Of course, the triumph that yet awaits us in a week’s time is for us to consider. “And the end is near, and I face the final curtain.” This is exactly what’s happening. Probably, he was the only one who had any notion of that in all of the exuberance of the crowd. He also knew that within a matter of days, that curtain in that temple would be torn from top to bottom. Jesus, of course, knew when he looked at the temple as it was then that there was a curtain inside that temple. And in the middle of all of that, Jesus now comes. In the sunshine, the roof is just emblazoned with a kind of wonder-at least as it was. And when you begin to come back up, from that vantage point you can see the city of Jerusalem spread out before you, and you can see the temple itself in all of its magnificence.

There is a point where you go down, and then you begin to come back up. And the disciples themselves would have been a mixture of faith and wonder.Īnd now we’re told that in the course of time, as the procession makes its way down through the Mount of Olives… If you have been to the Middle East, if you have been to Jerusalem, then you will have this picture fairly clearly in your mind. Someone would have told us something else. Many of the people, if we’d interviewed them, would have told us one thing. It transcended ages, and it transcended gender, and it was a great expression of all kinds of things. “Let these things,” he said, “sink into your ears: I am going to be delivered into the hands of sinful men.” And then Luke tells us, “But they did not understand.” Īnd so we, I think, can fairly assume that in the triumphal part that precedes our little section, that his disciples would have been caught up in the expectation and in the enthusiasm that marked the gathered crowd.

That ought to be a great encouragement to each of us when we think about our attempt to read and pay attention to the Bible. He looks at them, and he must have known how easy it was for him to say things to them and for them to miss them, mistake them, ignore them, or forget them.

He actually said to them, “I want these words to sink into your ears.” I’m quoting, actually, from earlier again in Luke’s Gospel. “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” He had told his disciples in the course of time the things that awaited him when he got there. If you go all the way back and you just work your way back through the Gospel of Luke, you will eventually come to 9:51, where we read, “When the days drew near for to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” So this has been, if you like, going on for some time, and we are now arriving at the point where he will enter Jerusalem for the last time in his earthly pilgrimage. The journey to Jerusalem actually has had a beginning for some time. And he addresses the city in a manner that surely must have caught his disciples off guard.

And in the section to which we turn now, we see Jesus as the Prophet coming to address the city. In the cleansing of the temple, which is the closing section, to which we won’t look, we see Jesus as the Priest coming to the temple and cleansing it. And in the opening part of this, 28–40, we see Jesus as the King riding into Jerusalem. You know, Jesus is represented in the Scriptures as fulfilling the picture of the Prophet and of the Priest and of the King. Luke actually, in the second half of this chapter, gives us three scenes. And if you think about the way in which many congregations choose to make sure that that is embedded in the consciousness of the people, it is to these things that they will give attention-and with justification, surely, in order to remind the children and to teach them and to remind us of something of what was happening there. I would think that most people, when they consider Palm Sunday, their focus is largely on the earlier part of the reading-the entry, the children. I can’t say how many times we have looked at these passages, but I think this is the very first time that I’ve ever given actual attention to these few verses, 41 to verse 44. Well, what I want to do this evening, actually, is to correct an imbalance in my own attempts at over the years teaching on the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Father, I pray now that as the evening shadows begin to form and as we come to the end of this day, that as we turn our gaze to your Word and to your Son, that you will accomplish the purposes that you have for your Word in this evening.

Bible story christ weeping for lazarus