THE PRINCE OF PEACE

[Exodus 13:1-4,11-15; Luke 19:28-44]

          Introduction to the Scriptures: This is the eve of the children of Israel leaving Egypt. The Passover has taken place, and they are on their way out of town. [Read Exodus 13:1-4] I was listening this week on Public Radio to a discussion among Jewish people of their celebration of the Passover. Here we are well over 3000 years later – “commemorate this day,” Moses says. Skip down to verse11. [Read Exodus 13:11-15] Verse 16: “And it will be like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead that the Lord brought us out of Egypt with his mighty hand.”

          That is a little reference to the firstborn, and we’ll pick that up again, but if you will, turn over to Luke’s gospel in the New Testament to chapter 19, verse 28, the familiar account of this Palm Sunday event, coming, as it did, during Passover. [Read Luke 19:28-35]

          Verse 37: “When he came near the place where the road goes down the Mt. of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for the all the miracles they had seen.” We are told in one of the other gospels that a group from the city joined them at that place, and these are some of the words of praise. Verse 38: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

          [Read Luke 19:39-44] In a few weeks some of us will be in Jerusalem. We’ll see the remarkable evidence uncovered not long ago by archaeologists when the great stones were pried off the temple wall and shattered the stones in the street below. Within just a few decades after Jesus spoke these words that judgment came upon his own children.

Prayer for Illumination: Father, in the remainder of this worship hour, we ask that your living Spirit would be moving among us. You came and walked among us in a tangible way in the person of Jesus, but Jesus promised that you would continue among us in the person of your Spirit, and your Spirit would lift him up and glorify him. So we too glorify you, empowered and enlightened by your Holy Spirit, and I ask that all that we do might honor you not only in our words of praise but in lives offered to you in a sacrifice of praise, through Christ Jesus our Lord, AMEN.

Message

          It truly had to be a fantastic day! The Passover Festival, which we have been studying for the past several weeks, was about to begin in Jerusalem, that center of God’s people since the time of David a thousand years earlier. (We have been in this nation for only a few hundred years.) This city has been their capital. And this event would commemorate for them the central, formative event in Israel’s life – their deliverance from slavery in Egypt which identifies them to this day, their Independence Day and the beginning of their nationhood some 1300 years earlier. They knew the story well, even as every Jew knows the story well today, although nearly 3500 years of history have now intervened. Their national identity and their hope for the future were bound up in this event – God’s deliverance of His people from slavery, and His promises for the future.

          Feelings had been greatly intensified by the current Roman occupation, and Jews from all over the civilized world gathered annually in Jerusalem for this great celebration. The Jewish historian, Josephus, has estimated the crowd at over 2 million, which is probably an exaggeration, but nevertheless hundreds of thousands of Jewish pilgrims had come to this small city (and it was small – it is still not very large today), for the event and patriotic fervor ran high. Some day their Roman overlords too would be overthrown!

          But this year there was another remarkable event unfolding, and it caught the interest of the excited crowd, for a certain miracle-worker (at least), a man named Jesus, who taught with prophetic power and insight and courage, who seemed to have no fear of the authorities, was coming to the Feast. In fact, he was even at this moment staying with a man named Lazarus along with his sisters, a man whom he had actually raised from the dead. Many of the local people had known Lazarus and had no doubt attended the ceremonies marking his death. They were convinced of this man Jesus’ astounding powers, wondering if he might be the one to deliver Israel once again from their current bondage.

          As the man and his disciples descended toward the city from the neighboring Mt. of Olives, Jesus was riding on a donkey’s colt. The people knew their scriptures well, and many recognized in the scene the words of the prophet Zechariah,

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. [Zechariah 9:9]

Those are very specific words by the prophet Zechariah.

          A sizeable crowd, many of whom had come out to see for themselves the man Lazarus whom he had raised from the dead, were met by an even larger crowd from the city, and the whole enthusiastic mob began cheering, “Hosanna!” God saves! “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” And, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”

          Some of the Jewish religious leaders, who distrusted Jesus’ popularity and feared a violent response from the Roman military who could swarm in and crack down on them at any moment, were appalled by this demonstration and urged Jesus to quiet the enthusiastic crowd. But he refused to do so. It was an intense moment. Anything might happen! But what in fact happened was quite curious. As Luke tells us the story, in the midst of the jubilation, Jesus began to weep, and as he looked at the city, he said,

If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace [you think you know, but you don’t know] – but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.

          These are tremendously significant words and help us get to the heart of what this Palm Sunday event was all about! The people were excited and hopeful, but probably most of them thought such a deliverance as they imagined was too good to be true. We wish for a lot of things we don’t really expect to happen. But what these words of Jesus indicate is that in fact this event that they were celebrating truly does mark the day they had anticipated – in Jesus’ own words, “the time of God’s coming to you.” It could have been all they had ever hoped for and more! The great tragedy, however, is that their misunderstanding of this event would result, not in their liberation, but in their destruction. We hear Jesus’ lament through his tears, “If you had only known on this day what would bring you peace . . . .”

          As you and I reflect on this event from the vantage point of two remarkable millennia, I want to be sure that not one of you leaves this place this morning failing to understand, as Jesus said, “what would bring you peace.”

          To understand this, we must first understand what had gone wrong. And God’s word is consistent and clear about what has gone wrong. The very first thing we need to understand is God’s initial love for us, or as your outline in the bulletin states it, “the love of the Father” for His children. The most fundamental thing that every one of us must understand is that God loves us. He says, I don’t even have a reason for it. I just choose to do it. He loves us and He created us uniquely for love. The life and beauty that stirs the whole of His creation is wondrous indeed, but you and I were made uniquely in His image, with a mind and a heart and a spirit corresponding to His. This makes it possible for us to enter into a relationship of true and genuine love with the God who is love in His very character and essence, and the God who has first of all loved us. That is why He made us. That is why we exist.

          The Bible is full of references to this love. The apostle John writes, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” [1 John 3:1] At the very center of the teaching of God’s servant Moses in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, and at the very center of Jesus’ teaching is the call to love God in return, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Our own Westminster Confession states so powerfully that the chief end (the chief purpose) of man is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” This is the Bible’s teaching. This is who we are. We are made for a relationship with God above all.

          It’s everywhere! Psalm 103 says, “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him [those who take him seriously]; . . . As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” I have often interpreted this, as I believe is appropriate, that He knows we’re dust, the dust of the earth – we’re not going to get it perfect, but it also means He remembers that we are made out of dust for the purpose of entering into a relationship with Him. Yes, out of the dust of the earth, God has created a being uniquely shaped and suited to share His love and delight. “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart,” Psalm 37:4 promises.

          But it had all gone horribly wrong. In one of the most poignant passages in the entire Bible, the prophet Hosea (in chapter 11) shares God’s lament that His love for us has not been returned. He picks up the story of His children after their great deliverance and tells us,

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel, the further they went from me. . . .It was I who taught [them] to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them.

Nevertheless, He goes on to say, they began to offer their attention to other gods who had done nothing for them, and they seemed determined to turn away from Him – the God who had rescued them, the God who had cared for them, the God who had loved them through all their fits and starts and failures. They had turned their backs on Him.

          Hosea uses this touching image of the parent holding the hands of his laughing child as he takes his first hesitant steps, and that same parent who later finds himself stunned by his child’s rejection. I poured my heart into these people! Through the prophet Jeremiah, God lifts up another image, that of a lover who gives himself totally to his young bride, only to have her reject him, turn her face away and go off after other lovers who do nothing but abuse her. Hosea himself was called upon to marry such a woman and to continue to call her back into a relationship with himself, because Hosea the prophet was living out the truth of God’s love for His people. “I remember the devotion of your youth,” he writes, “how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert.” Then he cries out, “Return, faithless people, . . . for I am your husband. I will choose you.” A bit further on He reveals himself as a father, “How gladly would I treat you like sons and give you desirable land, the most beautiful inheritance.” [Jeremiah 2 & 3] You are my firstborn. I love you.

          But as deeply hurt as God is by our rejection, He is still God, and He is not helpless. And here we begin to understand the steps that God determined to take to accomplish what He set out to do in the beginning in loving us. What He does involves judgment and grace, but we must understand that judgment and grace are inextricably linked. This will become more evident if we see them in the context of this compelling love.

          Is God a wrathful God as we so often observe when we speak of His judgment? We project our own selfishness on God when we condemn Him for being judgmental, but we must understand that this judgment grows not only out of His deep and essential concern for what is right, it grows also (this becomes very personal at this point) out of His deep love for us. God’s judgment comes from His love? Oh, yes. Because, you see, God, in His passion for those He loves, absolutely sets His face against anything that would interfere or break that bond. The wrath of God against sin is at its heart His zeal to protect and to restore His love relationship with us, and to avenge that relationship when it is broken. You had better believe God intends to act when sin rears its ugly head in our lives. He is not going to overlook it, and the reason He is not going to overlook it is because He loves us, and He is going to do away with anything that comes between us. He will do everything in His power to deal with that sin, precisely so that it will not finally destroy our relationship to Him. If He is able to deal successfully with the sin which separates us from Him, then He will be able once again to offer us His amazing grace. But the judgment precedes and makes possible the grace.

          Now, in a moment, we are going to see precisely what Jesus was talking about when he lamented that we had failed to see what would have brought us peace. But to understand it fully, we need to look for a moment at those few verses we read earlier from Exodus 13. Remember we have been saying all along that the whole gospel story is contained in the story of Exodus. Well, here in the 13^th chapter God spends a good deal of time talking about the Firstborn, and this, of course, follows on the heels of that last plague of judgment on the Egyptians where all their firstborn sons were killed while God’s angel of death “passed over” the Israelite firstborn.

          In ancient cultures, the firstborn son represented all the offspring of the family. This involved both privilege and responsibility. He was privileged to receive his father’s first and fullest blessing, but he was also obligated to represent his brothers and sisters in upholding the covenant with a new generation. So either judgment or grace would fall particularly upon the firstborn son as the representative of the entire family. If you understand this, it helps to explain why God’s judgment fell upon the firstborn sons of Egypt, and why the firstborn sons of Israel were spared. It will also help us understand the role of the firstborn son of God. Each represented an entire generation.

          With that in mind, let’s go back to what was happening on that Passover occasion we call Palm Sunday. Stop and think with me. What role did Jesus Christ have in God’s family? Well, as the one whom the Scriptures call “the only-begotten son of God,” he was God’s true firstborn son. And in that role, he represents all of us to the Father.

          If you have your Bible, turn with me to the New Testament book of Colossians and keep your Bible open to that. This is a marvelous passage, and it’s going to put these pieces together for us. Listen to this powerful description of the person of Jesus. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn [there’s that word] over all creation.” (Not, by the way, the firstborn of creation. Jehovah’s Witnesses miss the point here. He was not the firstborn of creation, for he was not created. As the Nicene Creed says, “Begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” So he is not the firstborn of creation, but rather God’s firstborn, who is now over all of God’s creation.) And then verse 16 goes on to say,

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church [now he is the firstborn among us, you see]; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

          All right, we are going to look a little bit further, but here we have the ultimate firstborn, and he represents all of us before the Father. And here He is, on Palm Sunday, our elder brother. Being one with the Father and yet as Mary’s firstborn, one also with us, He is in an utterly unique position to represent us in the restoration of a broken relationship with God our Father. Our sin has alienated us from the great love of the Father, but the King’s firstborn son, the Prince if you will, hailed here on Palm Sunday as the coming King, has come precisely for the purpose of reconciling us, making peace with the Father. “If only you had known what would bring you peace . . .”

          Ah, Jesus says on the way to the Passover celebration, if only you had known. But you have failed to recognize that what you see is God Himself among you, your loving Father, who has come among you to accomplish that peace. And what He has come to do is powerfully stated in those last verses from Colossians 1:19 ff. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [in this firstborn, the only begotten son, walking among us], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven [how does this peace come about?], by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

          Do you remember that grand prophecy from Isaiah which we always quote at Christmas, celebrating the birth of the Messiah? Who is this and why has he come? “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, . . . And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” He’s the king, he’s the prince. He walks among us, and yet he transcends us. He is the One uniquely equipped to reunite us with our Creator. Well, the Prince of Peace has come among us on this first Palm Sunday, but for God’s firstborn to bring us peace, he will have to pay the price of peace – and that will be his blood shed on the cross, the atoning sacrifice for our sins represented earlier by the Passover lamb the Jews were about to sacrifice on this very occasion.

          You remember, the judgment must precede the grace, for in order to restore the relationship of love, he must eliminate whatever has interfered with that love. The wages of sin is death, and, therefore, as the firstborn, our representative before the Father, he will have to pay the penalty for our sins before we can be reconciled to the Father, we his family.

          Some of you may still be thinking, “But why? Why can’t God the Father simply forgive us? Why does He demand this payment in blood?” You must understand that a debt may not be forgiven without someone paying the debt. To simply forgive when a debt is still owed is not at all just. If you are in a dispute with your neighbor because you cannot afford to repay $10,000 he has loaned to you, and I come along and tell you that your debt has been forgiven, your neighbor is going to be rather upset with me and with you as well. No, if I take it upon myself to forgive your debt, then what must I do? I must take it upon myself as well to make the payment for your debt. Only then can I forgive you. And you cannot be reconciled with your neighbor until I do.

          And it is this which God has done for us. Our rejection of God’s love for us must, by its very nature, be a mortal sin, for we cannot live without the God who has breathed His life into us, the dust of the earth. So, in order to pay that debt and restore our relationship, God, in the person of His firstborn son, representing both him and us, offers His own life as the sacrificial penalty to pay the debt incurred by our sin. Once the debt is paid, the relationship may be restored.

          But Jesus’ concern on that first Palm Sunday is that few of God’s children understood what was taking place, and perhaps even fewer cared. The offer of love could now be extended once again, but love . . . ah, love, it’s a voluntary thing, is it not? It may not be forced upon us. The offer of love could now be extended once again, but love is always voluntary. Our peace with God was being purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ, but the responsibility to accept that love on God’s terms was ours once again. As C. S. Lewis pointed out about God’s love in his classic book The Screwtape Letters, “he cannot ravish, he can only woo.” It is the nature of love. God will not force himself upon us. He can only love us and invite us to love Him in return. And if we do not understand that, that peace will never be achieved, that reconciliation will never be accomplished.

          So while the peace has been purchased by Christ on the cross, we must each decide whether we will or will not accept and return that love. And this is where that passage in Colossians about the reconciliation brought about by the firstborn son of God ends. Verses 21-23, look again:

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation – if [and here are our terms for peace, verse 23, this will all be true for you “if”] you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.

          In other words, the marvelous restoration of our relationship with the God who loves us has now been made possible by the payment in blood of our elder brother, Jesus. Now nothing stands between him and us. Past, present, even future sin has been paid for on the cross in the blood of Jesus. What is left, the only thing left, is our choice to learn what it means to love God back. If we are willing to do that, willing to accept God’s embrace if you will, then everything is ours, for we become His children and heirs, the apostle says in Romans. If we refuse, if we continue to seek our own way, as His people did then, then Jesus’ tears on that first Palm Sunday are for us. If you had only known what would bring you peace.

Closing prayer – Wow, Father, there is so much happening on this Palm Sunday. We see the celebration and we want to join in it, but we need to know what is going on. It is very sobering. What’s going on is that we have rejected your love and a great price, the price of your own blood has to be paid for that. What’s going on is that this has in fact been accomplished, and now your arms are open to us once again. Nothing is standing in between, sin and death having been defeated. Nevertheless, by its very nature love requires that we return to you. Oh, Father, on this Palm Sunday draw our hearts back to you once again, through Christ Jesus, your firstborn, our Redeemer, AMEN.