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110417am Palm Sunday
So why did Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a donkey? He wanted to show that he was the king promised in the OT Scriptures: See, your king comes to you, gentle and riding on a donkey. It's quite simple:
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God's love: God created everything and he loves us. He is the rightful king of the universe, and of your life and mine. He made us to have eternal life with him. We have a purpose here, the universe has a purpose, which is to be the way God made it to be, a place of beauty and order and wonder, of awesome immensity and mind-boggling smallness – and we have been put here to have our minds boggled by it, and to live in it as it was meant to be. The world was made good.
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Our sin: we rebelled against God. We want to be king of our own lives. Time and again we have done and said and thought things that are against what God says. We have shut the king out of his own world. You have shut God out of your life. In ourselves, we can't have eternal life. We are so used to the mess of the world and the mess our lives and our relationships and our own innermost being gets into that it's hard to imagine it any other way. We think sin is natural – but it's not. It merits God's judgement.
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Christ's cross: instead of coming against us as an enemy, God comes to us as a friend. It started with God calling the Jews to be his own people, and time and again in his dealings with them he showed something of what his judgement is like, allowing them to reap some of the consequences of what they sowed. Yet he kept having mercy on them, and eventually Jesus came, God' own Son. He came to Jerusalem on a donkey to show that he came in peace – and his enemies killed him on a cross. He died for all of us, to make amends on our behalf for all the evil in the world, all the bad things in your life. Instead of allowing us to take the consequences, he took them on himself. And by raising him from the dead God demonstrated his love for his creation. He showed that our rebellion doesn't have the last word, creation and the human race is not lost, it's redeemed. Christ died and rose as our representative – much as a head of state signs a peace treaty as representative of a whole nation, Christ did this for the whole human race.
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Our response: we have to stop shutting him out of our lives and welcome him in, to be our friend and our king. Baptism stands for washing away all the wrong we ever do and belonging to him. When we believe in him he sends his Spirit to live in us, and help us to be good, like Jesus. We have to step into and live in the peace for which he shed his blood. The Christian task in the world is to bring every sphere of life under the kingship of God.
A donkey is not an impressive war horse, it's a humble creature. As Jesus came humbly to you in peace, you have to get down off your high horse and humbly admit your sins, believe in him, and commit your life to him. The leaders of nations, and of global corporations, have to get down off their high horse and admit that Jesus is the true king. All the peoples of the world have to bow the knee and confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, as Paul says.
As we recall the events of Holy Week and Easter, I hope we can let these four themes resonate deeply in our hearts. God's love: can you see and sense the immensely powerful love of God for everything he has made? Our sin: can you feel and know the terrible depths to which we have sunk – and not just pointing the finger at other people, but at ourselves? Christ's Cross: can you look again at the lengths he went to as our representative, taking the whole weight of the sin and suffering of the whole world, willingly and lovingly – your sin, my sin, your guilt, your griefs – giving himself up to death at our hands? Will you next week look again at the most explosive miracle in history, Christ's conquering death – not just his own but yours, the death of all of us? And Our Response: can you look again at how you must bow the knee to him, how he must be king of your life, and how he summons the whole world to be his?
All of this is represented in his attitude, coming on a donkey, gentle, coming as our friend, on our side, for our good, with our best interests at heart.
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