Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Christ Church, Bulkington
Philippians 2. 5-11; Luke 19. 28-40
“the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen”
Nikolay Koshelev, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.
Palm Sunday speaks into an age of celebrity culture and social media in a way that few other Bible stories do. On Sunday, Jesus is the darling of the crowds, who mob Him like a modern day celebrity. It’s as if Taylor Swift turned up in Morrison’s in Devizes on a Saturday afternoon. Then, in the space of just five days, Jesus falls from favour so spectacularly that the crowds are literally calling for him to be strung up. We’ve seen so many stars fall from their pinnacles in recent years, sometimes deservedly and sometimes not, often because they said something on social media that outraged people.
The Internet is often the first thing that gets blamed for any social or cultural problem these days, and celebrity culture is never far behind. As with any technology, the Internet is an amplifier for both the good and the bad, and here are good and bad sides to social media. On the positive side, it keeps in touch with friends we haven’t seen for years and with family who live too far away for us to visit often. It could be why over the last ten to fifteen years mental health problems among young women have spiked and birth-rates across the world have collapsed.
But, hang on, Palm Sunday happened two thousand years before Facebook was invented! Our most serious problems are just modern variations on problems that have been with the human race since the dawn of time. Selfishness, greed, bigotry, and violence didn’t arrive with the smartphone. Nor did the way that being part of a crowd can turn normally decent people toxic, nor our tendency to abandon our most noble principles once it means risking unpopularity. Our problems today aren’t really caused by social media, or by the mainstream media, or by the way we chase after celebrities who are so often empty. Our problems are caused by the sickness in our souls.
Now some people might say the problems of our culture are the only thing we could expect at a time of godlessness. When people lose faith that there is more to our existence than the here-and-now, when they think the existence of human beings is a matter of random chance mutation and that our lives have no greater meaning than what strikes us as best at any given time, then it’s inevitable that people will become unhappy and start to do crazily self-destructive things. I think that’s true—but only up to a point.
The Jerusalem of Jesus’ time was an intensely devout, God-fearing city, just as it is now—and it still has its fair share of problems. And in this intensely devout city, Jesus’ own disciples react like everyone else: on Sunday they are shouting out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord”; but by Friday nearly all of them have abandoned Him, and that is despite “all the deeds of power they had seen”. Remember, we are no different today.
When Jesus’ disciples abandon Him, even after all they’d seen, they show us why Jesus couldn’t do what His followers expected from the Messiah, that He would seize power, throw out the corrupt religious establishment and the Roman occupiers, and establish a godly political Kingdom for the Jewish people that would be so wonderful it would attract admirers from all over the world. It was a lovely idea. But the sickness in their souls would have remained uncured. They would still have been prone to doing the wrong thing even when they knew better. They would still have been prone to selfishness, anger, spite, pride—all the bad things we see too often around us in mundane ways, that we give in to too often ourselves. With human nature being what it is, how could Christ as earthly King have maintained His Kingdom except by using the techniques of power and control that even the freest and fairest of societies must sometimes employ, and which are completely foreign to the nature of God?
Instead Christ supplied the medicine for the sickness in our souls, a medicine even His own most faithful followers have shown their need for, when He died for them and for us on the Cross.
Now, when we hear the story of Palm Sunday, in many cases as practising Christians who’ve been hearing it all our lives, we know what comes next. We know the crowds will turn on Jesus when He’s at His most vulnerable, and that He’ll be put to death, and that this seeming defeat will actually open the way to His victory and the liberation of the human race. We know the old, old, story.
Because of that, it’s easy to miss that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem actually is a great moment in its own right, not merely a prelude for what will happen next. A true prophet is indeed entering Jerusalem—more than that, the Messiah Himself, coming to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. This is the fulfilment of the ancient prophesies of Isaiah and Zechariah that people have waited hundreds of years for.
The Pharisees know those ancient prophesies too, and understand that Jesus is using their symbolism when He rides into town on an unridden colt, with his followers spreading their cloaks in front of Him. They are clearly scared, and ask Him to calm His followers down. Are they frightened because they think He’s a charlatan, a chancer from the provinces who has lost touch with reality and might soon lose control of His followers, provoking the Romans into one of their brutal crackdowns on anything that even vaguely resembles a rebellion? Or are they actually frightened because they think Jesus really is a prophet and coming king, which would put their cynicism and faithlessness under God’s judgement? In any case, this is indeed such a great moment that Jesus tells them that even if He could silence His followers, the stones themselves would cry out.
But then Jesus does something no king is expected to do—He humbles himself, empties himself, allows Himself to be put to death, rejecting all violence and revenge. Jesus understood the assignment given to Him by His heavenly Father. In His death, Christ shattered human illusions that we can build heaven on Earth—and, through what seemed to be His defeat, instead won for us to God’s eternal Kingdom. He opened the way to a Kingdom more glorious than anything we could win by our own efforts, greater than anything we can even truly imagine. It is because of what seemed to be His defeat that, at the end of all things in this age, every tongue in heaven and on earth and under the earth shall indeed confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
At a time when we worry about what might happen between the kingdoms of this world, events we seem to be powerless to influence, let us remember Christ has already opened a Kingdom to us in the world to come, if only we trust His promises; and in that knowledge let us recommit ourselves to obedience to the way He taught—one of humility, service of others, and forgiveness, even though it cuts against the grain of the social media age, just as it did against grain of the Roman Empire. And if we do that, we might catch a glimpse of His deeds of power.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us in times of plenty and times of austerity, when we are doing and when we are fasting, in all the earth and for evermore. Amen.
Amen