A sermon preached at St Luke’s Maylands and St Patrick’s Mt Lawley 13th December 2020
We are running up to Christmas and we want it to be real. This means exploring its meaning. This morning we are at part three of a series entitled Back to the Future. The key to our world’s future is to be found in the past: God, who created the world, commissioned Jesus at his baptism as the king of the world. We are talking about our world; if God really did that, then the whole of our world’s history revolves around that pivotal event.
Early in the year AD 28 Jesus began to announce that the kingdom of God was at hand. Last Sunday we explored what he meant by the kingdom of God. We saw that he envisaged a coming world-empire freed from every form of evil and suffering. We asked the question how this kingdom would come, and learned from his parables that it would not be by military conquest, but by the word of God. The seed of God’s word will grow and spread; one day “the earth will be filled with the word of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” We also saw something of the power of this word and how 2000 years later it is still alive and strong and leading to transformation of lives and societies.
This morning I want to ask the question again: How does the kingdom come? For there is another answer to this question; in fact, there are several. The announcement of the kingdom, which Jesus called “the gospel of God” is the instrument God uses to stop a person in their tracks, bring them to their senses, and draw them into his kingdom. But that is not all that is needed to bring about this promised new world. Jesus did more than preach. He also overcame the three great obstacles to the establishment of God’s kingdom. I will come to them in a moment, but first let us look at today’s reading: Mark 11.1-11.
Humanly speaking Jesus has come to the climax of his career. For his followers it is the day they have been waiting for. For three years he has preached about the arrival of God’s kingdom and done things that proved to them that he did come from God; no one could do the things he was doing, if God were not with him. And now he is coming to the capital, to Jerusalem, where they knew the great confrontation would take place with the nation’s leaders. Jesus is a wanted man. There is a price on his head. Anyone knowing his whereabouts must disclose it to the authorities or face prosecution. Earlier, his friends had begged him not to go near Jerusalem; it was too dangerous. He had insisted, and it led to the leaders issuing a death-sentence. He has been in hiding these last six weeks. And now he is about to reappear with a great following of Galileans behind him. Everything is set for a major confrontation. His disciples now are not worried. The think they know how it will turn out. They had seen him stop a storm. They knew he had the power to deal with any opposition. Now they were in a jubilant mood. But not Jesus; he knew something different lay ahead of him.
He sends two of his men to the village ahead of him to fetch a young donkey. He gives them a signal—a password—if they are challenged. Peter is intrigued by this. He was the closest to Jesus, but Jesus had not even told him. A man with a price on his head knows he must be careful. He has made preparations, which until then he could not disclose even to his closest helpers.
They untie the donkey, tethered in the street as he promised, and are challenged. “The Lord needs it,” they say. That is the signal Jesus had given them. It works. They bring the donkey to Jesus, seat him on it, and the crowd gives him a triumphal procession into the city. Their words make it clear what is in their minds.
“Hosanna” means “Save us now!” Israel has waited many years for God to save them and now the time has come—they think.
“Blessed is the Coming One, the one who comes in God’s name.” They have seen enough to know that Jesus is the promised king who will save and rule them.
“Blessed is the kingdom of our father David.” God had promised to reestablish the kingdom of King David, and now his promised son has come. They hail Jesus as the promised King-Messiah.
We should step back from this scene. What we are observing is what in Greek is called a parousia, in Latin an advent. It is the welcome a city gave to a visiting emperor. We are in the season of Advent. We are thinking of the advent of the Son of God as a human being into his world. We also think of his promised return—scholars call it his parousia—when he will come again to wind things up and reveal his perfected kingdom. But there is a third advent: that day in early April AD 30 when he rode as king into the city of Jerusalem. It was a scaled-down rehearsal of what we will all see when he comes again.
Things did not turn out as the followers expected; there were too many obstacles. We return to the question of the three obstacles. For a start, the nation’s leaders had turned against him,. Would he call fire down from the sky upon them? His followers believed he could. But he didn’t. Nor did he make a move against the Roman occupiers. When they realized this, many of his followers and the as-yet-uncertain were disillusioned and also turned against him. Most people today do not see him as a real solution to anything. Though his claims are there for anyone to see, and the evidence of what he did to back them up, he is regarded at best as a good teacher who provoked the authorities of his day and was squashed like many an idealist since. He is not taken seriously. You and I must decide what we will do with him. The good news is that God is ready and willing to forgive, whenever a person realizes their mistake and is ready to turn back. Jesus told a story about a young man who wanted his inheritance early so he could do his own thing. His father let him go, knowing he would waste it all, and waited for the day when he would come to his senses and return to his home.
It was Monday when Jesus entered the city. Late on Thursday night, when the crowds had all gone home, he was arrested and put before an unofficial court. They asked him was he the Son of God and he didn’t deny it. They condemned him to death for blasphemy. Before dawn on Friday they delivered him over to the Roman governor and demanded that he order a crucifixion. Pilate was the only one who had that authority. Jesus was dead by three o’clock that afternoon.
What went wrong? Read any of the four accounts and you will see that at no point does he appear ever to have lost control. His followers, yes, but he was always in his Father’s hands, doing his Father’s will.
Come back to Mark’s Gospel with me, to a few days before their arrival in Jerusalem. The followers, as I said, are excited out of their brains at what they think is about to happen. They think Jesus is about to stage a coup, with the backing of miracles and angels. The mother of James and John comes to Jesus and asks for positions of authority for her two sons. Jesus had already promised some sort of position to Peter; she didn’t want her two to miss out. He tells them that he has come to serve, and the way he will do that is to give his life as a ransom for many.
If the first obstacle Jesus faced was the sheer hostility of human vested interests, and their muddle-headedness, the second was our guilt.
Guilt is real. Some think a change of heart is all that is needed. But as the wrongdoing heaps up, so does the guilt. Those people who ran Hitler’s concentration camps – their guilt heaped up. Later some of them were sorry, but there was still the guilt, which had to be dealt with. It is the same with us. A lifetime of resisting God and hurting others; the guilt accumulates: the stain, the weight, the liability. Repentance is not enough; guilt is still an obstacle.
I knew a couple who worked in the red-light district of Sydney. A street kid used to hang around the church. They befriended him and eventually asked would he like to become their son. He was enthusiastic, so they applied to adopt. But there was a hitch. The kid was in trouble with the law. Before they could adopt, the street kid had to face a court and have his charges dealt with. Only when he was free of the law could they go ahead with the adoption.
The New Testament tells us something like that was going on when Jesus underwent the supreme penalty. At this point Jesus simply indicates that he must pay a price—a ransom—to secure our release from condemnation for our law-breaking; and our opposition to God, wrong-doing, hurting of others, dishonesty, and the list goes on. Piled-up guilt stands in the way of any of us entering God’s kingdom, but Jesus paid it out. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” said Isaiah, “they shall be white as snow.” Jesus died to make us clean. That was the second great obstacle to the establishment of God’s kingdom: without redemption there would be a king, maybe people hammering at the gate, but no subjects.
The third obstacle is death, but dealing with that was a piece of cake compared with the other two. The power of God which created the world raised Jesus from the dead, and that is why we are here today. The way is open for all who will come to Jesus and enter his kingdom.
Next Sunday we will look at what Jesus said about the end of the world, or more properly, the end of this age, for Jesus’ resurrection means the world has a future. But before I close I want to bring it back to you and me.
I said the first obstacle was the hostility and opposition of Israel’s leaders. God withheld his judgement, and Jesus prayed as he was crucified that his executioners would be forgiven. I take it this was a prayer not just for those who nailed him up, but for all whose ignorance in any way contributed. That would include even his disciples who abandoned him when things got dangerous. But I ask whether it might also include us. Where do we stand in relation to the coming of God’s kingdom? Or perhaps, where have we stood? What do we think of Jesus? When he returns as king, the question for each of us will be whether we have been for or against him. Each of us in our natural state is against him; we resist God’s will and oppose his kingdom. But he is ready to receive us. The answer to the question, how does the kingdom come, is through Jesus dying for us. As he said in a prayer days before it happened, “What shall I say, ‘Father save me from this hour?’ No, it was for this purpose that I have come to this hour.” Jesus came to die. He stands ready to grant us the gift of forgiveness which he purchased for us by his death. He is ready to adopt us as his children and welcome us into his coming new world of life.