Sermon 24th March 2013

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, preaches based on the reading from Luke 19 verses 28-40.

So: how’s your Latin?! If I were to say, “Vox populi, vox Dei”, who would know what that means? “The voice of the people is the voice of God”. Well, wouldn’t life be so much simpler if that saying was true! Wouldn’t it be great if all we had to do to know what God wanted was to take a vote? But, sadly, experience teaches us that all too often the voice of the people is, in fact, not the voice of God.

It’s not at all hard to think of countless examples of when that has been the case, when a popular cause has been far from the will of God. How about the Crusades? Or the Inquisition? What about the slave trade? Those are just 3 notorious times in history when people have claimed they knew what God wanted, and then later been proved badly wrong. But none of those instances comes even close to being as spectacularly wrong as what we’ve heard today. It just is not possible to be as wrong about the purpose of God as the crowds were on that first Palm Sunday.

As ever, the crowds could make a good case for believing what they did. Those were exciting times for anyone who had been following the travelling preacher from Nazareth. For the past 3 years he’d been doing amazing things – as well as preaching in ways that’d never been heard before. Jesus had given blind people their sight; he’d made lame people walk; he’d even brought the dead back to life – and there were numerous witnesses to all these miracles. All sorts of people had given up their lives to follow him: from hot-headed fishermen; to the hardest First-Century nuts of all, tax-collectors. Jesus had transformed their lives too: he’d even sent them out, to preach his message and do his work all over the place.

Of all people, we should understand this rather better than most. This Lent adults here have read through almost this entire story as it’s told by Luke. These events are fresh in our minds too, then. So, as we reach this day, and come to this part of the story, we should easily grasp why people thought that in Jesus God was doing a new and wonderful thing. Even if we do already know how this story ends, we can see how this event looks like it’s history in making. We may still need help with why these crowds were sure that any doubts they’d had were being dispelled before their eyes. So, to spell that out, until now in Luke Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem, Israel’s religious and political capital. But here Luke has him coming into the city, in ways that Jesus had obviously chosen to prove who he truly was. He was riding a donkey, one that he’d maybe acquired in a miraculous way. But even if there was a natural explanation for it, this was another sign of Jesus’ identity – and the obvious fulfilment of an Old Testament prophecy (as Matthew spells out in his Gospel).

As we heard, Luke laid it on thick – in keeping with Jesus’ own actions and intentions. There could not have been a more public time for Jesus to arrive. This was the Passover, the greatest festival of the Jewish religious year. Jerusalem would’ve been packed with people. At this feast the whole nation came to celebrate. Their hearts and minds were fixed on God’s deliverance of their people from slavery in Egypt centuries before. So could there be a better time, or place, for God to act for Israel again now, as he had done in the past?

The air around Jesus was ripe with symbolism. The crowd were sure that he had chosen this moment, and this way, to take the next step on his victorious journey. And so they began to shout. “God bless (GNB) / Blessed is (NIV) the king who comes in the name of the Lord” is what Luke tells us they cried out as they wound their way down through the Mount of Olives. And in one way they were quite right: Jesus was the king; he was arriving to do what God wanted. But that was also precisely the point where the crowd had things so spectacularly wrong.

If there had been a popular vote on what they thought God should do, the outcome would have been a landslide. Even the most pacifist religious people would have voted for God’s judgement to fall on Israel’s Roman occupiers. To have their God-given land back for themselves was what every 1^st-Century Jew dreamed of. To be safe, under God’s rule, in His kingdom, was a state that they hadn’t experienced for centuries. They wanted it again; and were sure that this is what God had promised He was going to do for them.

That was the voice of the crowd on that first Palm Sunday – in Luke, and in the other 3 Gospels too. People expected that God was about to rescue them. They believed they were seeing that starting to happen. And, in a way, Jesus hadn’t dampened their enthusiasm any. He hadn’t protested when they had put him on that colt. We know that he was quite capable of not doing what he didn’t want to. But he hadn’t told the crowd not to put their cloaks on the road. Jesus hadn’t insisted on approaching Jerusalem by a route that didn’t increase their excitement. And he knew what the crowd was up to: Jesus was well aware that this was the grandest sort of welcome – the welcome an Old Testament king could’ve expected. And he’d let them do it all.

In Luke, as in the other Gospels, Jesus didn’t even shush the crowd when they chanted Psalms as their anticipation heightened. That wasn’t unusual: people often sang as they came up to Jerusalem – as they still do today. But the particular Psalms that these crowds used were laden with significance. They spoke of God as king, who’d won the victory, now coming to establish His kingdom, and rescue his people. The Pharisees certainly understood what the crowd were saying about who, and what, they thought Jesus was.

Not for the first time in Luke’s account, they were horrified by this blasphemy that Jesus was allowing. It’s in Luke alone that they told him to order his followers to be quiet. Jesus refused: on the contrary, he told Pharisees that if people were silent, the stones would cry out. Jesus didn’t explain that; but we can easily read between these lines. He knew this was a key day; that his arrival deserved to be marked and celebrated in this way. And that surely only encouraged the crowd to build up their expectations of Jesus even higher.

But the crowds’ expectations were wrong: dangerously, and spectacularly, wrong. If they’d only listened to what Jesus had consistently said, time and again, they’d have known. In Luke’s telling of the story we only need look back to yesterday’s reading to see what Jesus had actually said. In Jericho, his last stop, some 18 miles before Jerusalem, Jesus spoke clearly about what was going to happen. And we know that this wasn’t for the first, but for at least the third, time that he had done so.

Luke makes it clear Jesus knew what lay ahead of him in Jerusalem. Far from what this excited crowd expected, and wanted – Roman downfall; God as king ruling in Jerusalem – God’s voice spoke in stark contrast to that popular voice. God’s plan was far greater, and Jesus had known that from the beginning, as Luke has shown time and again. Jesus knew that what he had to accomplish was far greater than ‘just’ the restoration of God’s kingdom in Israel. But he could only achieve that by being the sort of king that the crowd didn’t want.

Back in January here we heard Luke’s story of Jesus’ temptation by the Devil in the desert. We saw how the Devil offered Jesus a different, easier way. Jesus was offered a way to serve and please himself. But we also saw then how Jesus chose not to be distracted from doing what needed to be done. Even back then Jesus knew that what he had to do wasn’t for himself. Yes, there would be great rewards for him too; but that wasn’t the point. This was about opening the way to God for all people for all time. And Jesus couldn’t accomplish that by choosing an easy or glorious way for himself.

Simply put, Jesus knew that he had to die. That was why he had come to Jerusalem now, at Passover. Yes this was a time of national joy in Israel for their deliverance. But their safety in Egypt on the night the first-born died had been at the cost of blood. Now Jesus was here to offer his own blood, as a sacrifice to set all people free. It would involve pain suffering and humiliation on scale that we can’t even begin to imagine – though this week there are opportunities to make the attempt to try and do so.

For those who don’t know this, when it comes to it, Luke doesn’t pull any punches about what happened. Even though it’s John’s telling of events that we’ll read through here on Good Friday, we’re all being invited to read it in Luke as well. Be prepared: the death that Jesus endured wasn’t easy or sanitised. It was horrific – which is all that we should expect if we have listened to Jesus in Luke. Jesus said that he would be mocked, insulted, spit on, whipped and then crucified. And that is just what rode he into Jerusalem to face on that Palm Sunday.

Today isn’t a day to celebrate, then – or not in the way that these crowds did. The voice of God spoke very different words to those of the crowd. And it’s the voice of God that we need to listen to, then and now. The voice of God often says that the easy, popular, seemingly glorious way isn’t the right way. The voice of God says that the path we may have to walk is the selfless, serving, self-sacrificial way. We know that in Luke those who accompany Jesus are called ‘followers on the costly way’. To be a disciple of Jesus is to walk a path that involves suffering and pain that can be far beyond our worst imaginings. The popular voice may well tell us that it shouldn’t be like this, that we don’t deserve it. But the popular voice may well be wrong – as it was so clearly wrong on Palm Sunday.

Now I’m not saying that any of us can suffer like Jesus did. Of course we can’t, and won’t. But, whichever Gospel we read, those who follow Jesus are called to be like him, in his death as much as in his life. And so we need to pay very careful attention to these final days of his life. We need to note how the voice of the people was not the voice of God – and how Jesus chose to hear, and obey God’s voice. Throughout this week above all we need to see and hear how Jesus remained faithful to God to the end, despite the massive cost. Jesus ended his life as he had begun it: in obedience, faith, and trust in his Father God.

The voice of the people says that Easter is a great Spring holiday. The voice of the people says this is time to catch the first sun of the year (seeing snow outside, I don’t know why), to prepare for exams, and to eat lots of chocolate. I’d say that the popular voice is not the voice of God at Easter. This is time to remember, and give thanks to God for great sacrifice of his Son. It’s also time to think about how we’ll live the rest of our life. Will we listen to the popular voice, and seek an easy, safe and comfortable life for ourselves? Or will we instead commit ourselves to going God’s way, all the way? Will we follow Jesus’ example of self-giving to the point of death for the sake of others, and go with him along this costly way?

This is the point that our reading of Luke has now brought us to. At whatever level we may have engaged with it, this is the time to make some kind of a decision. Palm Sunday shows us the contrast between the voice of God and the voice of the people. Reality is that it is often true: there is a contrast; the voice of the people usually is not the voice of God. But which voice will we listen to? Jesus had to make a choice, one that would determine the fate of many millions of people. We know that of course he chose to obey the voice of God. The very least that we can do this week is to celebrate the costly choices that Jesus made for us. But today we too need to choose which voice we will hear and obey. So which voice will you decide to heed: the voice of people? Or the voice of God? Which road will you walk, this Holy Week, and beyond? And now let’s pray ...