First Lutheran Church – Detroit Lakes, MN
Palm Sunday | 04.02.2023 | Matthew 21:1-11
Today marks the day in Scripture where Jesus begins to get into real trouble.
The season of Lent has been a trek with Jesus from the Mount of the Transfiguration to Jerusalem, and, finally, here we are—he arrives in the Holy City. Palm Sunday.
First let’s talk palm branches. I know I’ve mentioned this every year, and I’ll continue to mention it every year: the palm branches are not and were not arbitrary. They are not and were not merely decorative props waved around in excitement. The palms have ENORMOUS spiritual and political meaning for Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem at the start of Holy Week.
Here’s why: Israel’s former king, King Solomon, the son of King David, who is considered one of Israel’s wisest rulers. His reign – although deeply tumultuous – represents some of the more stable and independent years in Israel’s history. And as we heard in our reading today, King Solomon adorned his house with engravings of…palm branches (1 Kings 6:29).
The palms on Palm Sunday, therefore, suggest that the people were claiming Jesus as king, and not just any king – a king from the House of Solomon, a king in the line of God’s covenant with David.
With that in mind, I also included a reading in today’s lessons from Isaiah (ch. 11), to remind us that even beyond the callback to King Solomon, the palms join a rich symbolic history of tree branches in the Old Testament. In the Isaiah text, a promise was proclaimed that although the family tree of Jesse, of David, of Solomon, will experience what appears to be death, a branch shall still someday grow to lead and save the people of Israel.
By waving the palm branches on that fateful first Palm Sunday, the people were signaling that Jesus…is this branch. Again, they were claiming Jesus as king, and not just any king – a king in the royal line of Jesse, David, and Solomon, and a king promised through the prophet Isaiah.
Not only is that high praise for who they thought Jesus was, for the crowds to do this in 1st century Jerusalem was a deeply controversial political move. Remember, at this time in history, these crowds and their country were under harsh Roman rule. The palms treat Jesus as a king, but my friends…in the Roman Empire, there is no king, but the emperor, but Caesar.
Therefore, Palm Sunday is a direct and open undermining of Roman rule. With these branches, they may as well have started singing ‘Hail to the chief’ and saluting him. They were greeting Jesus as a political revolutionary.
Nevertheless, the crowd went further: they also hurled their cloaks on the road for Jesus(Matthew 21:9). If bystanders at the time were unsure whether this mass of people was recognizing Jesus as king…with cloaks on the ground, there could be no mistake. It was an ancient custom to spread cloaks along the road when royalty proceeded.
And again, according to the Romans, this was not Israel’s country, and they were not the patient type when it came to treason and political threat. They didn’t like religious figures creating movements of disloyalty to the state.[1]
So, open acknowledgement of Jesus as a king right in the Romans’ faces, and believe it or not, it’s more dramatic for at least one more reason:
This all took place during the week of Passover.
And Passover, folks, made this situation an absolute tinderbox. For those of us who don’t remember, Passover is the celebration of Jewish liberation and independence from Egypt (in the book of Exodus)…Passover is a holiday, in other words, that recalls escape from oppression from tyrant Empires…like Rome.[2]
So not only were people waving palms, shouting hosannas, and tossing their cloaks, they were doing so on what was, essentially, their 4th of July…but with the British still in charge!
My point with all of this is that by his very entry into Jerusalem and the controversial excitement generated from it, Jesus put himself at immediate odds with the powerful in that city. If you understand that, then you more fully understand what happens in the rest of Holy Week.
And I start with all this because the tone and trajectory of Palm Sunday doesn’t stay. We’re not headed for a political revolution. The hosannas will not remain; rather, as we shall see, it will be shouts of ‘Crucify Him!’’ that soon greet Jesus. The palm branches will turn to a crown of thorns. The cloaks on the ground will no longer be from an adoring crowd, but will be Jesus’ own clothes, torn off, and divided up by Roman soldiers who’ll execute him.
The images of our gospel show a people who are ready to start and join a political revolution with Jesus, hoping that he has come to reclaim this province back from Rome, and wipe out the corrupt religious leadership.
In their minds, this is their David, their Solomon, their wise warrior king. But Jesus is different…He has not entered Jerusalem to start a peasant rebellion.[3] This unusual king has come into town not to bring violence, but love, not revenge but mercy, not war with the Romans, but, shockingly…forgiveness (Luke 23:34).
What we’ll find out by the end of this week, is that this king, as one theologian writes, comes “not in vengeance but in love.”[4]
And that may well be the line of Holy Week. We have a God who comes to this world not in vengeance, but in love…love even to the point of death.
Our king is no warrior; he’s something better – he’s a Savior. Come and see. Amen.
[1] cf. Pliny the Younger, “Pliny to Trajan,” in Readings in World Christian History: Volume 1: Earliest Christianity to 1453, ed. John W. Coakley and Andrea Sterk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 23.
[2] ex. Michael Joseph Brown, “Commentary on Luke 19:28-40,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2801.
[3] Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, J. Clinton McCann, Jr., James D. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV—Year C (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 247.
[4] David J. Lose, The Question of the Day, workingpreacher.org (April 9th, 2014), http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=3162.
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