3/22/59

Scripture: Mark 11: 1-11

Today’s worship is obviously a Palm Sunday service. The anthems, Scripture reading, and hymns are selected in view of it. The flower committee arranged for palms to grace our Sanctuary. We have set our thinking toward it through the Lenten season. We can make it a more memorable entrance to Holy Week by exercising our imagination concerning the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. For, of course, no one there had ever heard of "Palm Sunday," nor had anyone called it by that name for a long time after that occasion.

For the Hebrews, it was one of the busy days in the week before the Passover. The Jewish Sabbath was over, and pilgrims were pouring into Jerusalem on that first day of the week. They came from Rome and Ephesus, from Babylon, from Alexandria, as well as from villages nearby. Jerusalem was a cosmopolitan city. Jewish residents and Palestinian beggars rubbed elbows with Greek merchants, Roman bankers, Egyptian corn-brokers. Sadduces and Pharisees who were rivals and partners in controlling Jewish thought, walked the streets, as did Roman soldiers in very noticeable numbers.

The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, had moved his headquarters into the city from Caearea for the occasion. There was no use taking chances on some inflammable public uprising at a time like this. For a time of religious excitement could be a time of political excitement.

Most of the pilgrims had come to worship their God in the great Jewish temple.

That is background for the little procession that formed outside the city and entered it that day. A Nazarene from Galilee, named Jesus, had been receiving noticeable attention for nearly three years. He had chosen to come, with the other pilgrims, to the holy city at this Passover season. He sent a couple of his disciples into the city to fetch a donkey colt that they would find tied there. They brought the colt, put some of their clothing across it, and seated their leader on it. Then they made their way into the city, while others, seeing the procession, laid their cloaks along the way, waved branches, and shouted their "hurrahs." (hosannas) To outward appearance, it was in its early hours, perhaps the happiest day in the life of Jesus.

As he entered the Holy City, amid the excitement and the shouting of his followers, it was inevitable that others, seeing the procession and hearing the shouts, should ask questions. One writer, Matthew, puts it like this: "When he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this?"

The question may have been asked out of simple curiosity; perhaps it was repeated often during that day, and in the days that immediately followed in Jerusalem. Some may have asked, "Well! Who is this?" with a touch of condescension or even contempt for the country character who was attended by up-state Galileans. Some may have asked the question in awe, remembering that there was an Old Testament saying [Zecharia] that some remembered, which went like this:

Tell ye the daughters of Zion,

‘Behold thy King cometh unto thee,

Meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.’" [Zecharia 9: 9].

"King!" Could it be that this man might be a king? This might be really worth watching.

In some such spirit of expectancy, let us ask the question, "Who is Coming?" --- "Who is this?" as we witness, in imagination, the triumphal entry of Jesus today.

The New Testament writer Mark gives one answer [6: 3]: "Is not this the carpenter?" The people of his own town would say that. And it is a good answer, or bad, depending on the tone of voice in which it is said.

Jesus was well known in Nazareth; brothers and sisters of the family were average folk in an average community. They were manual laborers. Jesus, like Joseph, was a joiner -- a journeyman carpenter. He built houses, and tables, made wooden ploughs and ox yokes. He, and the ben-Joseph family, came from the people of the land. He belonged there. Further, he was a young carpenter. During the active ministry of Jesus, he was about the age of my own eldest son. He had done his work and was to be done to death at the age of 33. At 30, he left the carpenter shop to others of the family, and began his public ministry of teaching, preaching, healing. By the time he was 31 he was known widely as a promising leader -- perhaps a Rabbi.

It is hard for us to grasp his youth when we think of the pictures of him in stained glass windows. To the average boy or girl thinking of these pictures, I think he must appear an older man, bearded, mild.

An Englishman has described him in more imaginative terms. "Conceive in your mind, a strong and strenuous young Jewish workman, alive to all the joys of nature, with the crowning joy of a pure heart and a clear conscience and an invigorating consciousness of God; conceive a massive head and rugged face, strongly marked with thought and sympathy, but with the light of moral victory always there; conceive dark, keen flashing eyes that can speak inspiration or indignation, and you have the figure of Jesus" that this Englishman envisions in his thinking.

Some people, then, saw Jesus as a young journeyman carpenter who had taken to itinerant preaching. And we can be glad of that. We understand it especially well in this country. It is an American hymn writer, Henry Van Dyke, who gave us this verse which we occasionally sing:

Jesus, Thou divine companion

By thy lowly human birth

Thou had come to join the workers,

Burden-bearer of the earth.

Thou, the carpenter of Nazareth,

Toiling for Thy daily food,

By thy patience and thy courage,

Thou hast taught us toil is good.

Perhaps some of us stand here in our estimate of Jesus. It is a good place to begin. We should first see the carpenter before we try to interpret him. Did not those disciples of his know him thus as Jesus, of Nazareth, long before they arrived at the place in their thinking where they called him the "Christ" or the "Son of God." Jesus was known and loved long before our creedal theology, or our formal statements of faith. And so, it is still an honest, appreciative answer to say, "Is not this the carpenter?"

A second answer to the question, "Who is coming?" is given by the writer, Matthew [21: 11]: "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee." It is the answer that some of those pilgrims gave to the people of Jerusalem on that Sunday of triumph when they escorted Jesus into the city. It is an advance over the first estimate of Jesus which we have mentioned. But it does not destroy anything we have said before. The prophet was first a carpenter. His insights, his stamina, derived from that strength.

What is a prophet? He is not primarily a "predicter" or one who foretells the future. The biblical word for that was "seer." A prophet is "one who speaks out for God." When the high priest of Bethel ordered Amos to keep quiet, Amos replied, "I cannot. When God is inside of you, he is like a lion and you have to roar." Isaiah heard a voice saying, "Who will go for us?" and he replied, "Here am I, send me." And he spoke out for God for a whole generation. Jeremiah did not want to be a prophet. But every morning, for years, God called to him to speak in His behalf. And so, unwillingly yet loyally, Jeremiah obeyed.

Jesus entered the succession of prophets. He was God’s man; he saw life in terms of God. He saw flowers as God’s marvelous creation; he saw the hairs of one’s head as God’s numbering and concern. At the age of 12 he was especially interested in God’s house.

And yet, at the same time, he was a man’s man. He helped straighten out an embarrassing situation at a wedding party in Cana, when they ran out of refreshment. Some called him the kind of fellow who would eat with gluttons and wine-bibers, and he never appears to have denied it. He had a sense of humor that must have tickled the ridiculous in his hearers when he talked of specks of sawdust in one man’s eye while another had a beam of timber (like a railroad tie) in his eye.

While he was trying to show people how God works, and to introduce them more fully to God, he talked in terms of all kinds of people and situations around him. There were many kinds of folk around him -- fishermen, tradesmen like himself, tax gatherers, Roman soldiers, hard-shelled ecclesiastics, widows, fatherless children, farmers, merchants. To them all, he talked about the things of God.

He hated sham and pretense in people. He pointed out these traits in those who prayed for effect, or who came to church mainly to be seen, or gave conspicuously noticeable donations, while at the same time they conducted their business in a way that devoured the living of helpless folk.

And yet he advised attending church, and giving donations and praying. But he said, "Do it because of God; that is the real ultimate reason."

Being the "prophet of Nazareth" was a harder job than being the carpenter of Nazareth. And it is Jesus the prophet whom many people offer in answer to the question, "Who is this?" -- the prophet who met people because he loved people; challenged them because he judged them in terms of God; who was rightly called gentle and mild and yet strong enough to inflict pain of conscience. Jesus is for many of us the prophet, God’s spokesman. This is a good place to stand: "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee."

Yet another answer appears in Mark [15: 39]. It was not given until 5 days after that first Palm Sunday. Matters had taken a terrible turn with the Galilean. After several days of almost sensational activity and teaching in the temple, he had been betrayed, captured, tried swiftly, condemned as a criminal, sentenced to execution. It was the Roman officer who supervised his crucifixion and who watched Jesus die, who said: "Truly this man was a Son of God." This grizzled soldier was no theologian. He simply recognized, by Jesus’ manner, his utterances and attitude, that this victim was more than an ordinary human.

Man has always wanted to know God -- to know him who gives meaning to everyday life, and reason for existence. But how shall we know God? Many of us have found that Jesus shows Him best. We say that God is like Jesus -- not with Jesus’ hair or eyes or hands, but in Jesus’ spirit, his life. God is like that.

God is not to be completely grasped or understood by us mortals. But we have an excellent view - a partial understanding - of Him in Jesus. Jesus becomes our Christ, our visible, understandable vision of God. This is the truth behind the church doctrine of the incarnation.

Jesus is the word of God, the will of God, the purpose of God become flesh. In him we comprehend the meaning of life, the interplay of love and righteous indignation, the ebb and flow of suffering and healing, the promise of victory over death. God’s character is better known to us because Jesus; in him and through him. The third answer is: "Truly this man is the Son of God."

Every generation must answer the question, "Who is this who comes?" Each year it is asked of us who come to worship on Palm Sunday. And our answer? "Is not this the carpenter?" Yes, that is a true answer. "This is Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee." And that is a true answer. "Truly this man was the Son of God." And this is a true answer!

One more thing: this king riding into Jerusalem presses us not only for an answer as to who he is, but for a verdict, a decision, a loyal dedication to his service. He is looking for soldiers of his cross, messengers of his mission -- not crucifiers, but champions of his cause who will go with him into the city; stay with him through the events, the challenges, the sufferings of every week; and share with him the assurance of eternal living.

Let this Palm Sunday be a day of our deeper devotion to our Christ.

AMEN

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, March 22, 1959

Waioli Hiu’ia Church, April 15, 1973