“Blessed is He: A Sermon for Palm Sunday”

Scripture Text: Matthew 21:1-11

Listen to the crowds as they shout:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:19)

They are shouting because the King has come. This is the cause of all their wonder, the source of all their joy. “When Jesus entered Jerusalem,” Matthew notes, “the whole city was stirred and asked, ‘Who is this?’” (Matthew 21:10)

Apologies to the NIV translation committee, but seriously–stirred is too soft a word. The Greek is ‘eseisthe’–more like “seismic,” as in, “the whole city erupted” or “the whole city was shaken,” for that is just what happens at the arrival of the King. It sends a tremor of joy down into our depths–a tremor that rebounds in shrieks of praise up to the heights–the very heights of heaven itself, “highest heaven,” as Matthew has it. What a phrase.

From the rocky peaks I see them,

from the heights I view them.

I see a people who live apart

and do not consider themselves one of the nations.

The Lord their God is with them;

the shout of the King is among them. (Numbers 23:9, 21b)

Yes, that is what this is–the shout of the King. The city asks, “Who is this?,” and the exultant crowds respond, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee” (Matthew 21:11).

He is the King in the midst of his people. And we are glad of it. Very glad.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest heaven!

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This is a sermon about what Christians have traditionally called “The Paschal Mystery”–that which is remembered and celebrated during Holy Week: the death and resurrection of the Lord. I promise I will get to that. But I have to start with this past Sunday–the Sunday of the Palms.

A confession: in twenty years of preaching Palm Sunday, I have given it short shrift. The peculiar note of unembarrassed, eruptive joy it sounds I have usually glossed over, racing to those bits of the story that have more tang, more acidity, more bite.

For example, I have have sometimes focused on the fact that Matthew positions Jesus as a Galilean prophet (which would have been an enormous scandal to the Jerusalem establishment), emphasizing the notion that God often comes to us as a scandalous “other” in order to open us up to the wideness of the kingdom that includes Jew and Gentile, male and female, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free.

At other times I have focused on those events that come immediately after the Triumphal Entry–the cleansing of the temple, the cursing of the fig tree, and Jesus’ heartbroken tears over the city that “did not recognize the time of God’s coming” (Luke 19:44)–to point out that it is often we who are most invested in the things of God (“the elect,” as it were) who turn out to be most hostile to the true purposes of God.

And at still other times–in much the same spirit–I have focused on the fact that it is largely the same people that welcome him with joy on Palm Sunday who sling him up on a cross on Friday, jeering and mocking as they do. How quickly our praise morphs into bloodthirsty rage; we are too often unaware of the darkness that lies within. Palm Sunday and what comes after exposes all this, I have said.

Not wrong, these themes. Not at all. The shadow that lurks at the edge of Palm Sunday is real, and it will have its day.

But to gloss over the joy–I see now with clear eyes–that is wrong. Very wrong.

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The first Bible verse I ever learned I learned at my mother’s knee:

I have set the Lord continually before me, 

because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken… (Psalm 16:8)

I might have been three years old–four at the latest. She taught it to me with hand motions and in a kind of sing-songy cadence that made it impossible to forget. Over forty years later, Psalm 16:8 is with me on the daily–a definitional bit of Scripture that has come to shape a life. We keep God before our face, casting ourselves completely upon him in moment-by-moment dependence–that, and that alone, is, as the Heidelberg Catechism has it: “Our only hope in life and in death.” We are God’s; we belong utterly to him, body and soul–and it fills us with confidence to know this.

More than that, it fills us with joy. The rest of the Psalm tells the tale:

Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;

my body also will rest secure,

because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,

nor will you let your faithful one see decay.

You make known to me the path of life;

you will fill me with joy in your presence,

with eternal pleasures at your right hand. (Psalm 16:9-11)

I was raised among a people that knew these things. The Pentecostals and Charismatics that reared me in the faith believed them in their bones. They believed that in the Presence there was a “fullness of joy” and at the Right Hand (which is where we are, according to Paul–seated with Christ at God’s right hand in the heavenlies, as Ephesians 2:6 declares) there were “pleasures evermore” to be had–the greatest pleasure, of course, being God’s own self: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God is the joy of God’s people; he is their inheritance, their delight. To be together in the Presence is everything we could ever want, or need.

One thing I ask from the Lord,

this only do I seek:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord

all the days of my life,

to gaze on the beauty of the Lord

and to seek him in his temple. (Psalm 27:4)

That sentiment ran deep in us. Sundays when the Fire and the Cloud descended and we’d tarry in the Presence. Wednesday (or Thursday, or Tuesday, or Friday–IYKYK) evenings when the Glory would come to rest on us and time went out of mind and you hoped against hope that the moment would never end.

Everything good happened there–in the Presence of God, the King in the midst of the people. Bodies were healed. Chains fell off. Hearts were set on fire with love for God and one another and a broken world. We went out different, changed–because we had been with God, caught up Fire and Cloud, in Glory and Mystery.

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Somewhere along the line it all went off the rails. So much of the Charismatic movement became rife with sub-biblical teaching or outright heresy; a great deal of it fell into the captivity of political power; large portions of it transmuted into the very formulaic and paper-thin “seeker” movement. Many of us found ourselves exiled–not by our choice. It just didn’t make sense to stay.

I count myself among that number. For years I trod paths of exile, wandering, wondering whether the basic sentiments of the tribe of my upbringing were wrong. Is there something more, something else that we ought to be about? Liturgy, mission, works of justice and mercy, speaking truth to power? Was all that delight in Presence just an exercise in self-indulgence? Doesn’t the real work of the Church happen outside the joyful assembly of the faithful?

I have wondered those things. I do so no longer.

We spent ten weeks this spring preaching the books of Exodus and Leviticus in a series of messages we affectionately called Power and Presence. God delivers a people, we said; but for what?

I am sure that I knew the answer to this question before we started, but was surprised at the peculiar force with which it hit me as we preached these texts. And not just the force, but the nuance and depth of it–the peculiar way in which Exodus and Leviticus address the question of just what it is that God is up to in the world through his people.

In his commentary on Leviticus, L. Michael Morales notes that “life with God in the house of God…was the original goal of the creation of the cosmos”¹L. Michael Morales, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? A biblical theology of the book of Leviticus, 17.)–a cosmos warped and alienated by human sin. As such, God’s covenant with Israel was designed to address just that situation. “As the innermost aim of the covenant, dwelling with God in the house of God, for fullness of life in abundant joy and fellowship, is the great promise held out before God’s people, and the ardent desire expressed in Israel’s liturgy: ‘I will dwell in the house of God forever (Psalm 23:6)” (Morales, 18).

The deliverance of Israel from Egypt was for this, argues Morales–that God should have a people among whom he might live, with whom he might dwell in glory; which has ever been his desire. “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day…” (Genesis 3:8). Exiled from the Presence, Exodus tells us that God’s goal is to re-establish humanity in it: “You will bring them in and plant them on the mountain of your inheritance—the place, Lord, you made for your dwelling, the sanctuary, Lord, your hands established” (Exodus 15:17), while Leviticus tells us just how he does that: through the worshipping life of the covenant community:

Observe my Sabbaths and have reverence for my sanctuary…I will put my tabernacle among you, and I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people. (Leviticus 26:2, 11)

And the upshot is this–a hale, healthy, hearty people: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt so that you would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians; I broke the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high” (Leviticus 26:13)–a promise finally brought to fruition in the coming of Jesus Christ, God’s tabernacling presence in person. Writes Morales: “For this ultimate end the Son of God shed his blood and poured out the Spirit from on high, even to bring us into his Father’s house, in him, as sons and daughters of God” (Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?, 22).

That is to say, what is accomplished in the Paschal Mystery–the death and resurrection of the Lord–is the fulfillment of all God’s desire for us: that we would be atoned (literally, “at-oned”), brought to full and final union with God, who is our deepest desire, our highest joy; our love, our life, our all, our everything.

And so when Jesus–God in flesh–comes riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey and the crowds erupt saying, “Hosanna in the highest!” throwing their cloaks down on the road to welcome him with the children likewise dancing and singing praise, let us not (with the Pharisees!) sneer at them, thinking that we know more, or better, because we see the disaster that is to come. Yes, their praise is flawed (as ours is) and yes, they will have a hand in the disaster (as we also do)–but the disaster to come will save them, as the Lamb that is both immolated and sent into the wilderness does for them what they cannot do for themselves–bringing them home to the house of the Father, who welcomes them (and us) with open arms, delighted to receive us, forever.

So, then, let us join them in grateful praise:

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:19)

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Which is what we do every time we gather. We cast palm and cloak and even crown down before the King who comes in the Name of the Lord, the King who simply is the Lord in all his splendor, the Magnificent One–eternal, immortal, the only God–the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, the One who is worthy to receive all blessing and honor and glory and power, forever and ever.

And he will ride into our midst, this King of Glory, and we will celebrate him. As the days of Holy Week progress we will likewise remember the strange and alien work he does among us–suffering for us, dying in our place, rising into the age to come, dragging us along with him as he does, pouring out his Spirit upon us; and we will be undone all over again by his goodness, melted down by his kindness, remade by same Hand that made heaven and earth, that fashioned us in our mother’s wombs.

Let it be said clearly: it is not required of us that we should understand these things; still less that we should take it upon ourselves (preachers, beware!) to explain them. How it is that God in Christ makes good his word through the Paschal Mystery–the unmitigated disaster of the cross and the out-of-nowhere miracle of the resurrection–is beyond our ken, ever beyond; just as (but so much greater than) the “how” of the sacrifices and offerings of the tabernacle were beyond the ken of the priests and worshipers. 

It was not required of them (nor of us) to understand or explain–only to receive their benefit and bear witness to this: that somehow through them, the Glory came and the people were glad; just as (but so much greater than) through sacrifice of our Beloved, Jesus the Lord, the Glory came, and we are glad. Forever and ever.

These days, I am remembering that. Remembering that the original intuitions of the tribe of my upbringing were not at all wrong–all to the contrary, they were biblical through and through. That being together in the house of our Father, through the atoning work of Jesus, our Prophet, our Priest, our eternal King; the one we call “Immanuel: God with us,” who by his Spirit is making all things new, even us, and sending us out to bear witness to his life-renewing work…

…that is quite simply the best thing that can ever happen to us, the very best thing that is offered to us–either in this age or in the age to come.

And so let us once more say:

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

Hallelujah. Amen.

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*Editorial Note: When Andrew Arndt writes (or preaches via article!) for us, we do well to reflect thoughtfully, as his gift of word and phrase form the heart deeply! Andrew’s Substack can be found here, and New Life East’s Substack is here. Lastly, the incredible artwork for this article is courtesy of Missio friend Julius Shumpert (@saintjuliusart), whose work is found at http://cosmicchrist.com.

© Julius Shumpert (@saintjuliusart of http://cosmicchrist.com)