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PALM SUNDAY-HE JESUS SET HIS FACE TO GO TO JERUSALEM!
from Desiring God. You can listen to the audio for this John Piper sermon here.
Luke describes the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem at the beginning of that last week of his earthly life:
As he was drawing near, at the
descent of the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples
began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty
works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the
name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest! (Luke 19:37, 38)
Palm Sunday: Today and To Come
There is no doubt what was in the disciples’ minds. This was the fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy given centuries earlier:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of
Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt,
the foal of an ass. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war
horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall
command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth. (Zechariah 9:9, 10)
The long-awaited Messiah had
come, the king of Israel, and not just of Israel but of all the earth.
Jerusalem would be his capital city. From here he would rule the world
in peace and righteousness. What a day this was! How their hearts must
have pounded in their chests! And must not their hands have been sweaty
like warriors in readiness just before the bugle sounds the battle! How
would he do it? Would he whip up the enthusiastic crowds and storm the
Roman praetorium—a people’s revolution? Or would he call down fire from
heaven to consume the enemies of God? Would any of his followers be lost
in the struggle? The tension of the moment must have been tremendous!
The
Pharisees had a double reason for wanting this kind of welcome
silenced. On the one hand, this Jesus was a threat to their authority,
and they envied his popularity (Mark 15:10). On the other hand, they feared a Roman backlash to all this seditious talk of another king (John 11:48). Therefore they say to Jesus, “‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples.’ But he answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out!”‘ (Luke 19:39, 40).
No, he will not rebuke them for this. Not now. The hour has come. The
authority of the Pharisees is done for. If the Romans come, they come.
He will not silence the truth any longer. To be sure the disciples’
understanding of Jesus’ kingship at this point is flawed. But hastening
events will correct that soon enough. In essence they are correct. Jesus
is the king of Israel, and the kingdom he is inaugurating will bring
peace to all the nations and spread from sea to sea. The book of
Revelation pictures the final fulfillment of Palm Sunday in the age to
come like this:
I looked and behold, a great
multitude which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes
and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb,
clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9, 10)
The entry into Jerusalem with waving palms (John 12:13)
was a short-lived preview of the eternal Palm Sunday to come. It needed
to be said. If the disciples hadn’t said it, the rocks would have.
I
like to think of all our worship in this age as rehearsal for the age to
come. One day we, who by God’s grace have been faithful to the Lord,
are going to stand with innumerable millions of believers from
Bangladesh, Poland, Egypt, Australia, Iceland, Cameroon, Ecuador, Burma,
Borneo, Japan, and thousands of tribes and peoples and languages
purified by Christ, with palms of praise in our hand. And when we raise
them in salute to Christ, He will see an almost endless field of green,
shimmering with life and pulsating with praise. And then like the sound
of a thousand Russian choruses, we will sing our song of salvation,
while the Mighty Christ, with heartfelt love, looks out over those whom he bought with his own blood.
Had Jesus taken his throne on
that first day of palms, none of us would ever be robed in white or
waving palms of praise in the age to come. There had to be the cross,
and that is what the disciples had not yet understood. Back
in Luke 9, as Jesus prepared to set out for Jerusalem from Galilee, he
tried to explain this to his disciples. In verse 22 he said, “The Son of
Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief
priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” And
in verse 44 he told them, “Let these words sink into your ears; for the
Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men.” But verse 45
tells us, “They did not understand this saying, and it was concealed
from them that they should not perceive it; and they were afraid to ask
him about this saying.” Therefore, their understanding of Jesus’
last journey to Jerusalem was flawed. They saw him as a king moving in
to take control. And he was. But they could not grasp that the victory
Jesus would win in Jerusalem over sin and Satan and death and all the
enemies of righteousness and joy—that this victory would be won through
his own horrible suffering and death; and that the kingdom which they
thought would be established immediately (Luke 19:11)
would, in fact, be thousands of years in coming. And their
misunderstanding of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem results in a
misunderstanding of the meaning of discipleship. This is why this is
important for us to see, lest we make the same mistake.
Jesus’ Resolution to Die
In Luke 9:51–56 we learn how not
to understand Palm Sunday. Let’s look at it together. “When the days
drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to
Jerusalem.” To set his face towards Jerusalem meant something very
different for Jesus than it did for the disciples. You can see the
visions of greatness that danced in their heads in verse 46: “An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest.”
Jerusalem and glory were just around the corner. O what it would mean
when Jesus took the throne! But Jesus had another vision in his head.
One wonders how he carried it all alone and so long. Here’s what
Jerusalem meant for Jesus: “I must go on my
way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a
prophet should perish away from Jerusalem”(Luke 13:33).
Jerusalem meant one thing for Jesus: certain death. Nor was he under
any illusions of a quick and heroic death. He predicted in Luke 18:31f.,
“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written
of the Son of man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be
delivered to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and
spit upon; they will scourge him and kill him.” When Jesus set his face
to go to Jerusalem, he set his face to die.
Remember, when you think of
Jesus’ resolution to die, that he had a nature like ours. He shrunk back
from pain like we do. He would have enjoyed marriage and children and
grandchildren and a long life and esteem in the community. He had a
mother and brothers and sisters. He had special places in the mountains.
To turn his back on all this and set his face towards vicious whipping
and beating and spitting and mocking and crucifixion was not easy. It
was hard. O how we need to use our imagination to put ourselves
back into his place and feel what he felt. I don’t know of any other
way for us to begin to know how much he loved us. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
If we were to look at Jesus’
death merely as a result of a betrayer’s deceit and the Sanhedrin’s envy
and Pilate’s spinelessness and the soldiers’ nails and spear, it might
seem very involuntary. And the benefit of salvation that comes to us who
believe from this death might be viewed as God’s way of making a virtue
out of a necessity. But once you read Luke 9:51
all such thoughts vanish. Jesus was not accidentally entangled in a web
of injustice. The saving benefits of his death for sinners were not an
afterthought. God planned it all out of infinite love to sinners like us
and appointed a time. Jesus, who was the very embodiment of his
Father’s love for sinners, saw that the time had come and set his face
to fulfill his mission: to die in Jerusalem for our sake. “No one takes my life from me (he said), but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18).
Jesus’ Journey Is Our Journey
So Jesus sets out for Jerusalem, and it says in the text that “he
sent messengers ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the
Samaritans to make ready for him; but the people would not receive him
because his face was set toward Jerusalem.” It doesn’t really
matter whether this rejection is just because Jesus and his companions
are Jews and Samaritans hate Jews, or whether the rejection is a more
personal rejection of Jesus as the Messiah on his way to reign in
Jerusalem. What matters for the story is simply that Jesus is already
being rejected, and then the focus shifts to the disciples’ response,
specifically the response of James and John.
James and John ask Jesus, “Lord,
do you want us to bid fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”
(verse 54). Jesus had already named these brothers “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17).
Here we get a glimpse of why. I take this passage very personally
because my father named me after one of these sons of thunder. And I
think I probably would have said what John did here: “Jesus,
we are on the way to victory. Nothing can stop us now. Let the fire
fall! Let the judgment begin! O, how Jerusalem will tremble when they
see us coming!” Jesus turns, the text says, and rebuked them (verse 55). And they simply went to another town.
Now what does this mean? It
means, first of all, that a mistaken view of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem
can lead to a mistaken view of discipleship. If Jesus had come to
execute judgment and take up an earthly rule, then it would make sense
for the sons of thunder to begin the judgment when the final siege of
the Holy City starts. But if Jesus had come not to judge but to save,
then a radically different form of discipleship is in order. Here is a
question put to every believer by this text: does discipleship mean
deploying God’s missiles against the enemy in righteous indignation? Or
does discipleship mean following him on the Calvary road which leads to
suffering and death? The answer of the whole New Testament is this: the surprise about Jesus the Messiah
is that he came to live a life of sacrificial, dying service before he
comes a second time to reign in glory. And the surprise about discipleship is that it demands a life of sacrificial, dying service before we can reign with Christ in glory.
What James and John had to
learn—what we all must learn—is that Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem is our
journey, and if he set his face to go there and die, we must set our
face to die with him. One might be tempted to reason in just the
opposite way: that since Jesus suffered so much and died in our place,
therefore, we are free to go straight to the head of the class, as it
were, and skip all the exams. He suffered so we could have comfort. He
died so we could live. He bore abuse so we could be esteemed. He gave up
the treasures of heaven so we could lay up treasures on earth. He
brought the kingdom and paid for our entrance and now we live in it with
all its earthly privileges. But all this is not biblical reasoning. It
goes against the plain teaching in this very context. Luke 9:23, 24
reads: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take
up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will
lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it.”
When Jesus set his face to walk the Calvary road, he was not merely
taking our place; he was setting our pattern. He is substitute and pacesetter. If we seek to secure our life through returning
evil for evil or surrounding ourselves with luxury in the face of human
need, we will lose our life. We can save our life only if we follow
Christ on the Calvary road. Jesus died to save us from the power and
punishment of sin, not from the suffering and sacrifices of simplicity
for love’s sake.
By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org
24 Mar 2013
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