“The King’s Coronation Plans”
Notes
Transcript
We thank God this Palm Sunday 2024 for salvation through Jesus Christ.
In addition to recognizing the thanks that we have to God this morning, I also want us to recognize the paradox of the day. Paradox is a term used when speaking about a situation that leads to the conclusion that something is self-contradictory. I see some head scratching, but you and I use paradox quite often. For example, in every day speech, we might say something like, “it was the beginning of the end.” That statement may sound contradictory at first, but when you look at the end of something as something that takes place over more than a single moment, it does make sense for an end to have a beginning.
Indeed, Palm Sunday is bathed in paradox. Palm Sunday marks the first day of what’s known as Holy Week and it commemorates the triumphal entry of the Lord Jesus into the Holy City of Jerusalem. Now, you can read about the triumphal entry of Jesus in Mark 11, Matthew 21, Luke 19, or John 12 but in that paradox is Jesus commanding his disciples to go to a specific place where he knew they would find a colt, to untie it, and to bring it to him. And Jesus knew that when they went to untie the colt, there would be people standing there wondering why they were untying the colt, and Jesus instructed the disciples to answer, “The Lord has need of it.”
You and I use the word Lord today only when we refer to Jesus. Since we don’t use that word for any other purpose, it may be difficult for you and me to get a picture in our mind of what weight Lord carries. So let me tell you that in the time when Jesus walked on earth, there was another person who assumed the title Lord, and that was the emperor of Rome, known as Caesar. The Caesar of Rome ruled as king of the empire. It would have been customary to say “Lord Caesar” or in language more common to you and me in 2024, “King Caesar.”
And whether you have in your mind the images of great Roman emperors portrayed in Hollywood films or you have in your mind last year’s magnificent coronation of England’s King Charles, those images you have are certainly rich with vibrant wardrobes paired with displays of extravagance, grandeur, and strength. Caesar and Charles are mere men and yet, there’s a sense of otherworldliness that sets them apart from every day people like you and me. And paradoxically, on that first Palm Sunday, the true Lord did not enter into Jerusalem with a display of extravagance, though everything was within his reach. There was no grandeur on display as he rode upon the back of that colt. Nor did the true King of all enter into Jerusalem with a show of strength, though incomparable power dwelled within him.
Paradox exists all over the Word of God where what seem beyond comprehension and impossible, is brought to be or is done by the power and grace and mercy of God Almighty. And with Palm Sunday before us, it boggles the mind about the necessity of what Jesus is predicting in our passage this morning. When kings plan the ceremonies where they’ll be crowned with glory and splendor, they certainly don’t lay plans like what are outlined by Jesus. What we have before us in this morning’s passage is our Lord’s response to Peter’s confession. As we saw last week when Brother Colton led us, it is Peter who correctly identifies Jesus is the Christ of God. Putting that in other terms, Jesus is the foretold and promised Messiah of God. Jesus is the Savior of all. Jesus is the long-awaited King. And so enters paradox again, because just like people in the time our text is bringing us back to, we have an image or understanding of kings that has been formed by the examples of others. So it makes us ask at the outset,
What sort of King is Jesus?
What sort of King is Jesus?
And as we seek to answer this question from the text, we will work through three headings and each heading will start with the phrase “Jesus is the King who…” I would encourage you to free your mind of the examples of kings you’ve seen in movies and simply open your heart to this King, whose name is Jesus. He’s nothing like any other king you think you know. For example, the first thing we see from our text is Jesus declare Luke 9:22 ““The Son of Man must suffer many things…”
From this I want us to come to understand first that
Jesus is the King who suffers with His people
Jesus is the King who suffers with His people
Now, stick with me as I try to explain what’s going on in this verse and how I arrive at this.
Let’s remember that in Luke 9:20 Jesus asked the twelve apostles, “But who do you say that I am?” and speaking on behalf of them, Peter answered, “The Christ of God.” Translations in English will have Peter’s answer as “the Christ of God” or “the Anointed One of God” or “the Messiah of God.” Peter got the answer correct, Jesus is the Messiah, but interestingly, in Luke 9:21 Jesus responds to Peter’s confession that Jesus is God’s Messiah and it says that Jesus, “strictly charged [or rebuked] and commanded them to tell this to no one…” The fact that Jesus rebukes Peter here doesn’t mean that Peter’s confession was wrong, but it does mean that if the apostles went around willy-nilly calling Jesus the Messiah, it would bring about a bunch of unnecessary fanfare.
See, the Jewish people had been waiting for a very long time for God’s Messiah. Waiting for centuries, in fact. They knew that the Messiah would be a descendant of Israel’s King David and the popular opinion of first century Jews was that this Messiah would make Israel great again. What you should know right now is that under the rule of David, the strength of the kingdom of Israel was at its strongest and wealthiest than any other time in the history of the people. David was a skillful leader with a warrior’s heart, with Scripture attesting to numerous battles that he and his army came away victorious from.
And the condition of the Jewish people when Jesus enters into time is far from the high cotton of the days under David. In fact, Israel isn’t even really a kingdom any more. After David’s rule, the kingdom divides into two kingdoms who each go through a run of really bad leaders with some good ones sprinkled in until they’re both conquered by stronger enemy nations who pilfer them completely. Those enemy nations take the Jews out of their lands and relocate them and do their very best to eliminate faith in the One, true God, yet interestingly enough, as God was speaking through his prophets before the fall of those kingdoms, God was telling his people that it was better to go into exile and when they did, to remain faithful to him when they were under the rule of godless nations.
Now, eventually God moves the heart of a godless king who was reigning over the Jews in exile and that godless king permits the Jews to re-enter the Promised Land. And while the Jews make an effort to rebuild what was lost, they’re never truly free again like they were under David. And in the time of our text, though we see Jesus and his apostles and disciples moving through the Promised Land, the people are not under the rule of a Jewish king, but they’re ruled by the caesar, king of the Roman empire.
So what makes Jesus rebuke Peter in the way that he does is that in the first century, it’s become a popular belief that the promised Messiah of God would, borrowing from a contemporary slogan, “make Israel great again.” A popular belief that God’s Messiah would be a warrior-king who kicked Rome out of Jerusalem and restored the strength of Israel to days not seen since David. And I know some may be wondering where I’m going right now, with some potentially concerned that I’m going to pick on a favorite American politician or call on us to abandon concern for this nation and suggest that we all learn Chinese or something. No, I’m not going there, but I am going to tell you that if that’s been a concern of yours, then you’re at risk of doing the same thing as Jews in Jesus’ day. You’re projecting political goals and expectations onto God and are at risk of twisting the promises of God to whatever floats your boat. No, Jesus calls upon Peter in this way, “Peter, you’re right, but don’t go around saying that.”
The Bible says that God Job 12:23 “makes nations great, and he destroys them; he enlarges nations, and leads them away.” So often it’s our desire that the nation remains great - and that’s not a bad thing! - but our motivation is to maintain the comfort that comes with being on top because when we’re comfortable, we generally aren’t suffering. Yet in the sense that God makes nations great and he destroys them, we have to recognize that the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is not a God who leads his people to escape suffering. So many theologies exist that have to do with the hope that we escape negative circumstances and they’re not consistent with the God who has revealed himself in the Bible. No, rather than leading his people to escape suffering, the Christ of God, the Messiah of God, Jesus enters into our suffrage and is speaking here of his plans to subject himself to it.
I would love to tell you that there’s a cosmic “get out of suffering free” card that Jesus hands to us on the day of salvation that we can choose to play when push comes to shove, but there isn’t. And at the same time, though it’s not God’s design for suffering to be escaped, when we suffer, he’s there with us. He’s there with us and I’ll add, he knows suffering himself. Jesus had a good friend whose name was Lazarus and one day, Jesus got news that Lazarus had fallen ill and was near-death. By the time Jesus arrived to the home of Lazarus, he had already died and the body of Lazarus had been laid to rest. In the shortest verse in all the Bible, when the Lord arrived at the tomb of Lazarus, the Bible tells us, John 11:35 “Jesus wept.”
Even the toughest of us in the room have suffered something significant that has brought us to tears. Be it tears from the loss of a loved one like Lazarus, tears born from frustration as your body is ravaged by age or disease, or tears from looking upon just how terrible society has become. And in our suffering, God in Christ Jesus weeps with us. God in Christ Jesus has entered into our suffering and has become suffering, so in whatever suffering you are facing or you will face, don’t starting thinking that you’re suffering because God’s left the room. Jesus the King isn’t far-removed, distant and out-of-touch with the happenings in your life. The Spirit of Jesus is right there with you. Jesus shows us that he is the King who suffers with his people.
The King who suffers didn’t fit the popular expectation of God’s Messiah, but Jesus wasn’t concerned with what was popular. The mission of Jesus is to reconcile, to reunite the cosmos to the Godhead of which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have great love and concern for. So you can imagine how hearing this stuff about the suffering Messiah must’ve made the group scratch their heads. And if this talk about suffering confused the group, you can only imagine how what came next couldn’t register.
We also see in this passage that
Jesus is the King who dies for His people
Jesus is the King who dies for His people
Let me begin to address this heading by inviting us to recall that for all our time in this book of the Bible, we’ve seen Luke leading us to understand who Jesus is, and that he is God himself who became human. In our studies in recent weeks the power of God in Messiah Jesus has been on full display, establishing that in Jesus, God has set foot on his creation and is seeking to reconcile all things to himself. And for as much as Luke has been leading us to understand who this Jesus is, we have yet to see many run-ins with the Jewish leaders, but it’s coming.
And if Jesus is the Christ of God and expectation in the first-century for the Christ was to make Israel great again, the Messiah being killed wouldn’t bode well for that initiative. I mean, think about it. When an up-and-coming leader is killed, that’s usually not a sign of a successful campaign but a sure sign that you threatened the establishment who took action to preserve their position and power. You might remember that Alexi Navalny, the leader of the group in Russia who are opposed to Vladimir Putin was killed just last month for simply threatening the iron-fisted rule Putin has in Russia.
And in one sense, Jesus knew that he was going to challenge the establishment. That’s why Jesus also says in Luke 9:22,“The Son of Man [will] … be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed…” But the work of Jesus is more than just a failed opposition leader.
See, when God in the Person of Jesus Christ entered into time, God was not reigning and ruling in the hearts of men, but what ruled was the lust for power. Long before, God had chosen to make himself a people who were faithful to him and had promised to curse those who were unfaithful. God’s chosen people were not faithful in that they were failing to fulfil their calling to reveal the glory of God to the other peoples of the world because God’s people had chosen to serve lesser things. They lusted after idols like power and wealth. Surely, some of the people had been led into that idolatry in their ignorance. And the Jewish leaders had taken the Word of God and applied it in such a way that didn’t lead people to live in a relationship with the One true God, but they had developed a system of rules and regulations that revealed the idols they served. For them, those idols made sure that the power and wealth of leaders of the Jews would be protected.
Someone’s wondering right now, “OK. But why did Jesus need to die?” And I need you to know that an answer like, “so I can go to Heaven,” is too simple and too cheap. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That’s a familiar verse to many of us and far too often we moralize it this way: “you’ve got a problem and that problem is sin,” from which we will then go on to say that the cross is the answer to our sin problem. Romans 3:23 goes much deeper than that. It is true that we all have a sin problem and that sin we have done separates us from God, making us subject to his curse, but deeper than that is the reason for sin ever to take place for us.
When you sin, in whatever way you do, the reason for that sin is the fact that you have chosen to reject the rule and reign of God as King. You have placed an idol upon the throne of your heart where God has intended for himself to be seated. Instead of revealing the glory of God who reigns as Supreme, you’ve enthroned your idol who reveals anything but God’s glory. Where God expects loyalty and allegiance as King, you rebel. In fact, you do the same thing that Satan did. Satan was the worship leader in Heaven and at one point decided that he, not God, should receive the worship of all in Heaven. When you sin by failing to reveal God’s glorious rule and reign, the idol you are worshipping…is yourself.
Think about the so many ways you commonly think of or speak about sin. You get drunk. You have sex with yourself or with others outside of marriage between one biological man and one biological woman. You use profane language. You steal. You lie. You are lazy and don’t work, happy to exploit the labor of others. You elevate a skin color or a birth place over another. What you’re doing in those active decisions is choosing your own pleasure and your own lusts and yourself above God Almighty. Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” or in the yet to be released Newburg paraphrase of the Bible, “everybody’s got an idol and if you want to see it, take a selfie.”
Why did Jesus need to die? For God to undo the idolatry of any who would repent of their ways and for God to make for himself a people who fulfill what we were created to do - worship and glorify him. How does the death of Jesus accomplish that? Well, since God himself became human in Jesus Christ, Jesus becomes the new and better Israel who doesn’t fall to idolatry, but reveals the glory of God perfectly. And yet in another moment of great paradox, in the cross, though Jesus was perfectly faithful, the man Jesus is tortured and put to death because Jesus willingly becomes the curse for all who rebelled against God, in the very place of rebels like you and me. Jesus dies the death you’re owed as a traitor against God.
Jesus is the King who suffers with his people and dies for his people and if that wasn’t confusing enough to the apostles, then this last one is really going to leave them at a loss.
Jesus is the King who raises His people to life
Jesus is the King who raises His people to life
Let’s remind ourselves that our text is a prediction passage from Jesus so that we should understand that he’s preparing the apostles and disciples for the fate that will eventually meet him. Jesus has rebuked Peter because there’s a popular understanding of Messiah and that popular understanding doesn’t line up with what God has intended with his Messiah. Peter and the apostles know that Jesus is the promised King, although they don’t quite grasp everything that involves, and as we will come to see as we work our way through the rest of Luke, as well as from the accounts of the other evangelists, Jesus will not deny that he is the Messiah, he will accept people calling him Lord and God, and he will declare that he and the Father in Heaven are one.
Coming back to this idea that Jesus is going to challenge the Jewish-religious establishment, when Jesus is put to death, it sure might’ve looked like a revolution died with Jesus. With that Russian opposition leader dead, there was a sham for an election in Russia this week where Putin took in 87% of the vote. In his death, that opposition leader did not deliver Russia from the hands of its oppressors and in the first century, in his death, it looked like Jesus wasn’t God’s Messiah. It looked like maybe Jesus was the traitor who was rebelling against God’s ways and was rightly executed. In Jesus, some had come to celebrate the fulfillment of their hope in God’s long-awaited Messiah, that the true light to the nations had finally arrived and yet on that day we mark as Good Friday, by the time that the sun set and the tomb of Jesus was sealed, it seemed like darkness was an unstoppable power. No doubt, some questioned whether God was real, whether they would ever really see the Messiah arrive, or if salvation was ever truly possible.
Yet, the gospel doesn’t end with a bloody cross - it includes an empty tomb! What God does on that glorious Resurrection Sunday is incomparable! God vindicates Jesus. God proves that Jesus is the true Messiah. Where Adam failed in the garden, God proves that Jesus is the better Adam. Where Israel had failed in their calling, God proves that Jesus is the better Israel. When Jesus is raised from the dead, he is proven to be Messiah, the one who is without sin and blame. He is King of all.
Let me tell you, Brother Colton shared a quote last week that is worthwhile to remember. “Human speech is too limited to describe Him, the human mind too small to comprehend Him, and the human heart can never fully absorb who Jesus Christ is.” If that’s true of Jesus in general, it’s certainly true of his resurrection. Words cannot fully describe it. Our brains cannot fit all that it means. Our hearts cannot soak in the full significance.
But let me say one thing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the impact it has upon anyone who has repented of their sin and confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, surrendering their lives to him. Speaking of the resurrection, the Apostle Paul says:
1 Corinthians 15:17 (ESV)
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.
Paul’s writing to address people who are questioning whether Jesus has been raised from the dead, but notice the association Paul makes between the resurrection of Jesus and the sinful state of Christians. I’m going to say this in positive language because I’m confident of the resurrection of Jesus. Because God has raised Jesus from the dead, God has proven Jesus is the Savior. God has said that though Jesus became the curse for sinners, Jesus himself never sinned and is without blame. God has raised Jesus to life because Jesus is righteous. And my friends, here’s gospel truth that you can take to the bank - God has promised that everyone who repents and believes upon Jesus Christ will be raised to life with him! That means that in Christ, you’re raised from the dead without blame because in his death on the cross, Jesus took your blame, he took your sin, and he put it to death for you.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Behold Jesus, the Christ of God!
Jesus predicts his suffering, his death, and his resurrection because this is the coronation plan of the true King. He is the king who suffers with his people, who dies for his people, and who raises his people to life. When it comes to the basics of being a disciple of Jesus, we have to understand this about Jesus. This is the nature and calling of the Messiah.
What sort of King is Jesus?
Jesus is the King we need
Jesus is the King we need
What sort of King is Jesus?
Jesus is the King who picks you up, no matter what you’ve done.
Jesus is the King who turns you around, no matter how far you’ve strayed.
Jesus is the King who places your feet on solid ground, no matter how precarious your circumstance.
Will you this morning, thank the Master? Is your life marked by thanks for Jesus the Savior?
This King Jesus, if you repent of your sin and surrender to him, will heal your idolatrous heart.
This King Jesus will change your name - no longer will you be child of Satan - you will be a sinner saved by grace, a son or a daughter of the Most High King.
This King Jesus will set you forever free from the curse of death and when you meet him, you’ll never be the same.
My friend, do you behold this Jesus? Do you cherish him?
There can be only one King and my friend, his name is Jesus. There is salvation only in Jesus Christ. Come today, confess your need of a Savior. Surrender to the King, there is none like him. And when you surrender, in our praise to Jesus, we can acknowledge the truth that in every soul saved, hell lost another one.
Are you free?
Thanks be to Jesus Christ, I can humbly share with you that by the grace of God, I am free, I am free, yes I am free.
Are you free?
Then Jesus is the King you need.