Palm Sunday 2023

Good morning, church.

Our scripture reading this morning is John twelve, verse twelve through nineteen.

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

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.

And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written, Fear not, daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt.

His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him, and had been done to him.

The crowd that had been with him when he called Lazarus out of the tomb, and raised him from the dead, continued to bear witness.

The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign.

So the Pharisees said to one another, You see that you are gaining nothing.

Look, the world has gone after him.

This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

We are taking a break from our time in Genesis as we move into Holy Week.

This is the first Sunday of Holy Week.

It is Palm Sunday.

So if you're expecting a parade of children waving fake palms, just wait right after the sermon.

It'll be very good.

Probably very chaotic.

I saw, you know the Babylon Bee?

It's like Christian the Onion.

There uh I saw a post of theirs this week that was like, Little Johnny is excited for his favorite Sunday of the year when he gets to hit his sister with a plastic palm frond.

So we'll get to see that in real time, which will be good.

All right, let's pray and we'll move into the triumphal entry, a text uh which we celebrate today with Palm Sunday.

Holy Father, we praise you, our King, our Lord, who deserves the gates to be thrown open and to be met with praises.

Lord, that is right in what you are worthy of.

It is the honor that you are due.

Lord, we pray that our hearts would be ready and prepared to meet you and praise you, receive you as our Lord and Savior and King.

Lord, we pray that you would be honored.

Pray that you would be honored in our lives, in our city, in our nation.

Lord, that as you gather all the nations toward yourself, that you would be honored in the world.

Lord, we pray that this Palm Sunday we look forward to your coming in as King, returning in glory.

But Lord, here at this Palm Sunday, like the original Palm Sunday, there is confusion and uh pain in the world, and there is misunderstanding of who you are as Lord.

Lord, I pray that you would meet us in this place now and aim our hearts towards your future glory.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, Palm Sunday is about Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem.

Now, Jesus' whole ministry has really taken place on the outskirts of the main city centers that he was around.

And uh he had been operating in really a mode of secrecy.

This is particularly true, we see in Mark's gospel.

We've been moving through the Gospel of Mark each fall.

Um, and uh we've seen this pattern throughout Mark's gospel, which is the messianic secret that Jesus will heal someone and then he'll say, Now don't tell anybody about it.

And it's strange to read because we're thinking, well, but isn't like the whole thing about being a Christian is like you've got to go tell people about it?

And won't he end his uh ministry with this great commission and he'll say, now go tell everybody about it?

But this time of Jesus' ministry was cloaked in secrecy.

He was a messiah, the messiah who had come.

But the way that the messiah was understood could not have been received by the crowds that he was interacting with.

They were expecting a political Messiah to emerge from among the Israelites and to regather the Jewish community, overthrow their Roman oppressors, and recreate this nation for themselves.

But Jesus as the Messiah had aims that were much higher.

He was not just throwing off earthly oppressors, but he came to kill the serpent, the devil himself, under whose rule we all live, and who has captured our hearts in sin.

He came to die as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins for his people, and gather people from every tribe and nation and tongue.

The Messiah who Jesus is was so much more grand than could be understood.

So that if he would just come out and say, I am the Messiah, the slot that that would slip into in people's minds was great, we have our king, let's make him king now, and let's overthrow the Romans.

Now, Jesus would do all of those things.

He would become king, he would overthrow the Romans, but in a much stranger way than anyone possibly could have understood.

So his ministry was cloaked in secrecy.

It was a hidden ministry throughout most of his time.

Now, despite his efforts to be hidden, you uh heal a couple of people and then bring one guy back from the dead, word gets out.

So that is where our story actually takes place today.

What's incredible to see about Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem is that it is the most dangerous thing he could do.

If we would expect his ministry to continue on in the way that it had for the past three years, then we would think, okay, he's going into the main city where the authorities hate him.

How is he gonna get into that city?

And we would expect some like slinking in the back door with like a, I don't know, a fake beard or something.

He had a beard, but one on top.

And then people would have been like, well, Jesus only had one beard and that guy has two, so that's not Jesus.

But instead, he enters triumphantly.

He enters as a king.

Now, this seems like the most dangerous possible thing that he could do because he is entering, demonstrating his true glory, and his fame is increasing, and as his fame is increasing, his infamy among the scribes and Pharisees is increasing as well.

And so this type of triumphal entry is really exposing himself to the most hostility that he could be exposed to.

It's it's coming into enemy territory and not sneaking in the back, but announcing your arrival as one in triumph.

Now, if I were one of Jesus' consultants, I think he hired Deloitte.

We I I would have sat down with him and been like, hey, you're a pretty big part of this movement that's going on.

We want to do all that we can to keep you safe.

So I wouldn't the the one thing that I think could really upset all this momentum is you being murdered.

That would really interrupt the mission that we have going.

So maybe let's skip Passover this year.

You know, I've we have a lovely summer home that we can go to or something.

And uh we won't go into Jerusalem, and we certainly won't announce our arrival, but we see in the way that Jesus goes into Jerusalem that he is going there to die.

This is the aim of Jesus' ministry.

And we see that just in his very choice to go in and not go in quietly, but to go in triumphantly.

Everything about the Holy Week is all upside down and inverted.

It's an upside down world that he is entering into, where right is wrong and wrong is right, and those who are righteous are being punished, and those who are criminal are being set free.

And so Jesus enters into this upside-down world as the only one who's right side up, and he will face the most terrible consequences.

It makes it a wild story to understand and try to interpret.

Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, but it is a triumph that marches towards death, but that is the triumph.

In his death, death is destroyed.

In the sins against him, sin is washed away from all of his people.

It is all in this holy week story.

So let's look at John 12.12 and provide a bit more context on entering into Jerusalem.

John 12.12.

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

All of the Gospels tell the story of the triumphal entry.

John is, of course, a little different.

He doesn't take the perspective of the disciples, he takes the perspective of the crowds.

And so he starts us by saying the crowds, rumor had moved, and they had heard Jesus is coming into Jerusalem.

Now, why were the crowds gathering around?

Well, John places the triumphal entry right on the heels of the raising of Lazarus.

The raising of Lazarus in John's gospel is described to us as the most impactful of Jesus' signs.

There's something about bringing someone back from the dead after four days when they smell that, yeah, that's newsworthy.

So the crowds hear of this, and the Pharisees see that Jesus is gaining incredible momentum in his ministry.

And many Jews are now following Jesus as the Messiah because of the healing of Lazarus.

And so they hatch a plan, and their initial plan is we're going to kill Jesus.

We get rid of Jesus, we make this thing stop.

But then another one of them has another great idea during one of their brainstorming sessions, and they said, we should also kill Lazarus.

Because, you know, it's hard to, it just seemed like a good idea.

So they were their plans were to kill them both.

Now, right after this, as Jesus is gaining this momentum, in order to protect his own life, he goes and hides for a little while in a town called Ephraim.

Your name is Ephraim, Ephraim.

Yep.

And they go and hide, it's your namesake.

Um, it was named after you.

They go and hide in Ephraim, and uh the Pharisees send out word and they say, if anybody knows the whereabouts of Jesus, just tell us.

Oh, we have something lovely to give him.

I don't know what they said, but uh they were they had people that they were seeking to uncover Jesus' whereabouts, but he's hidden.

Now, meanwhile, the hiddenness of Jesus and the trying to discover him after this resurrection of Lazarus is coming to this inflection point.

And it's just in the liturgical calendar of the nation of Israel.

Passover week is coming.

And for Passover, all Jews make a pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem.

And so we know that if we don't find him before this, we'll find him in Jerusalem.

This inflection point is coming.

John describes to us, because he's really giving us the perspective of the crowd, and in chapter 11, verse 56, he says, This is the people in Jerusalem who have made pilgrimage there.

They said they were looking for Jesus and saying to one another as they stood in the temple, what do you think?

That he will not come to the feast at all?

It's sort of like, I don't know, I'm being very jokey today.

But it's kind of like, is Trump ever gonna make a tweet?

He can be back on there now.

When's this guy gonna tweet?

And it's just in the world, you know, people are just talking about it.

Is he gonna arrive?

Is Jesus gonna come?

There's this inflection point that's coming now.

What's gonna happen when he gets here?

What's the buzz?

Tell me what's happening.

That song's act literally about this.

Not a lot of Jesus Christ superstar fans in the uh today.

The hiddenness of Christ was the maintenance of his life.

But the march into Jerusalem is the climax of his ministry.

The tensions are built to this terrible inflection point.

Will Jesus come to Jerusalem?

The triumphal entry is this absolute statement by Jesus, yes, I will.

I am coming to Jerusalem.

John 12, 13.

So this back to 1212, just a refresher.

The next day, the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem in 1213.

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.

This is the reception of Jesus coming in to Jerusalem.

The crowds gather around.

They cry out, Hosanna.

They proclaim, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel.

There is hostility that will mount because of these declarations.

The crowd is, in a sense, saying everything that is true about him and participating in his execution, because as his fame grows in truth, the lies mount to destroy him.

They take branches of palm trees, they give him a greeting of a king.

They cry out, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

They declare him the king of Israel.

This is a Roman-occupied territory with kings and governors already presiding over it.

This is a revolutionary declaration within the city of Jerusalem about Jesus' arrival.

Well, let's talk about those palms.

Palm Sunday.

Peter Lighthart is this great theologian.

He's one of the best symbolic thinkers that there is.

He sees things that are just wonderful connections in scripture.

And so in looking to this, I look to him to see what does he think about these palms?

Wow, his insights are wonderful.

So I'm going to share them with you now.

Palm in Hebrew is the word Tamar.

Now, if you were with us a couple of weeks ago, we in Genesis, this is rather convenient because we just moved through the story of Judah and Tamar.

Now, if the names aren't ringing a bell and you were with us, the story will, because it's a wild story.

Judah goes into Judah marries a Canaanite woman, which he he shouldn't have done, and they have three sons.

He takes for his oldest son a Gentile wife named Tamar.

The oldest son dies, and so she ought to move to the youngest son who should have her offspring.

The youngest son refuses to have her offspring, or the middle son, excuse me, refuses to have her offspring.

He dies as well.

Judah is now responsible for marrying her to his youngest son, his third son, but he's afraid because the sons that she that he is marrying Tamar to keep dying.

So eventually she is estranged from the family and sent back to live in her father's house as a widow, even though she has a rightful husband in Judah's sons.

Judah goes to shear his sheep.

It's a festival occasion.

And Tamar dresses as a prostitute.

And that is enough to entice Judah in.

They conceive.

And Judah, with his daughter-in-law, because of his sexual immorality, conceive a son together, two sons, actually, twins.

Now Tamar is brought before Judah, and they say, see, she's been unfaithful by the one she's been unfaithful because she's pregnant.

And Judah says, well then she should be stoned.

And then Tamar reveals, because she had Judah's possessions, reveals it is by the man who owns these things, the man that owns this staff and who owns this signet and this cord, by this man I have conceived.

And Judah realizes I am the father of my daughter-in-law's child.

She has been more righteous than me.

That woman's name was Tamar.

Palm.

Tamar, her oldest son is Perez.

And from the line of Perez through Judah, a Gentile is brought in to the line of Judah.

And this Gentile woman becomes the mother of the ones who would be in the line of King David, of King David, who has the covenant of the eternal throne, of King David who stands in the line of Jesus.

So the palm had become associated with the woman who stands in the line of the kings.

The palm is associated with the kings, because Tamar is the one from whom the kings come.

The first instance of palms, the tree, not the woman, in Scripture is in Exodus 15.

It's right after the Exodus.

And they cross in the Red Sea, they sing that great song, and then they're looking for a place with clean water, and they can't find one.

So there's bitter water, the Lord makes the water sweet, and then they continue on and they go to a place called Elam.

And in Elam there are twelve springs.

Twelve springs in the desert.

You know, three would have been great.

Twelve springs in the desert.

And they are watering 70 palms.

Now I know twelve.

You know what to do with the number twelve, right?

You're reading the Bible and you see a twelve, and you think, yeah, twelve seem important.

Tribes of Israel, twelve apostles.

So we can see that these twelve tribes of Israel are going out and watering the seventy.

What's the seventy?

Seventy palms.

The seventy is the nations.

All the nations of the world.

That is what the 70 are.

That comes from Genesis 10.

Because in Genesis 10, we get the table of nations.

This is all of Noah's offspring.

And all of Noah's offspring are numbered, and they number out to 70.

And so it is typical throughout scripture to describe the nations as the 70.

This is a complete number which represents all of the nations of the world.

And so what we see in this settling place in Exodus is the twelve tribes of Israel go out to water and bring life to all the nations of the world.

Tamar is the palm.

She is the Gentile who is brought in to the line of the kings.

So when they are waving these palms, what we are seeing is the declaration of Christ as king, them proclaiming with their words that he is king of Israel.

In the palms themselves, participating in this story, which is that he is the king who will bring all nations in.

He is the king who will be over all nations, just as Tamar was brought into our line, and from her came the kings.

So all the nations will be brought in, as the palms were watered by the Israelites, so too will the whole world be brought life by the nation of Israel and their king.

That is the declaration of who Jesus is.

They cry out, Hosanna.

Hosanna is one of those words where it's kind of a uh it's kind of a prayer and a celebration.

It would literally be said, pray.

Or it would literally be save us, we pray.

Save, pray.

Save us, king who comes in.

Save us.

You are the one who will save us.

Hosanna, save us, save us.

The king is coming in.

This is the declaration that Christ receives on Palm Sunday.

Our Savior and our King is arriving.

Our Savior and our King, Hosanna.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

John 12, 14 and 15.

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

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

Now, the other three Gospels go into a lot of detail with regards to acquiring this donkey.

And it's kind of a strange story.

I'll read this excerpt from well, uh before we get into that story, I'll say a bit about the quotation here.

It says, just as it is written, and then it's a quotation from Zechariah, chapter 9, verse 9.

Zechariah 9:9

It says, Fear not, daughter of Zion, behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey's colt.

And in this prophecy, it goes on to explain: this king will gather in for himself all nations, and they will all look to him as the king.

And what will he come riding in on?

A donkey's colt.

Now, we would expect a horse for that type of riding in.

Behold, behold your king in the Toyota Corolla.

Not what I expected.

Reliable.

But not what I expected.

He comes in, this king comes in to gather all nations to himself.

This is the prophecy.

So then the other three Gospels go into this description of gathering the uh of getting the donkey to ride in on.

You know, the Bible gives us so few details considering all that takes place.

And so when it gives us like, you know, uh three verses on getting a donkey, strange editors.

Luke 19, 30 through 32.

Jesus is saying, Go into the village in front of you, he says this to his disciples, where on entering you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever yet sat.

Untie it and bring it here.

If anyone asks you, why are you untying it?

You shall say this, the Lord has need of it.

So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them.

In the other gospels it describes the interaction where where where someone says, Why, why are you untying that colt?

And they say, The Lord has need of it.

And then the person gives it to him.

I think this passage speaks for itself.

You know, there's something that we can see in this.

The selection of the donkey.

Where it was tied for this prophetic word.

Who would be willing to simply hear the words, the Lord has need of it, and say, Yeah, okay, take my donkey.

These are all in Christ's plan.

All of these details, all of these details belong to Jesus.

Now they're entering a world, a next week, where everything that Jesus does will look like it's just happening to him.

It will look like all that he could plan is just unraveling.

It will look like the unraveling of his control, but perhaps the disciples might remember.

I mean, he even knew where the donkey was to come in here.

This isn't something that's taking place outside of his providence, outside of his will, outside of his clear intention.

You know, this looks like everything that's taking place to him is the enemy winning.

And yet he is in control of it all.

He's the one who found the donkey, who mounted up and rode it in.

Why a donkey?

Why not a horse?

A donkey is a beast of burden.

Something upon which you throw your burdens.

Jesus is riding in to take on the burdens of the world.

He is riding in to be the one who is the beast of burden, the one whom we cast all our anxieties upon him.

That word cast is what you do to a donkey.

You cast things upon him.

Jesus will have the sin of the world cast upon him.

So he rides in on a donkey.

His mission at this point, the one who is being declared king, it is so right, oh, but so hard to understand from this side of the week.

We see three responses.

John 12, 16.

His disciples did not understand these things at first.

But when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.

So we can see Jesus is laying this out so that it might be understood.

He was in control of the story, the author of the story.

All that happened to him were things that he was doing.

But we've got to understand the dynamic that this gives us of that Palm Sunday.

They're looking at Jesus.

They're celebrating this triumphal entry.

They're even saying all the right words, but they don't have any of the true meaning attached to it yet.

They don't even understand how they themselves are participating in the prophetic word of God.

It is, in a sense, as it is most revealed, it is still hidden.

As explicit as Jesus is being here with his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, it cannot be understood until the death of Christ and the resurrection on Sunday.

And it is only then, when Jesus was glorified, that they'll look back and reinterpret all that had been taking place.

All the wickedness that they saw of that week, all the pain and terror, they will look back on and they will say, this was a function of the absolute plan and hand of Jesus, and it accomplished the salvation of the world and the glorification of him as king over all nations.

This is still true today.

Look at how this Palm Sunday matches this Palm Sunday.

Look at our past week.

I was considering my daughter was a nightmare this morning.

She's two, which is almost the same, that's almost redundant.

In Nashville this week, a pastor with a daughter close in age has no daughter this morning.

There is not a tear.

What is happening?

The slightest evil in the world begs all of existence into question.

Where are you?

Are you here?

What are you doing?

Look at this Palm Sunday.

Looking at him as King.

He's in control of everything.

The rest of the week, it will look like he's not.

He is.

He is.

He is now.

Our Lord and our King.

He rides in on a donkey to bear these burdens.

The crowd that had been with him, 17 and 18, when he called Lazarus out of the tomb and raised him from the dead, continued to bear witness.

The reason why the crowd went to meet him was that they heard he had done this sign.

So the crowd is continuing to bear witness.

And you can hear this dissonance in the way that this section is introed, is disciples did not understand these things at first.

And it's not like the disciples didn't understand and the crowd understood.

Nobody understands.

But they're participating in this narrative that has taken over.

And they are saying true things, but they don't really know what they mean.

They're saying, Hosanna, come save us from this Roman occupation.

Be our king and our Lord so that we could have a king like the other nations have.

But he is riding in saying, I will save you from your greatest enemy, the devil, and I will save you from the punishment from God due to your own sins.

It is your burdens who will be cast upon me.

He is saying, I am not just the king of Israel.

Look at the palm branches you wave at my entrance.

Look how they signal the Gentile who stands in my very line.

I am the king of all nations.

All peoples, tribes, and tongues will bow down and worship Jesus Christ.

That is the entrance that was really taking place on his march towards death.

In verse 19, so the Pharisees said to one another, You see that you are gaining nothing.

Look, the world has gone after him.

You can hear the despair in the Pharisees.

Oh, gosh, this look at this crowd celebrating.

Look at how they sing Hosanna.

You can almost hear it in Saul.

When Saul first heard everybody cheering, David kills his ten thousands, and Saul kills his thousands.

And Saul's like, I hate being king.

Look at how they go after him.

I've lost the crowd.

The Pharisees stand back there in that same way.

Look at how they go after him.

What is it that when that we can do?

You see, you're gaining nothing.

We're gaining nothing in all our petty little arguing here.

We need to do something real.

We need to put an end to this.

We need to kill that man.

Because look, the whole world is going after him.

Can you hear it?

They're saying what's true.

It's more true than they know.

The whole world will go after Jesus.

They don't even know what they're saying.

But it's true.

The whole world will go after him.

Everyone, even the wrong, the most wrong, are strangely participating in the goodness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

You can't understand it on the front end of Palm Sunday.

But after he is glorified, you can understand it.

We can't understand the wickedness in our world right now.

In fact, I spent so much of my time in undergrad struggling with theodices.

Do you know what those are?

It's not the Homer book.

It's not the Odyssey, although it's spelled the same.

Just minus a space.

Theodicy is how you deal with the problem of the problem of evil, how you solve it.

How can God be all good, all loving, all powerful, uh, all-knowing, and evil still exists.

He either doesn't know about it, so then he's not all-knowing.

He's either too weak to do anything about it, so he's not all powerful.

He is uh not loving, so he doesn't care to do anything about it.

And then the other one that this pinky represented that I don't remember.

Evil always throws a question mark over all of existence.

Have you never suffered?

You know this.

Suffering is not a is not a minor little little moment that takes place just in the heart of a person.

It begs a question of the entire cosmos.

How can things be such as they are and God exists such as he explains himself to be?

And I spent a lot of time trying to solve that problem, solve the problem of evil.

I think I was thinking about it wrongly.

Evil, because God does not come in and say, Yes, I see the irrationality of evil.

Let me explain to you how, oh, it's not actually evil.

Just look at it from this perspective and you'll see that it's it's not really evil.

No, that's not what God does at the end.

He destroys evil.

He removes it from his story.

The explanation of evil is a mere participation in absurdity, because evil is absurd.

And I mean that technically.

I mean that when the premise of evil is entered into an argument, the argument collapses because you cannot have an absurd premise support a conclusion.

Evil is absurd.

There is no explanation.

It must be dealt with.

Like a snake in a garden, you have to chop its head off.

So we have a Lord who comes in and does not rationalize or explain the evil of the world.

He kills the snake.

He does it in the most masterful of way.

He takes the death upon himself.

And by death, he kills death.

And with his death, he takes the punishment of our sin upon himself, so that in the punishment of him our sins are forgiven.

And then he takes up his own life again.

And he calls us by faith to share in his resurrection.

And he says, look forward with me to when I come back, because when I come back, I'm destroying all evil, and there will be none of it anymore.

What a fearful thing for the Lord to say, unless he himself has become your protection from that punishment.

There is a Palm Sunday that we have to look forward to.

In Revelation 7, verses 9 through 10.

Revelation 7:9–10

After a description of all the 12,000 of the tribe of Benjamin, the 12,000 of the tribe of Judah, the 12,000 of the, you may remember the part, right after that, in Revelation 7, verses 9 through 10, John, guided by the angel, looks up and says, After this, I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands.

Revelation 7:9–10

Tamar had become their mother too.

Crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

All nations will be gathered in.

There is a Palm Sunday when there will be no ambiguity.

There is a Palm Sunday where we will say, and the crowd will say, and everyone in it will understand the meaning of the words that they are shouting about the Lamb who was slain.

And they will say, Salvation belongs to God.

He is the one who accomplishes it who accomplishes it.

He is our Lord.

And listen to us.

The table of nations from Noah sings together in one voice, although they were split at Babel, which takes place in the next chapter after the Table of Nations.

Although they were split at Babel, now the table of nations sings together in one voice, and they proclaim, Christ is Lord, the lamb that was slain won us.

Salvation belongs to him, and we stand rescued.

The king comes in.

And then later in the same book, Jesus rides in and he's not on a donkey.

In Revelation 19, 11 through 16, then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse.

The one sitting on it is called faithful and true, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.

His eyes are like a flame of fire, and his head are on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself, just because that's cool.

He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is the Word of God.

And the armies of heaven arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses.

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron.

He will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty, on his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

There is a palm Sunday coming where we will not long for the justice of the Lord to be described, it will be made certain as he will come in on a horse.

So we warn the nations.

Turn to him.

There is no refuge from him, only in him.

Turn from your evil ways, turn to repent into the name of Jesus Christ that you might be saved, because he is our Savior and our Lord.

Honor him.

Proclaim the goodness of his name.

There will be a Palm Sunday that is not like this one.

There will be a Palm Sunday, where there is no ambiguity, but Christ is Lord and salvation belongs to him.

Warn the world, beg them to find the depth of his mercy before the terror of his wrath.

We announce the donkey.

As we look forward to the horse, we experience his kingship and his salvation.

They both belong to the Lord.

Are there any questions today?

Nice.

We'll take communion, then find your seats, and our children will come in and they will do a Palm Sunday parade.

Now, we should clap and say Hosanna with them, and we get to participate not with the crowd of that first Palm Sunday.

Because we speak not with words whose meanings are hidden to us, but we stand after the resurrection of the Lord.

So we participate now, we get a share of a little slice from deep into the future that comes back, and we get to get a taste of here in the present.

We get to say, with the nations clothed before the Lord, before he rides in on his white horse, we get to say, salvation belongs to the Lord.

Our King, our God, blessed is the lamb that was slain.

We speak with words, we know the meaning of them.

Because God has shown us his glory in Christ, who gave himself for us out of the depth of his love, that way he might reign over us eternally.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11, beginning in verse 23, 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.

This will happen just later this week in Jesus' life.

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.

Here we stand.

Our Lord has died, and it means our salvation.

He will come again, and it means the redemption of all things.

All that is upside down will be made right.

Evil is not explained, it is dealt with.

Holy Father, I pray that here in between the proclamation of your death and your coming, Lord, that your promise to be with us, we would hold fast to you.

That you would give us courage to proclaim you are our Lord.

That you are Lord of all things.

That there is not one square inch in the whole domain of existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not proclaim mine.

Lord, let us make that proclamation boldly.

Live in the truth of that.

Come to you for the rescue that we need.

Salvation belongs to you.

We praise you.

You freely give it.

Lord, let us receive that today at your table.

The freedom of your rescue, the joy of what it is that Christ is Lord.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.