Let the People Hear
Luke 19:28-44
March 16, 2008 – Palm Sunday
NOTE: THE ME/WE/GOD/YOU/WE FORMAT USED IN MY MESSAGES IS BORROWED FROM ANDY STANLEY’S BOOK, "COMMUNICATING
FOR A CHANGE."
Me/We:
How many here have ever been told to “shut up?”
If you’re a human over the age of 1 week, you’ve been told to shut up, right?
It’s never fun, especially when you’re talking about something that you’re really excited about.
“Fred, Fred! I’ve gotta tell you about the coolest thing I just found out about! It’s the wave of the future, man! Life-changing! World-changing! I’ve gotta tell you about this. It’s called ‘disco…’”
Today is Palm Sunday, the day we celebrate the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem for the final week of His life on earth.
If you’ve seen this depicted in the movies they show a bazillion people screaming and waving palm branches.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any palm branches last night when I came up with the idea of having something to wave around, so you’ll just need to work with me here, okay?
(Wave dusters)
Remember that? It’s a great scene – especially since they use, like, real palm branches and stuff…
God: We’re going to look at a passage today that is part of that great story, but that actually takes place just before Jesus got to the city, and we’re going to see an effort to make some people shut up.
Luke 19:28-44 (pp. 743-744) –
28 After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. 29 As he approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples, saying to them, 30 "Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks you, ’Why are you untying it?’ tell him, ’The Lord needs it.’"
32 Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. 33 As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?"
34 They replied, "The Lord needs it."
35 They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. 36 As he went along, people spread their cloaks on the road.
37 When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen:
38 "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!"
39 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples!"
40 "I tell you," he replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out."
41 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it 42 and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace--but now it is hidden from your eyes. 43 The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. 44 They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you."
This particular incident isn’t the actual “Triumphal Entry” as the subtitle of some of your Bibles indicate.
The Triumphal Entry described in the other gospels is when Jesus actually entered Jerusalem.
This is the same trip, but this episode happens before He even got to Jerusalem, as we see in verse 37 –
37 When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices…
And in verse 41 where it says –
41 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city…
And really, the climax of this portion of His journey isn’t when He gets to the city, but rather when He looks on Jerusalem and weeps.
Jesus deserves a triumphal entry as a king, but Luke here emphasizes that He is moving instead to the place of His rejection. (Expositor’s Bible Commentary)
And I wonder what must have gone through His heart.
The gamut of emotions must have been a huge rollercoaster. As He nears Jerusalem, the crowds are cheering to the point of upsetting the Pharisees, and Jesus is loving it. The people are declaring their love and allegiance to Him, believing that He is the King and the Messiah.
Then as He gets close to Jerusalem, He stops and is overcome with sadness, knowing that Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, the center of prophecy regarding the Messiah would be judged because of their rejection of Him. And that judgment was carried out just over 35 years later, when Jerusalem was overthrown completely and the temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.
By the way, over 600,000 Jews were killed during the approximately four years it took from the time the Romans arrived to stop the rebellion to the time the city was overthrown and the temple destroyed.
Jesus knew what was coming, and it broke His heart.
But then as He got to the city, another crowd was waiting, shouting their love and desire for Him, making a commotion, bugging the Pharisees again.
And then within the week, He would be hanging on the cross, rejected not only by the Pharisees and other religious leaders.
Can you imagine what that was like for Him? I can’t. I’ve been super joyous, I’ve been super down, I’ve had people shower me with love, and I’ve had people shower me with scorn.
And probably most of you have as well.
But even with all that, I don’t think there is any way that any of us here can really understand what Jesus was going through.
And in this part of the journey, we see the responses of two different groups of people: the crowd and the Pharisees.
1. The crowd was shouting.
The crowd was totally into Jesus. They couldn’t get enough of Him, and in verse 37 we find that it was because of all the miracles they had seen.
So they were screaming and shouting at the tops of their lungs, maybe hoping to be able to touch Him for their own need or for a hundred other reasons.
Maybe to get Him to autograph their “Passover, 33 AD” T-shirts.
According to the first century historian Josephus, there may have been an additional 3 million people in the city waiting for Jesus to arrive.
To them, Jesus was the embodiment of all they had hoped for. He was the king who they were hoping would run the Romans right outta Dodge, once and for all, restoring Israel to the glory it once had in days past.
2. The Pharisees were steaming.
These guys didn’t want anything to do with Jesus except to get rid of Him.
They were angry because they felt that the crowd was being sacrilegious and blasphemous, not to mention being a bit on the dangerous side by calling Jesus “the king who comes in the name of the Lord.”
The Pharisees understood that these people weren’t just saying, “Look – there’s that cool guy fed us that day!”
They understood that these people were proclaiming a loyalty to Jesus that endangered their grip on the people.
It scared them. And that fear blinded them to who Jesus really was – the Messiah who had come to be the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets, the one who would redeem His people from their sins.
And in that fear, they responded by trying to get the crowd be quiet. Maybe if they could get the crowd to be quiet here, it would be quiet when Jesus got to Jerusalem, and the crowds would be easier to control and influence.
So they said, “Hey Jesus! How about getting these people to shut up? We don’t need that around here!”
But Jesus said, “Sorry – ain’t gonna happen. If they shut up, then the rocks themselves will take up the shouting.”
It doesn’t tell us what their reaction was, but it was probably along the lines of “It’s enough that the people are shouting – we definitely don’t want rocks doing it. With our luck, not only would they start shouting, but then we’d end up having people selling the rocks on e-bay…”
And you know what? People have these same reactions to Jesus today like we see with the crowd and the Pharisees.
Some people are excited about Him and aren’t afraid to say they love Him.
Others want those who love Jesus to be silenced. They don’t want to hear about Him at all, especially in school and government.
They don’t want their co-workers or neighbors to talk about Him. They don’t want the TV to talk about Him.
Why don’t they want to hear about Him? There are lots of reasons, but here are just four:
- They don’t want to hear that about a Savior because they don’t believe they’ve sinned.
- They don’t want to hear about how glorious life is for some Christians when their lives are full of hardship and pain.
- They see Christians acting in decidedly un-Christian ways away from the church service.
- They think that believing in Jesus means throwing away your brain so you can’t think rationally anymore.
For some of you, those were barriers to coming to Christ at one time.
The world and society tell us to be quiet.
But Jesus wants us to be vocal about Him, in spite of what others try to pressure us to do.
He wants us to not be afraid to speak out about our love for Him.
You: So here’s what I want to encourage you do – not just today, not just during this time of year:
Don’t let the rocks take your job.
Don’t allow pressure from those outside of Christ force you to be silent.
Let people know that you love Christ and are determined to live for Him in every area of your life.
You don’t need to be obnoxious about it. You don’t need to get in people’s faces about it. You don’t need to shout it from the streets.
But when you have opportunity to let someone know what Jesus means to you, go for it.
I know it’s not always easy or comfortable. But keep in mind that by calling Jesus a king, the people in the crowd were risking prison and death, because Roman law called that treason against Caesar.
So I think you’re pretty safe in vocalizing your love and allegiance to Christ.
We: You know what I love about the church? It’s a safe place.
Here we can declare our love for Him openly and joyously.
We sing, we pray, we read from the Bible, and we can be very open about our allegiance to Him.
My hope is that the safety of church doesn’t make you complacent to the point of just going through the motions here on Sundays.
My hope is that when you open your mouths to praise Jesus, it comes from your heart.
My hope is that that praise will overflow into tomorrow – and Tuesday – Wednesday – and Thursday – and well, you get the picture.
Let the freedom you have hear be exercised out there, so that others may see that “Jesus” isn’t just something people say as a cuss word, but that He’s your king. For now and for eternity. Let’s pray.
