As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, ‘Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her. Untie them and bring them to me.3 If anyone says anything to you, say that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.’
4 This took place to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet:
5 ‘Say to Daughter Zion,
“See, your king comes to you,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”’6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them. 7 They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’
‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’
‘Hosanna in the highest heaven!’
10 When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, ‘Who is this?’
11 The crowds answered, ‘This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.’
12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the benches of those selling doves. 13 ‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘“My house will be called a house of prayer,” but you are making it “a den of robbers.”’
14 The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. 15 But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David,’ they were indignant.
16 ‘Do you hear what these children are saying?’ they asked him.
‘Yes,’ replied Jesus, ‘have you never read,
‘“From the lips of children and infants
you, Lord, have called forth your praise”?’17 And he left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night.
Sometimes God doesn’t give us what we want. He gives us what we need. I’ll give you an example.
Carol and I used to believe that God wanted us to serve him in my home area, in and around Sunderland. Until the Bishop of Jarrow called me in to say there was no job up there for me at the end of my accuracy. And that was a real shock to us, and made me realise that maybe what I thought God wanted, was really just I wanted.
So I began to pray “Lord, show me where to go, I’ll go anywhere.” And just to prove it I briefly looked at a job on the Falkland Islands, which came with its own Land Rover, but Carol said it was too far away.
So I prayed, “Lord, anywhere in the UK, except London” oh, and one other place, more about that later. But I couldn’t find a job, until one day my training vicar said, “Hey Barry, this job would be perfect for you” and showed me an advert for a job… in London. And guess what, I got it. And it was a great job. Not what I wanted, but just what I needed.
Eight years passed. And then it was time to look for a new job. And that brings me back to the other place I told God I don’t want to go: Worcestershire.
Anyway, just to prove I’ve learned my lesson, I’ve added three more places to my “never want to work there” list: New Zealand. Hawaii & Tahiti. They all sound dreadful. Though let’s face it, after a week of lockdown, being outside anywhere at the moment, seems appealing. The moral of the story is “Don’t say no to God,” Because he gives us what we need, Not what we want.
I wonder if you noticed the needs and wants in our Bible reading? Or were you just worrying whether the crowds welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem, were practising social distancing?
Now I reckon our passage could be called a “tale of two mashups”. In the music business, a mashup is where you take two existing songs and mix them together to form something new. So for example, at a carol service you might sing While Shepherds Watched their flocks by night, to the tune of On Ilkley Moore ‘bar Tat – it does work – and it sounds great! Or if you’re into rap music, how about this: Rapper Biggie Smalls Feat singing along to The theme music from Thomas the Tank Engine. Really! Watch…[warning, the full video has some pretty foul language so be aware if you go looking for it]
So our passage has two mashups of significant parts of Israel’s history which help reveal first, what the crowd want, and second what the crowd need.
1)What the crowd want.
Do you remember as Jesus came up the road, the crowd laid down cloaks for him? Why do you think they did that? Simple: they wanted rid of their Roman puppet king Herod, and they knew the story from 2Kings 9 of how the Prophet Elisha had got rid of a dreadful king called Ahab, by anointing Jehu as king of Israel and the people welcomed Jehu with trumpets, and shouts of “Jehu is king!” and laid down their cloaks for him to walk on.
The Palm Branches are something similar. Much as they hated Herod, the people hated the Roman occupying army that even more. And they remembered how 200 years before a Jew called Judas Maccabees had led a violent revolt not against the Romans but against a Greek occupying army. And when he arrived in Jerusalem on a great white war horse, the people carpeted the road with palm branches.
That’s what the crowd want: To them, Jesus is a mashup of Jehu and Judas Maccabees, and let’s throw in a dash of King David too – who wrote the
blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”
psalm they’re all singing. It’s all about violent revolution and national pride, because we all know that self-determination fixes everything.
What about our second mashup?
2) What the crowd need.
It starts with that quote from the prophet Zechariah about a king riding a donkey. Not a great war horse, a donkey. This king is humble, not a conqueror but a servant. And look at who Jesus serves – v14 – not the high priests and temple authorities, but outcasts: the blind and the lame. And you’ll not be surprised to hear that there’s a historical link here too. 2Samuel 5 tells of how David conquered Jerusalem: at the time it was considered such an impregnable fortress that its occupants boasted to him that even an army of blind and lame people could defend it. And after David captured the city, a tradition grew up that the blind and lame could not come into it, especially the temple. Yet here’s Jesus welcoming them, and healing them.
And he’s welcoming them into a temple that is no longer offering sacrifice. For hundreds of years sacrifice had been offered there hour by hour, day by day. But when Jesus drove out the animal sellers and money changers – who were exploiting the pilgrims to make money – that long tradition of sacrifice would have ground to a temporary halt. And 35 years later, God brought it to a permanent halt by allowing a Roman army to destroy the Temple completely. Sometimes God puts a stop to our most cherished traditions, because he’s got something better for us! Not the performance of ritual for God, but relationship with God!
But the crowds and the temple authorities and high priests can’t see it. They’re too focused on who they want Jesus to be, to see who he really is: A humble servant king who has come to bring judgement on their most cherished religious practices, and to bring them to God, where there’s hope and rescue and healing for outcasts. But they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see their desperate need for God. Because they were so focused on what they wanted.
And then Jesus leaves town. Did you notice that at the end of the reading?
He left and went out of the city to Bethany, where he spent the night.” (Matthew 21:17)
Jesus came, he saw, and he left. To find a hotel room. This really is the second time in Jesus’ life where there was no room at the inn. At Passover time, half a million pilgrims descend on Jerusalem – you can’t get a bed for love or money – so rather than storming the Palace [Hotel], Jesus and his friends head a few miles back down the road to Bethany, not conquerors, but pilgrims… tourists. And the crowds are left deflated, ripe to turn on him a few days later.
So what are we meant to learn from these two mashups? Two things.
1) God gives us what we really need
We all know that, what we need and what we want, aren’t the same thing. If my kids choose the food when we go shopping, I know it’ll not be a healthy nutritious diet. It’ll be brown and wrapped in purple paper with Cadbury’s written on it. What we need and what we want aren’t the same thing.
In our passage, the crowd want a conqueror to defeat the Romans by force of arms. But God didn’t give them what they wanted. Instead he gave them what they needed: a Saviour who defeated Rome by the force of love. And we’re more like those crowds than we like to admit.
We’re designed for intimate relationship with God. It’s only in him that we’ll find true peace, and joy, hope and contentment.. But because our relationship with God has been all bent out of shape by the mess we’re in and the mess the world is in, we don’t go to him for peace and joy and hope and contentment. Instead we try to find them in on our work, in escapist pleasure, in wealth, in music and art, in sex and drugs, and chocolate. CS Lewis, author of the Narnia books, put it this way,
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too easily pleased.”[1]
And because we are far too easily pleased, we miss out on what God truly has for us.
You see, our greatest need is not the list of ten things we want, Even if one of them is loo roll. Our greatest need is God himself, Offered to us through Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s who we really need.
2) when God denies us what we want, maybe what we want is the problem.
When it comes to church, we all have things we like. Traditions. Practices. Musical and liturgical preferences. It could be modern stuff. It could be old stuff. The key thing is, it’s our stuff. And just like the crowds in the story we justify our stuff, by appealing to parts of the Bible as well as history and tradition.
But just because we can find spiritual-sounding reasons for doing the things we want to do, doesn’t mean they’re what God wants us to do. And sometimes the way God deals with that, is by taking away what we want, to force us to think about what we really need. I do wonder if one of the reasons God is be putting us through lockdown at the moment – breaking up our cherished practices and services – is to challenge us to think about what we really want and need? It could also be that he wants us to stop taking some aspects of church for granted.
Remember the old Joni Mitchell song, Big Yellow Taxi?
don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til its gone?”
Well maybe lockdown is meant to provoke us to long for what we’re missing? Some of you have spoken to me of how much you miss communion. We all do. But doing it online is not holy communion as the Bible understands it.
Holy Communion is a fellowship meal where we come together as people and receive spiritual nourishment as we proclaim the Lord’s death by doing what Jesus told us to do: drinking from the one cup and eating from the one bread.
And you can’t do that over the internet. And you can’t do that isolated at home. Yes you can eat bread and wine at home. Of course you can. But the Bible tells us the blessing of communion is received when we come together and share in the common cup and a common loaf. The blessing comes to the individual, but it is a blessing that is only received when we come together in community. So maybe we’re being denied it at the moment, to make us long for that spiritual blessing, and that fellowship all the more? I just throw that out there for you to ponder.
And I want you also to know that next weekend, Easter, we’ll be providing you with some prayers you can pray yourself which give vent to some of the emotions and longing you feel over not being able to receive communion, a service of spiritual communion, if you like. We’ll tell you more about that, next week.
So as we approach this rather unusual Easter, let’s resolve to come humbly and gently before God, and lay aside our wants, agendas and passions, and embrace what we truly need, the king, riding on a donkey, who by dying and rising for us, gives us the best thing ever, intimate relationship with God himself. To Jesus be glory forever! Amen!
[1] Lewis, CS, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses