Sermon: Waiting for God

Sermon by Matt Kennedy
Text: Matthew 21:1-11
Palm Sunday 2011

One of the more frustrating things about God is that he tends not to explain himself. God promises Abraham that the number of his descendants will be greater than the stars in the sky but he doesn’t explain how that’s going to happen. One would assume that this would mean his wife, Sarah, who is unable to bear children, has to get pregnant. That expectation shapes Abraham’s entire life. Decades pass and Sarah ages far past the point where even if she weren’t barren, she could have babies, and still no promised child. No explanation from God. So she and Abraham think, “Maybe God needs a little help.” So at Sarah’s urging, Abraham sleeps with Sarah’s maidservant Hagar. Hagar gets pregnant, Ishmael is born. Great, now Abraham has a Son and all is well. Except that God shows up again out of the blue and says, oh, no, he’s not the one.  Finally, miraculously, Sarah who’s now in her 90’s becomes pregnant and Isaac is born.

The story could end here with “they lived happily ever after” but it doesn’t. 12 years later God shows up and says, “I want you to take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love and sacrifice him in the place I will show you”. What? You promise to make my family into a great nation, you make Sarah and I wait 40 years to give us one son, and now you want me to kill him?

So on the one hand Abraham has God’s promise that he’s clung to his whole life, a promise enfleshed in Isaac whom he loves. On the other hand he has God’s command to sacrifice the Promise. But Abraham saddles his donkey and heads to the place God shows him, which just happens to be the future site of Jerusalem where the Temple would be built, and we know how it ends. At the last moment God provides a lamb for Abraham to sacrifice in place of his Son and so, miraculously and in a way that Abraham never could have guessed back in Genesis 12, Abraham follows God’s commands and God keeps his promise.       

That’s Genesis 12-22—you can read it in two hour’s sitting and you know how the story ends. But the drama was real. It was Abraham’s entire life. God never explained how he’d work things out, he just made a promise

Abraham’s life is a picture of the life of every follower of Christ. God calls you, he makes you his, he promises to be with you, to provide for you, to make all things come together for your good, but God rarely explains how. That freaks me out. Sorrow or trials comes. I compare my circumstance to God’s promise and ask “what is going on?” And in response…silence.

That’s when, often, I decide to go to Hagar’s tent. To cease to wait. To take the good things God promises in our own way. So you’re lonely. You meet someone. You fall in love. She’s married, he’s married. Surely God loves me and wants me to be happy. Surely this is God’s doing. Or, you’re no longer in love with the person you married. Surely God wouldn’t want me to be miserable. I’m leaving. Rather than waiting on God—we sketch our own picture of what God must do to be faithful and then we paint it ourselves and at the end of the process we’ve fabricated a new god who fits comfortably with our expectations.

Now what does this have to do with Palm Sunday. It has everything to do with Palm Sunday.

Matthew 21.

Jesus is very intentional about the way he enters Jerusalem. He sends two disciples into Bethphage, a village on the Mount of Olives within sight of Jerusalem—with careful instructions.

(v.2) “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.”

If two strange men get into my car and start the engine, I’m going to object. If they respond, “the Lord needs your car”. I’m calling the police. This is prearranged. Jesus has sent ahead to friends to have transportation waiting for him. He gives his disciples words to say to assure the owner that they’re acting on Jesus’ behalf.

Jesus has carefully planned to enter Jerusalem on a donkey followed by a colt. Why? Well, let’s turn to Zechariah 9:9-13. Zechariah wrote shortly after the return of Judah from exile in Babylon. V.9:

“[9] Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

That’s the section Matthew quotes. It’s part of a longer prophesy of a coming king. Let’s make some observations.

Notice the mixture of peaceful and warlike imagery in verses 10-13. Verse 10 indicates that through the King, God will cut off war and bring peace to his people—Ephraim and Jerusalem. In fact, he’ll speak peace to all the nations and ultimately rule from sea to sea. In verse 11 God promises to set free those held captive in the waterless pit (a waterless pit was a great place to keep prisoners. They won’t drown but they can’t get out) he refers to them as prisoners of hope. This language in Zechariah’s day points to return of those still in exile in Babylon and elsewhere. God’s promise is to bring his dispersed and exiled people home. Those in exile are “prisoners of hope” because they hope in God’s promise. Through the coming king, then, God will bring make war to cease, speak peace to the nations, and bring home the exiles. Notice in verse 13 there is a turn from peace to war “For I have bent Judah as my bow; I have made Ephraim its arrow. I will stir up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece, and wield you like a warrior’s sword.” (Zechariah 9:13) and if you continue to read you see that God himself through his king will fight for his people and win a victory.

God’s promise was partly fulfilled 400 years later during the Macabbean revolt when the Jews rose up against the Greek Seleucid empire in 166BC. But for Jews in Jesus’ day there was a problem. The Greeks were gone but another oppressor followed. The Romans. And the Babylonian exiles had returned but there remained millions of Jews scattered abroad who’d yet to come home. The Nations still held sway over God’s people. There was no peace. So partly based on Zechariah 9, first century Judaism was flush with expectation for a greater warrior king—the Messiah, the anointed one, from God who would defeat not just the Greeks but all the Gentiles.

So now comes Jesus. His reputation as a prophet and a healer has preceded him. Crowds have followed him from Galilee. The crowds in verses 7-9 are not from the city—they’ve followed him to Jerusalem. Only days before he’s raised Lazarus from the dead. Everyone in Jerusalem knows about it.

So imagine the electricity in the air before Jesus begins his trek into the city, the tension and expectation, the question—“is this the One?” And it’s in that atmosphere that Jesus sends for the donkey and the colt.

People sometimes read Matthew 21 and think—“oh humble Jesus riding a donkey. Let’s not get carried away with that.” If a prophecy in our day said that the Lord will return as an Anglican preacher in Binghamton on Palm Sunday 2011wearing a beat up red baseball cap. And I put on a red beat up baseball cap today no-one would say, “Oh look at humble Matt” . The beat-up cap may be humble but I would not be making a humble claim.

Jesus riding the donkey followed by a colt is making a dramatic claim about himself.

And everyone got it. “the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

The Son of David is a messianic title. “Hosanna” means “O Save” or “the one who saves us”. They get it. John 12 tells us that crowds from Jerusalem came out crying the same things. The city is in an uproar. The villages surrounding the city are stirred up—the place is going wild.

Don’t be fooled by the crowds. Superficial readings of the NT often conclude that Jesus was “a man beloved by the people.” “The people love Jesus. It’s just those nasty mean religious leaders who hated him. Jesus is a man of the people!”

No.

When “the people” get to know Jesus, they hate him.

And I can understand that. They’ve been waiting on God’s promise of salvation, peace, and victory. They’ve waited a long time—through trial, sorrow, tribulation and great suffering. “Surely God wants to save us from these things.” They might have thought.  “Surely God will give us a warrior king. Surely that is his will for us now. Surely he loves us and wants us to be free and happy.”

So as the real Messiah enters the city, they cheer and wave and bow down but it’s not really Jesus they greet. They greet the warrior king. Jesus brings an offer of peace from the Father against whom all creation rebels. He comes to do battle against the three great enemies of God’s people, Satan, Sin and Death, but this is not the battle nor the peace the people want. Five days later they shout for blood. They go with Abraham into Hagar’s tent.

Three observations:

First. When need is great, When suffering is great, When pain is great, When in dire need of healing or satisfaction or companionship—it’s tempting to stop waiting on God to fulfill his promises to satisfy our desires, to heal our hearts or bodies in his way and in his time—to take matters in our own hands. It’s so easy for pragmatic, practical people like us to decide that “prayer isn’t working”  or “I can’t wait any longer” or “this difficult thing cannot be ‘God’s best for me’”. Often that sort of thinking translates into “God’s grace is no longer sufficient for me”. Resist that. It always ends in misery.

Second: Our God is not ‘our’ God. What is the name that he gave to Moses…”I AM” God is not defined by our expectations. God will never break his promises and he will never contradict his own Word but he does not do always fulfill his promises or carry out his word in ways that we expect. That means that when your expectations of who God is and what he will do are not met, it does not mean that God is not at that moment, working out his salvation in your life. Trust him and obey. Even when it seems to make no sense, we obey because we trust.

Third: God uses even our sin to accomplish his will. I need to be careful saying this. I’m not saying that sin is ever good. It’s not. But I did want to add this at the end to assure you that God’s purposes and plans for your life hinge on God not on you. So, should you “enter Hagar’s tent”—you’ve not forever ruined things. The universe does not rely on your good decisions. Neither, even, does your own life. Grace follows behind and goes before us. God’s promise to Abraham came to pass despite Abraham’s sin with Hagar. God not only sees our sins before we commit them but his plan and purpose for our lives incorporates even our sins into his bringing about good for us. What does Paul say? While we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly. It was, after-all, It was the very act of rejecting Jesus, handing him over to be crucified, the people participated in God’s plan to save sinners. Our hatred of God that God used to save us. It is good to mourn over our sins—but not despair. God is greater than our sins and that he has promised to save us.

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