears.

But he will lead us out again at whatever cost to himself.

This is the image of Jesus walking forward with the disciples behind him.

He will lead us in here and he will lead us out again at whatever cost to himself.

You know, I think the disciples, the reason, the only reason that they would walk behind him, knowing the danger that they are headed towards, is that they would understand he will lead us out again, even if it is at great cost to himself, which it will be.

The rest of the crowd walks behind Jesus in fear.

They understand the stakes of what it means to enter into the city, and they likely understand the stakes of what it means to enter into the city as followers of Jesus.

That means that they will be understood to be part of a rebellious faction which could undermine all of the structures of power that are upheld in the city that they are walking towards.

It is a city which is the spiritual center of the Jewish people, where the religious leaders, the Sanhedrin, gather together and provide their judgments, which dictate the lives of these people.

And it is also the center of Roman power in the region.

So that beast of Rome expresses itself in great power here.

And they know that they are walking in and they will be understood as rebels against those two incredible sources.

And so they walk in with a deep fear.

So look at Jesus marching towards Jerusalem.

He walks forward.

The disciples are amazed at the courage that he would take this to that place.

And the crowd walks behind, fearful of what might come.

So Jesus takes the twelve disciples aside in Mark 10, 32.

And taking the 12 again, he began to tell them what was to happen to him.

So he wants the 12 to be, in a sense, isolated from the crowd.

And perhaps he's saying, look, I understand that you're amazed at me walking forward, but I want you to understand what it is that I'm really walking towards.

And so he lays out in detail what will transpire on this journey to Jerusalem.

No longer, like the other two predictions that Jesus offers of his death, is it something that may happen in the future?

They are on the road now, walking towards it.

And so Jesus wants them to understand what it is they're walking towards.

Now, what Jesus lays out, I think would sound to the disciples like the absolute worst-case scenario of what they could possibly imagine happening in Jerusalem.

They might have imagined something like walking in, and Jesus goes toe-to-toe with the Sadducees and the Pharisees and scribes and the elders, and like they had seen him do countless times in at the retirement ministry and in their time around Galilee, they come up and they ask him some question, and it's a good, challenging question, and then Jesus just chews them up, you know, just so successfully undermines whatever it is that their considerations were.

And the disciples, you can imagine, probably enjoyed it a bit.

And they might think he's been so compelling.

Everywhere he's gone, he's drawn a crowd.

He's been so persuasive, and his words have this authority and power.

We're just gonna watch this happen in Jerusalem.

We're finally hitting the big stage, and we're going to see that Jesus is going to come here.

These enemies will be so humiliated and so exposed for what they truly are, and we will turn this place into our own kingdom, and it will be evident, and we're gonna get to be a part of it.

We've got our guy, he's ahead of us, and he's walking forward.

So you can imagine there's this sort of expectation there.

But Jesus will lay out in these seven events that he tells will happen to him, and then an eighth, and he will lay out in these seven events what must have been the worst case scenario imaginable for the disciples as they are walking this way, as Aerosmith said.

So that was an accident.

Mark 1033, saying, See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles.

See, behold, we're walking to Jerusalem.

This is happening.

He is the one who is making the movement.

They are not being drawn into Jerusalem.

They're not being forced or compelled to go into Jerusalem.

Jesus says, look, we are walking to Jerusalem.

This is not like the retirement ministry, where it's just going to be us, you know, the 13 of us, you getting to know some things from me in these quiet places, frustrated by the people that we're ministering to, but no less, something like a retirement.

This is not going to be the familiarity of our time in Galilee, feeding crowds of thousands.

We are going to Jerusalem.

Notice we are walking there.

And then he lays out these seven things.

And it begins.

And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes.

That's the first thing that will happen.

This story will, these events that Jesus lays out, it begins with this disaster.

The enemies of what we're doing here, I will be turned over to them.

And I will find myself in the clutches of the scribes and the Pharisees, and they will have me.

Now, of course, there's an event which is sort of related to this one, because it is not just that the scribes and the Pharisees will receive Jesus, but that he will be turned over to these enemies, and he will be turned over to these enemies by his friends, by the very ones that he is speaking to then.

The one who would do it most completely is standing there.

So what is you can you can imagine there are a few things worse than being turned over to your enemies.

The thing that might make that worse is that when you are turned over to your enemies by your friends, this is where this is where what Christ is walking towards will begin.

The chief priests and scribes, and it continues, and they will condemn him to death.

So he's turned over.

Oh, perhaps there's some way in which they'll ask him a question and Jesus will be able to do that thing he does where he flips it on them, and then we they walk away ashamed, and and more followers are gathered to what we're doing.

They will condemn him to death.

The one who will sit on the great white throne of judgment at the end of the age will come under the judgment of men, and he will be condemned to death.

The only truly innocent man will be condemned to death.

The condemnation of death by the Jews will be fulfilled by the Gentile, by the Gentiles.

It says, and they will condemn him to death, and then the third thing, and deliver him over to the Gentiles.

The Jews were unable to accomplish a death penalty on their own legally, and so they unite themselves in this co-belligerence with their own oppressor so that they might see to it that Jesus is killed.

So now there is Jesus.

What we see happen is he is rejected by his friends, taken in by his most immediate enemies, and then condemned together with the most powerful political force in the world.

This is an absolute isolation.

And this is what Jesus is marching towards.

Once he is turned over to the Gentiles, he will experience no mercy from them, no more than he experienced from the scribes and the elders.

Mark 1034 says, and they will mock him and spit on him and flog him and kill him.

The fourth thing: they will mock Jesus.

So Jesus will not walk away from his interlocutors and be shown victorious over whatever question they might have thrown in his direction.

He will be humiliated.

What are we walking towards?

You were to be elevated as king.

We are walking to Jerusalem so that we establish this kingdom.

We're still concerned with who's going to be the greatest in that kingdom.

And you're telling us you will be captured, you will be turned over, you'll be condemned to death, you'll be humiliated.

This is the walk that we're on.

The one who understood what it meant to be in the throne room of God and to see angels, seraphim surrounding, and shouting day and night, holy, holy, holy, will be mocked by men.

They will spit on him.

There are some signs that uh transcend culture.

But we understand what it means to spit on someone.

To want to make them unclean, demonstrate that they are absolutely beneath, absolutely rejected, that we take no pity on them, that they are beneath what it even means to be human.

And to demonstrate that we spit on them.

Mocked and spit.

Then he will be flogged in the sixth event.

He will be beaten beyond recognition as a man.

In his humiliation, he will experience great physical pain and torment.

This is what he's walking towards.

And then he will be killed in the seventh event that he relays to them.

This is his walk.

This is what we are walking towards in Jerusalem.

If that's what you know you're walking towards in Jerusalem, if you know you're walking towards this thing that looks like certain defeat, why are you walking there in front of everyone?

Why would you go out in front and walk down that road?

What type of person must you be to know this is coming and to put yourself in in front?

Look, he is not being compelled, he is not being drawn to to avoid this.

All they had to do was nothing.

Just stay where you were, Capernaum, this time of year.

Particularly lovely.

All you had to do was not walk to Jerusalem until we see him marching there.

Not in ignorance, but in absolute knowledge of what it is that he is walking towards.

So why why is he why is he walking there?

Because it is necessary.

It is necessary that Jesus go to Jerusalem.

It is necessary that he be turned over and condemned.

It is necessary that he be beaten and humiliated, and it is necessary that he would be killed.

In Jeremiah Burroughs' book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, he tells this story.

All those old Puritans tell these old Roman stories, like you know them.

They knew them.

But he says, it is said of Pompeii that when he was to carry corn to Rome in time of dearth, he was in a great deal of danger by storms at sea.

But, says he, we must go on.

It is necessary that Rome should be relieved, but it is not necessary that we should live.

What is the necessity that Jesus must go to Jerusalem?

Why is he walking down that road?

It is not necessary that I live.

It is necessary that these sinners are saved.

Now here's the thing.

It's not necessary that sinners be saved.

There is nothing unjust about condemnation to death and eternal torment of those who had turned on and rebelled against the source of life and eternal joy.

There is no injustice in that.

So what is this necessity?

The necessity is if sinners are to be saved, it is necessary that Christ go to the cross.

Why is it that sinners must be saved?

Why would he go on that walk?

The Father and the Son in eternity past had decided that they would set their love upon their people.

And at no matter cost, the cost, even a cost that they would bear, they would have their people.

So what makes the march necessary?

It is the love of the Father towards the people that he desires to save.

It is necessary.

If sinners are to be saved, then it is necessary that Christ go to the cross.

But what compels that necessity?

Do you see the depth of love that causes Jesus to walk in front of everyone else, knowing exactly what he is walking towards?

The only explanation for that is his depth of love towards those he intends to save.

This is the only explanation.

Him showing this incredible, unthinkable depth of love.

Do you see him walking?

Why would he walk?

He could stop at any moment.

He could turn around and it would be all over.

He is compelled by his love.

And so when he considers his own life, he considers it is not necessary that I live through this walk to Jerusalem.

It is not necessary that I avoid the humiliation.

It is necessary that the people that the Father and I have committed to save be saved.

Some people, some Christians throughout history have really understood this.

One story that really inspired me early in my faith was the story of the Moravian missionaries, Johann Leonard Dober and David Nietzsche.

They were Germans who were uh converted by this man named Ludwig Zinzendorf.

And they were contacted by an ex-slave in St.

Thomas.

And the uh this ex-slave's name was Anthony Ulrich.

And Anthony Anthony Ulrich had a sister who was still enslaved on the island.

And he came to them and he said, I think that these slaves would be deeply receptive to the gospel.

And there is no one there to teach it to them.

And I hope that you we could maybe send some people, even perhaps that my sister might be witness to and that she might hear the gospel.

So Dober and Nietzsche are compelled by this idea of this island of people who have no hope of hearing the gospel.

And what what they're uh they understand from Anthony Ulrich, he's he explains to them look, the these slaves are worked from morning until night.

And at night they just they just sleep and recover for the next day, and there's no space in their lives.

There's no opportunity to witness to them unless you are alongside them working in the fields day and night.

That would be the only way that you'll be able to come in contact with them.

And so they decide that the uh means by which they will go to those islands is is they will sell themselves into slavery.

And and when they were discussing that they would sell themselves into slavery to go to this island to witness, they're saying it would be it would be worth it if we could see these people saved, but but perhaps it would even be worth it if we were only able to witness to Anthony's sister.

And if she were the only one who were to be saved.

As it turned out, um they were not able to be sold into slavery because they were white and there were no white slaves on this island.

Uh so they found an alternative way of going, and when they when they arrived, they said, Well, we're carpenters and we'll just ply our trade here.

And they witnessed to those who were on the island.

But when they set off, uh, this is the famous cry of Moravian missions, when they when they set off to go to that island, uh, St.

Thomas, you know, it's not all bad.

Um, when they set off to go to uh St.

Thomas, um they anticipated that they might never return.

As it turns out they did.

But they anticipated that they might never return.

And so they're setting sail and they're waving goodbye to their families, and they they say this may the lamb that was slain receive the reward of his suffering.

Why is it necessary that they would go?

Why is it necessary that they would go to that island?

Because Christ, because it was necessary that Christ come to save them.

And they understood that.

And they became the type of people who would take up that same necessity so that they would see that the ones whom God intends to save, he will get.

He got us.

How much more might it be necessary that we join him?

Now, before I finish, there's one more thing that Jesus says.

There's an eighth thing.

It's not just the seven uh the seven events that would take place to Jesus when he gets to Jerusalem, because he ends it, and in verse 34, he says, and after three days he will rise.

Now, why is it that we could follow Jesus into the most dire circumstances?

You know, you know what it's like to walk into a conversation that you don't want to have, but you know you ought to.

It's like, can I just not do this?

And yet we we need to move into it.

Because Christ moved into it on our behalf.

And what why is it that we can enter that with hope?

This is what's unique about the Christian's ability to do this.

We enter that with hope because in Christ's death, death was killed.

Because three days later, he was resurrected.

So we go forward with this certainty, his kingdom will prevail.

Death could not hold him down.

So even if I must participate and enter into this death that he calls me to enter into in all kinds of ways, that he calls you to participate in in all kinds of ways, you enter with hope.

You enter seeing the glory that is to come because you are bound up in Christ.

Look at the depth of his love towards you.

Do you see the type of the type of person that this creates?

The ones who grasp the depth of Christ's love towards them.

Look at him walking.

Understand what he's walking towards.

See in his walk towards Jerusalem the depth of his love towards you.

This will change your heart.

Are there any questions today, Matthew?

Sweet.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

On the night when Jesus was betrayed, he invites his disciples to this meal.

And he knows what he is walking towards the next day.

We've seen him say it this morning.

And yet, before he has that meal, he says to his disciples that he has longed for this night.

He has longed for this meal.

Because he knows the death is coming, but he looks past the death to the glory of what will be accomplished.

He knows that in his death he is putting death to death.

And that even these sinners who he is eating with might be rescued to join him in this eternal hope of his kingdom.

So, Christian, he invites you to this meal this morning.

This meal which he offers to you for free, which he purchased at great cost.

It is his broken body and his poured out blood.

In it you see the depth of love that he has for you, that he shows to you.

Take it up, eat, drink.

Depend upon him.

Walk towards those things that you know he is calling you to that may look just like death.

But walk with a hope that your king has conquered the grave.

So let's enjoy this meal together.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this time of communion.

Lord, we praise you for the depth of love that you show towards us in your march towards Jerusalem.

I pray that our hearts might be uh taken and captivated by this image of you, and that we might understand more completely the depth of love that you showed to us, and that our hearts might be transformed to be able to participate in that same love for one another.

Lord, we praise you.

We ask that you would be glorified in this time.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.