As you know, it’s Palm Sunday. But more recently in the church calendar, Passion Sunday is the one that the readings are generally directed to. Believe it or not, you got the short reading of the Gospel today. The idea behind that is that because very few people actually attend church through the week — Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday — then what tends to happen is you go straight from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, for the average Christian that attends some sort of service, missing the exact purpose for which Christ came into the world in the first place. Missing the key event that is central to all of human history: namely, that the King of all things dies on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for our sin. So this morning’s Gospel began with the King of all standing in front of a governor of a small, backward, troublesome, and poor province of the Roman Empire. The province was Judea, and it was a very difficult place to govern, in part due to the zealous nature of many of the adherents to an Old Testament-distorted religion of works-righteousness and political empire. Being assigned by Caesar to rule over Judah was not an occasion for celebration. In fact, the average governor lasted all of about three years and then was shipped out, because he wasn’t able to effectively manage and keep peace in the province.
By Matthew chapter 27, verse 11, the all-powerful King stood before that obscure governor. The King of kings, the King of the universe, had allowed himself to be arrested, interrogated, and ultimately condemned to death by a weak and sinful representative of the Gentile race and a worldly political power. Pilate held the highest office in the province. He answered to Caesar alone. He alone held the power of life and death in his office. But as a person, as a man, he became weak and frightened, and governed accordingly. Pilate eventually gave in to the religious leaders who kept pushing him along, in particular with one statement: “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend.” Now that phrase, “friend of Caesar’s,” is the extortionary part of the story. It doesn’t mean that Pilate and Caesar were golfing buddies. The statement implied that friends of Caesar’s were loyalists, appointees who were loyal to Caesar and who recognized Caesar as god on earth. So the phrase “friend of Caesar’s” had a kind of official character to it. And if you broke from being a “friend of Caesar’s,” then you were automatically disloyal and thus deserving of death yourself. And what they were implying is that if he let Jesus go, who claimed to be a king, then they would make sure Caesar understood that Pilate was following a new king, not the Roman emperor.
Now Pilate, at the accusation, tried to find a way out. But for all of his attempts to free Jesus — which he could have simply done by freeing him and then telling the religious leaders that if they dared touch him or harm him, they would face the wrath of both Caesar and Pontius Pilate — he caved to the pressure of some in the crowd who yelled, “Crucify him!” While sitting on the judgment seat, just before he passed judgment on Jesus, he receives a message from his wife that says, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.” In that moment, a Gentile woman became a prophetess — one who spoke the Word of God. She spoke the truth given to her in the dream: namely, Jesus was the righteous man, and he needed to be set free. But Pilate still redoubled his effort to shift responsibility of adjudicating the Jesus matter, to shift it to somebody else. But that effort failed too, for they had no authority to crucify, to kill anybody. They were purely a religious institution. It was Pilate’s job, and his job alone, to make sure that justice was done in Judea. Even though Pilate knows Jesus is innocent, Pilate yields to the cries of the mob. He washes his hands in a public display. He claims that even though he’s going to turn him over to the mob, he’s not guilty of killing an innocent man. If Jesus is crucified, the blood’s not on his hands. It’s on the hands of the mob. In other words, Pilate was trying to baptize himself. He was trying to wash himself clean of this sin of knowingly condemning an innocent — and the only truly righteous man in the world — to death. For a great and grievous sin, he was blaming others for what he was about to do. That’s been a problem, by the way, since the fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. Sinners — we like to blame somebody else for the wrongs that we commit, the problems that we have. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. Blaming others for sins and mistakes is fundamental to sinful human nature. We don’t have to teach children to blame and accuse others of something they did. Kids come by it naturally. We are by nature sinful and unclean. We play that game a lot because we want the appearance of being innocent and righteous, and now the victim of somebody else’s bad judging.
So Pilate took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” This washing was a fabricated, man-made sacrament of self-justification. In reality, Pilate was cleansed of nothing. His sin, guilt, and above all his fear remained. At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, he was baptized into our life, death, our sin, and our guilt, and we were washed clean in his Baptism. We were buried in his life of perfection, his death of atonement, and his glorious resurrection. This is the true washing that removes guilt. But Pilate had nothing of this. He washes his hands and declares himself innocent. In our Baptism, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit washed you in the water and the Word, and gave you absolution, forgiveness, declared you innocent, and blessed you. Christ’s Baptism — he is the only true washing of repentance. Nothing any human being does to him or herself cleanses anything in the sight of God. Pilate tried to absolve himself from guilt, while at the same time he was governing out of fear. He would find no wrong in Jesus, but he had to sentence him to death, or the Jews would riot and he would lose his job. The Jews were often inclined to riot. They did a lot of that back in the Roman days. Rebellious demonstrations were often put down in a bloody fashion. But that was not a resume enhancer, not at all. The job of a governor was to do everything within his power to avoid it.
As for the crowd: when unrighteousness always stands in the face of righteousness, there’s always an explosion of violent reaction. A new pastor comes, and he preaches the Law in a way that people in the congregation hear, and all of a sudden they’re convicted, because this fellow dares to do something bold and brash: he actually preaches the Law. And they get mad and offended. And what is their response? Frequently it is not confession and absolution. It’s getting rid of the preacher. Kill the messenger. Pilate found himself in a similar fashion, in the midst of willful injustice and the inhumanity of the cross. The Jews were driven mad by an innocent man who stood before them, who time and time again preached the Law and Gospel, and in so doing offended them to the point of becoming murderers. He offended them by teaching them that they were unrighteous people in need of the only good man ever born, Jesus the Christ. So they cried, “His blood be on us and on our children!” And guess what they were saying? In essence: let him be killed, and we’ll take responsibility for it. Pilate wasn’t the only one with a self-righteous problem that day. A large section of those that made up the crowd had a self-righteous problem too. They had been told that Jesus had committed the greatest sin of all, one that they themselves would never even think of doing — although they did it all the time. They would surely never commit blasphemy like this fellow from Nazareth. They thought they were doing a good work by putting him to death. In another twist of irony, by the way, they were. But that which they meant for evil, God was going to use for ultimate good. And here’s the thing: when the people cried out, “His blood be on us and on our children,” it is in fact Christ’s blood that we and our children are now made clean, isn’t it? We’re washed in the blood of the Lamb, and we’re made clean. And our prayer should be: Lord God, please wash our children and ourselves and our grandchildren in the blood of the Lamb and make them clean. Let his blood be upon us for the purpose of absolution. Romans 5:9 says, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” Or Revelation 7:14: “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Lord, let your blood be upon my children and grandchildren. That should be our prayer. See, no one’s righteous unless the blood of the Lamb covers their iniquities. All people might pray, “Christ’s blood be upon us and upon our children.” But sometimes, in the case of those standing before Jesus, it was said in self-righteousness, that they were doing a good work by murdering this blasphemer. But for us it means: our sins are forgiven. We’re justified and will be washed clean in the blood of the Lamb.
Then verse 27: the soldiers of the governor — see, the Bible doesn’t let the governor off the hook — the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” The King of kings, the highest authority in all creation, did not protest the treatment. He didn’t call upon his followers to rise up and free him from the governor. He did not use his divine power to defend himself or to come down from the cross. He willingly suffered physical and spiritual pain and submitted himself to utter humiliation. Why? Because it was his Father’s will, and because he came to save you from your sin. Verses 33 and following: “And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, ‘This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.'” The most important event in all of human history, of all of creation, was taking place right there in front of the soldiers, and they were playing their part. But for them, this kind of cruelty had become business as usual, and they appeared bored by the whole thing. They simply went and sat down. They’re so bored they decided to play a game. They cast lots for Jesus’s outer garments. Isn’t that, by the way, the complaint of the 20th and the 21st century of the Christian church? “Gee, that tune and that music just doesn’t do it for us. It’s boring. We need peppier music.” It’s boring. “This Jesus and the cross — don’t bother going during Passion Week. Just show up to Palm Sunday because the kids are cute, and Easter because there’s a hunt.” It’s boring. It’s the big complaint of the day, of the last hundred years for Christians. It’s just boring. They have no place for Christ, the Christian faith, liturgical worship, services, and life in the church, because it’s just boring. Make it a concert. Make it a show. Make it a performance. We sometimes are guilty. We like to sing the easy hymns, the ones with the nice cute melody. We forget to look at the lyrics we’re singing, which in our hymnal are profound, beautiful, life-saving words of the Law and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, filled with the blood that makes us clean and the Lamb of God who is slain for us.
When Jesus was hung on the cross, the people mocked him by calling him the Son of God: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” They too wanted a show of mighty power. They wanted an exciting thing to happen. They were in the presence of the Son of God who came to save them from their sins, and their attitude was marked by irreverence. And irreverence is a mark for us too these days, right? People show up, walk into the church. God joins himself to the Word and sacrament ministry. He is here. And people treat it casually. But the glory of God, the Son of God incarnate, was hanging on the cross of Good Friday, being tortured at Golgotha, and no one at the base of that cross should have been in any casual attitude whatsoever. We now know that the Passion of the Christ is our salvation. We were not saved by what was done on Palm Sunday, as wonderful as it was. We were saved by the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us. It was true for Jesus: Palm Sunday and the ride into Jerusalem was Jesus’s entry not just into Jerusalem, but it was his entry, his first day of Passion Week. In five days, just five more days, he would be utterly humiliated, scourged, crucified, and died. On Palm Sunday, the people wanted a King of the Jews, the Son of David, the king of all Jerusalem. They wanted new and exciting. They wanted life to be easier. They were welcoming him as the Son of David, as they should have. They just had the wrong definition. It was good and right for them to celebrate. It was a fulfillment of prophecy, and it was an act of worship in welcoming their King. It was both humble — on a donkey — and glorious — praises. But the true glory of God, the real kingship, is seen on Good Friday, the highest day of the church year. The cross is where God’s grace is found, where he put it. That’s where the soldiers came to see it. And when they saw it — as for the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, they saw the earthquake and the things that took place, and they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!” It was when Jesus asked his Father in heaven to forgive the soldiers. It’s when he breathed his last, when the heavens were darkened and the earth shuddered and the rocks were split. Finally the centurion was filled with fear and came to see that Jesus was no mere man, but the Son of God.
Notice: the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious leaders. On Palm Sunday, Jesus came lowly, riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey, to Jerusalem — to be arrested, tried, convicted of sin by God the Father and sinful men alike, then crucified, murdered, and on the third day rose again. So behold: this is Palm Sunday. Your King has come and saved you from your sins. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.