Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
No sooner had Jesus dismounted the donkey and the parade of the pilgrim’s Passover had begun to wind down when some Greeks showed up looking for an audience with Jesus. God-fearing Gentiles going to Jerusalem for Passover was common. There were an awful lot of them. We don’t hear much about them, but there were Gentiles all over the known world who had converted to what would be called Judaism, to the Old Testament faith in the promise of a Messiah, and each year those Gentiles would come to Jerusalem just like any other true believer.
What is notable about these Greeks is not that they were Greeks, but that they were eager, and they took action seeking an audience with Jesus. They found Philip and they said, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Well, the proper response would have been something like, “Get in line,” because Jesus was at the height of his popularity. Just days earlier he had performed his greatest miracle of all, the raising of Lazarus after Lazarus’s body had been in the tomb for days. People today would say that Jesus was trendy. Everybody wanted to see him, hear him, touch him, talk to him. Jesus had just entered the city amidst a parade of palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!”
By the way, hosanna is defined this way: a cry of praise or adoration to God, in liturgical use among the Jews, and said to have been shouted in recognition of the messiahship of Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem. The people who lined the road and put those palm branches down and shouted thought that they were welcoming their king, that is, the miracle-working political king of Jerusalem. In just a few days they would be sorely disappointed.
As for the request of the Greeks, by the time Jesus entered Jerusalem he was past the point of press conferences, interviews, and conversations of secondary importance. He had no interest in listening to people heap praise and glory on his head, given what was about to take place during the week. There’s another word that sort of needs defining: glory, doxa in Greek, kabod in the Old Testament. It means heaviness. It means deep death. The closest word we’d have for it, although we misuse the word frequently or overuse it, is awesomeness. It’s a stunning thing. It’s heavy. It’s great. It’s unlike the kind of thing that any human being would naturally have in his heart and mind.
Now he was preparing for his crucifixion. “The hour has come,” is his reply to this request, “for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Now it’s unmistakable that in fact his crucifixion he calls a glory, a heaviness, a greatness, and he is going to be glorified by being lifted up from the earth. As for the why he had to be lifted up from the earth and to die on the cross, Jesus tells immediately afterwards a short parable: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This is one of Jesus’s more obvious and easy to understand parables. The grain of wheat is Jesus, and Christians, we are the fruit. Without burying the seed in the soil it will not sprout. It will not bear fruit. If you try to hold on to it, to keep it, preserve it, keep it clean and dry, you get absolutely nothing from it. But bury it, and it rises up to bear fruit. Jesus will go the way of death and the grave just as the seed must go into the ground.
This morning’s Gospel lesson is what we expect to hear on a Palm/Passion Sunday. In it Jesus talks openly about his suffering, his crucifixion, and his resurrection. But Jesus’s life, and especially the events of Holy Week, are not for Jesus alone. In fact, much of what is recorded in John 12:20-43 is directed and spoken directly to us, his disciples, those who believe and trust in Christ. For example, verse 25: “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life unto everlasting life.” Or verse 30: “This voice has not come for my sake but for your sakes.” Verse 36: “While you have the light, walk in the light, so that the darkness does not overtake you. He who walks in darkness does not know where he goes. You have the light, believe in the light.”
You see, Holy Week is not just about what happened, or what Jesus allowed to happen, or what Jesus did. It’s also about and for us, for you and for me and the whole Christian church. If you thought that you could glide through Holy Week safely sheltered like a spectator in the spectator’s box of a football game, detached from the events of Holy Week, the pageantry, the crucifixion, the suffering, the bloody mess, then think again, for all of it is about you. Jesus dying and rising is about all of us. And Jesus drives the point home as well when he says, “He who loves his life loses it; he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to eternal life. If anyone serves me, let him follow me, and where I am there you shall also be.” That includes the cross. Where he is, you also are. As it was with Jesus, so it is with you. It is enough, Jesus said, for the disciple to be like his teacher and the servant like his master. For if they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, that is, the devil, how much more will they malign those of his household?
Passion Week shows us just how hostile the people of this world in unbelief truly are, how angry they are toward the one true God. So Christians shouldn’t expect to be treated any better than Jesus was. And not only do we suffer from the normal maladies as is common to all human beings, cancer and sickness and disease of every sort and injury, we suffer from the additional burdens placed upon our bodies and our souls by virtue of our faith. We struggle with a guilt that the world does not know, with the pain that the world does not have. We possess a Christian conscience, so that which bothers us rarely, if ever, bothers the world. We also suffer an increasing number of attacks upon our people because of our beliefs and our convictions.
Christians should also keep in mind that as Jesus’s suffering and death were a strange kind of glory, the suffering of a Christian produces its own kind of glory and its own kind of virtues. It comes with the cross. It comes with the waters of Baptism. Christians often pitch hissy fits when things go badly for them. Pastors spend a lot of time talking to people who want to know, “Why me? Why this? Why must I suffer? Why can’t things go well? Why family troubles? Why financial troubles? Why, why, why?” Well, to recall some themes from Wednesday this past Lent, maybe it’s because of some bad choices, or bad company, or misunderstanding of Christian faith and doctrine. Maybe it’s on account of spiritual complacency or some other bad decisions and thinking on your part. Or perhaps it’s part of the hidden will of God, like Job, wherein God is working to perfect one’s faith. For we are his workmanship, Ephesians 2:10, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Maybe we’re not walking in them like we ought to.
But it is true, sadly so, for an awful lot of televangelists and preachers and teachers: Jesus didn’t promise a rose garden without thorns or thistles. That’s a popular myth, this myth that if you follow the principles of the Bible, why, you’ll be healthier, wealthier, and you’ll have an easier life, a prosperous life, an abundant life, which they misinterpret. That’s the popular myth among a lot of Christians, and that’s how you build giant mega churches these days. When things aren’t going well for us, we think that God should be managing our situations in a more customer-friendly kind of manner. Instead, he gives us a call to take up our crosses, to take up our burdens, and follow him all the way to his cross and to his grave.
Now look, everybody dies, of course, but that’s not the kind of death Jesus is referring to as he enters Holy Week. He’s talking about his death and resurrection, which he subsequently gives you in the preaching and teaching of the Law and Gospel, in the Word of God, in Holy Baptism. You’ve heard this verse a lot lately: we’re buried with him therefore in Baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, there’s that word glory, we too might walk in the newness of life. For Colossians 3:3, in Baptism we died, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God. Sometimes we don’t get the answers because God hides them, and if God hides something, it stays hidden until he wants it revealed.
On Palm Sunday the people didn’t come out to see a Messiah who was going to be defeated and crucified in a few days. Everyone expected the beginning of the Messiah’s glorious reign as the king of Jerusalem. They didn’t expect God’s true glory to be hung on the cross within the week. That’s because they weren’t listening to what Jesus was teaching. Jesus thinks and speaks of God’s glory in a very different way than what we’re used to in our normal vernacular conversations. Jesus says, “The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified. If he dies, he’ll bear much fruit.” Here the glory is divine: suffering, dying, being buried in the dirt. It’s the crucifixion itself. This is what it means for the Father to be glorified by the Son and for the Father to glorify the Son.
Palm Sunday is a humble demonstration of the kind of glory we should expect in this life as Christians. No great cheering crowds or great fanfare. By the standards though of Palm Sunday, the crucifixion was absent any kind of glory. Jesus was so overwhelmed by this fact that it burdened him. God the Father was placing it on him, and Jesus had prayed at least twice, “Not my will but thy will be done.” Here he says, “My soul has become troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Glorify thy name.” He wasn’t praying to be spared. The glory referenced in these verses points to the glory of the cross: the bloody mess, the thorns, the nails, the spear in the side, the water and the blood gushing out. While people basked in the glory of Palm Sunday, Jesus turned his thoughts to God’s glory of Good Friday.
In response to the prayer, the Father speaks to both his Son and to his people: therefore came a voice out of heaven, “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” God the Father speaks to comfort Jesus, but he speaks in such a way that others hear and think it’s an angel. Some think it’s thunder. Others understand what’s actually been said. Jesus wants to make sure that disciples hear so they’ll eventually understand. Misunderstanding would happen throughout the week, as we now know. He goes on to tell them that he’s going to be judged with the judgment that belongs to the world: “Now judgment is upon this world, and now the ruler of this world shall be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” But he was saying this to indicate by which death he would die, that is, he was saying this to point specifically to the crucifixion. The one who knew no sin became sin for the world, to bear the sins of the world. And while we earned the judgment, we are not the ones who bear any sin. God the Father does not say, “You’re guilty of my Son’s death, therefore you shall die eternally.” It’s the exact opposite. Because of Jesus’s death, the Father declares of you: your sins are forgiven. You are not guilty. Go in peace.
Jesus glorified the Father by willingly doing his will. That’s the Philippian text: being found in the appearance of a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him and bestowed upon him the name which is above all names. He gets to the cross and rests in the resurrection. When the people in the New Testament want to see Jesus, when Jesus wanted them to know what kind of kingdom the kingdom of heaven is like and what kind of work had to be done in order to bring it about, Jesus always points them to the cross. Never to their own faith, never to their own ideas, never to their own emotions, never according to their own plans, but to the plan of God the Father that his Son be crucified on the cross. That’s what Holy Week is all about. That’s why we have Palm/Passion Sunday now, to emphasize for people who make it or don’t make it to church all week long that it’s all about the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
There’s that famous verse that I don’t think is translated very well in most translations: he was raised on account of our justification. That is, he had justified us, and because he had completed his work perfectly, he’s now raised from the dead. No matter what life brings to you, no matter what troubles befall you, no matter what sin you fall into, the pastor speaks the absolution that you’ll know your sin forgiven, and then he brings you to the cross and the cross to you. Even now you have the glory of God in the midst of your troubles. Jesus visits you with his glorious forgiveness of sins. Our time of tribulation and tears in this world will end one way or another, sooner or later. Until it does, look to God’s strange glory on the cross and the obvious glory in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For this is the glory that does everything that you could not, would not, and did not do. It was all done in that glory on your behalf.
Here on Palm/Passion Sunday, Jesus rides on, as you’re going to sing in the last hymn of the service today, he rides on to Good Friday to obtain for you his divine majesty, another word for glory. “Ride on, ride on in majesty, in lowly pomp ride on to die. Bow thy meek head to mortal pain, then take, O Christ, thy power and reign.” It’s a glory, it’s a glory beyond comprehension, but it’s one that has been imputed, given to you. You’re wrapped in it in the waters of your Baptism, in the gift of true Christian faith. And each and every time you confess your sin, God is faithful and just to forgive your sin and cleanse you from all unrighteousness, because that’s what the glory of Christ does. Glory in it. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.