Sermon:
The reading of the Passion:
Palmarum – Sunday 24 March A✠D 2024
✠ Psalmody: Psalm 22:19, 21;22:1, 7-8, 11;73:23b-24, 1-3;22: 1, 6, 19, 22, 31
✠ Lection: Exodus 15:27—16:7a; Luke 19:29–40;Philippians 2:5-11;Matthew 26:1-27:66
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
By your mouths this morning, you spoke harrowing words about the Lord Jesus, saying, “Let Him be crucified!…Let Him be crucified!” We not only consider this Palm Sunday, but The Sunday of the Passion, because by entering into Holy Week, the Church has historically used this Sunday to begin reading in its gatherings the Passion accounts from all four Gospels, concluding with St. John’s on Good Friday, all culminating in Christ crucified. The Passion of the Christ refers not to His high emotion for you, although your dear Lord has it. Nor does its meaning carry any of the other modern understandings of the word, such as love, lust, or burning desire. To refer to Christ’s Passion is to speak of His suffering, for that is what the Latin word, passio, means from which we get ours. We remember His suffering, His enduring being betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes who would condemn Him to death and hand Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked, scourged, and, of course, crucified.
Much of God’s beauty is cloaked in rich irony; irony which you possessed when you called out, “Let Him be crucified!” The Christian lives and breathes that beautiful irony of God, because of how much of it He uses to bring about your salvation. When pondering upon the cross of Christ, the violent and bloody execution of the innocent Man Jesus, it is ironic to be rightfully disgusted by it while also rightfully desiring to see, to even call out for it, to be carried out. Let us pray for the desire to see Jesus crucified as the Father gives eyes to see, for He Himself said, “I will strike the Shepherd.” The crucifixion of Jesus is the LORD’s doing and it shall always be marvelous in our eyes.
The struggle between faith and the fallen reason is one in which we wrestle with the Crucifixion’s beautiful necessity, and the Lord’s blessed, Holy Word strengthens our faith through ironies such as the notorious prisoner whose freedom Christ secured in exchange of the innocent for the guilty. The prisoner was called Barabbas: Bar- , “son”, -abbas, “of a father”. The one being held as prisoner due to his own sins is the son of a father named Adam by whom sin entered into the world and brought condemnation. In the prison of your own sins, you are held in bondage and rightly condemned to pay the penalty unless Jesus, the Son of the Father, is handed over in exchange for your freedom in God’s forgiveness being won. It is ironic that it was the will of the Father to have the Son handed over, that this is what the Son Himself wanted, and by faith, you want Jesus to be handed over, to be exchanged for unworthy prisoners, too. These humanly horrific things must happen.
So, when the offer was placed before the blood-thirsty crowd, “Whom do you want me to release to you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?”, the irony is in turn placed before you. You want to give voice to the tumultuous crowd and answer with them, “Barabbas!” You want the one with whom you are numbered in unrighteousness to be set free in exchange for the Righteous One, because it must be so. It is the will, the plan, and the desire of God that it be so for your salvation. In order for the King of the Jews to become your eternal King and Savior, His passion is the necessary path of rescue and redemption of your condemned soul. You are not to feel sorry for Jesus as you would a poor puppy that is being mercilessly beaten for not listening to the voices demanding it to obey commands. Jesus is the Lamb of God opening not His mouth, being led to the slaughter and He wants it to happen. You want it to happen. You rightfully call out for Barabbas’ release and for Jesus in his place, for Jesus in your place, “Let Him be crucified!” By faith in God’s plan of salvation, you become not wickedly blood thirsty as how the crowd cried out, but desperately and thankfully blood thirsty to drink of it all of you the life-giving blood of your Savior poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins. You want Jesus crucified, and so did He, for you.
“His blood be on us and on our children.” Yes! You want this to be so. You need this to be true, for without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. Without the shedding of the blood of the righteous King of the Jews there is no salvation for the world. You need Jesus’ blood to be upon you. You need His blood to be in you for there is life in the Blood. There is eternal life in Christ’s blood, so when you receive it, you know that you are receiving the fruit of His passion, the eternal fruit of life bore by His tree of most necessary, gruesome, glorious death. By words ignorantly spoken in a condemning self-curse come words that you plead to be true, and they are. His shed blood works the forgiveness of sins and the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all who are afar off; as many as the Lord our God will call.
He calls by granting the gift of faith by which you call out, “Let Him be crucified!” He calls you through His portal of death, for what you are to be disgusted about the most in the Crucifixion is the number of your sins that the Son of the Father bore in His flesh in exchange for your release. Be disgusted not first at the crowd worked up into dark tumult by those blinded by their envy, but at your logs of anger, spite, laziness, lust, murderous words, and whatever other sins this Lord’s good commandments reveal about you. And when you examine yourself, do not remain in the disgust of them, but rejoice that Jesus wanted to die for all your sins; all of them, both those others know about and those you try to keep hidden. The Father made the Son Who knew no sin to be sin for you, that you might become the righteousness of God in Him, so weep not at the sadness of the cruifixion. Respect its gravity. Revere the sacrifice, but forget not that the Passion of the Christ was the heavenly plan and we will rejoice in the eternal Day that the LORD has made and be glad in Christ crucified. The heart that sees God’s mighty, necessary, gruesome yet glorious work upon the cross in its place, sees the beauty of the innocent blood being poured out upon it, being poured out into it and takes comfort that even by earthly ironies carried out and spoken by wicked people, He has worked all things for your good. Be serious about Passiontide and now Holy Week. But also revere, be glad, be thankful for the Son of the Father Who exchanged Himself for you; Whom you most certainly want to see crucified for you; Whose blood you shall be eternally grateful to have upon you.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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