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April 13, 2025: Palm Sunday
Luke 19:28-44
We’re in Holy Week, which means long Scripture readings. They can test our attention spans sometimes. But bear with me here because I think the verses immediately following our processional gospel are important for understanding what is happening.
As [Jesus] came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”
In Luke’s theology, Jesus is the very embodiment of the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom walks, breathes, eats, and lives among God’s own people. Jesus spends a lot of his ministry trying to hammer through his disciples’ heads what kind of Kingdom that is and what kind of King he is. But they can’t understand. Back in Luke 9, after Jesus foretold his suffering, death, and resurrection a second time, Luke tells us “…they did not understand this saying; its meaning remained concealed from them, so that they could not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about [it].” Luke even indicates that this lack of understanding continues at the moment of Jesus’s ascension, when they ask, “Lord, now are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” However, this lack of understanding doesn’t just reside with the disciples. It extends to all God’s people in every time and place who fail to perceive God’s radical inbreaking into history and the things that make for genuine shalom. And the metaphor here for all God’s people is the city of Jerusalem.
God and Jerusalem have a long history after all. It was the location of the First Temple built under Solomon’s reign. It was the place where God made His Name to dwell, as Deuteronomy says. And it was also the place where kings and priests would ignore the Word of God to their detriment and the detriment of their nation. God would send prophets repeatedly and these same kings and priests would ignore or punish these same prophets. Jeremiah was thrown into a pit. In 1 Kings 22, King Ahab imprisons the prophet Micaiah after he doesn’t go along with the false visions of success the rest of the court prophets paint. And a century later or so, King Jehoiakim straight up murders a prophet named Uriah for calling him and the whole temple court to repentance. There is a reason that God’s favorite description for His own people is that they are “stiff-necked”.
But we’re not any better than they were. We, too, prefer to go our own way. We, too, are guilty of a hard-headed, “my way or the highway” kind of thinking that gives little thought to our communities, our neighbors, or even God. And because we can be so stiff-necked, we can fail to perceive those things that make for peace—things like mercy, love, forgiveness, peacemaking, joy, generosity, and self-control. The powers of this world often see these things as weak. Many of the kings of Israel and Judah did. Empires throughout history have. Leaders up to the present day have. Even in our so-called advanced age, we haven’t become any more merciful than our ancestors; quite the opposite.
But King Jesus continues to ride through every age. And in his train, he brings those things that make for peace. Where we are merciless, he shows us mercy. Where we are unforgiving, he gives us forgiveness. Where we are hard-hearted and insist upon our own way, he breaks our stony hearts to give us his way—his liberating gospel. Ezekiel prophesied about this liberation when he wrote, “I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” And on the cross, we will see this tender-hearted King of all welcome one of the worst sinners—an insurrectionist and murderer crucified next to him—into Paradise.
And so, Jesus receives us all into his Kingdom—without an ounce of deserving or merit at all. We truly are all beggars, as Martin Luther wrote the night he died. And Jesus has mercy, mercy on you. Mercy on me. Mercy on the whole world. That’s the kind of king Jesus is. And that’s the kind of Kingdom over which he reigns. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.