I suspect that most of you enjoy celebrating holidays! And for good reason, holidays usually entail a host delightful activities: decadent decorations, a couple of days off work, a family gathering, a festive feast of flavorful foods, a lavish level of leftovers, and some kind of customary commemorative celebration. What isn’t there to like about holidays?
Now I still cherish holidays today, but I especially treasured them when I was a kid. My siblings and I always enjoyed making homemade decorations weeks ahead of time. I would feel invigorated by the appetizing aromas wafting from our mother’s kitchen. And I would be overwhelmed with excitement at the anticipation of my uncles, aunts, and cousins coming to celebrate with us! What is your favorite holiday?
Of all of the holidays my family celebrated, Passover was always my favorite. I suppose that is not a great surprise coming from someone who grew up in a large Jewish family like mine. Passover is the most important holiday of the whole in the Hebrew calendar. It is the day set aside to remember the Exodus when God used Moses to deliver our people from 400 years of slavery in Egypt. A few days before the Passover, my mother and sister would begin cleaning the whole house and my father and I would always select an unblemished one-year old lamb from our herd to be slaughtered for the main portion of our Passover meal.
Then, on the day of Passover, our whole family would gather for the feast and we would eat the lamb along with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. The bread was unleavened to remind us about how our ancestors had to flee Egypt in hast and the bitter herbs were dipped in salt water to remind us of the torment and tears our people endured in slavery. My father would sit at the head of the table, raise a cup of wine, and begin to retell the Exodus story by asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights.” As my father told the story, us kids would dress up and act it out. It was usually a pretty big production for a small town family. Then after dinner, we would all walk to the temple to worship God together. O how I loved those Passover holidays!
One Particular Passover Preparation (1-3)
Today I would like to tell you the story of my most memorable Passover ever. I was only about 10 years old, but I remember the it distinctly. The Passover feast was to be celebrated on a Thursday that year and the preparations were to begin on the previous Sunday morning. After we finished breakfast, my father told me to walk out the pasture and begin looking for an unblemished yearling lamb that we could slaughter for the Passover feast; he would come and find me after he finished some other chores in the barn. I loved the smell of the spring grass as I meandered into the meadow, and began grazing among the lambs.
We lived in the little village of Bethphage at the foot of the Mount of Olives. We were primarily date farmers, but we also raised some sheep, lambs, and other livestock. We also had a couple of donkeys that we used to pull the carts during the date harvest.
As I searched for the perfect lamb, I noticed two men approaching our donkeys which happened to be tied to a tree on the far side of the pasture. I thought the men were trying to steal them so I ran toward them and yelled for my father. But as I approached them, I realized that they were not trying to steal them at all; they had rather perplexed looks on their faces. In somewhat sheepish voices, they said, “Shalom, young man…this probably isn’t going to make any sense to you, but our Master sent us here to acquire a donkey for his entry into Jerusalem.”
As they explained this, I was relieved to see my father coming over the knoll. He calmly asked them who their Master was and they replied, “Jesus, the Lord.” When my father heard the name Jesus, he asked no more questions and immediately untied our old jenny and her young colt, who we had named Samson. He handed them the reigns and said, “May these beasts of burden be used for the Lord’s service.”
Even though we had never seen Jesus, we, along with many other people, believed that he was the promised Messiah. We had heard about all of his miraculous signs that he performed in Galilee and just a few weeks earlier, in our neighboring village of Bethany, he raised a man named Lazarus from the dead. Who but the Messiah could do these things?
As the men walked away, my father told me to go back to the house and tell my mother and siblings that we are going to Jerusalem.
A Prophetic Parade (4-11)
My mother gathered my siblings and we headed west along the Jericho road. When we came around the big bend, we saw a huge caravan of people walking toward Jerusalem. By the time we caught up with them, we had already passed through Bethany and were just outside the walls of the Holy City. The people inside the city must have heard that Jesus was coming because hundreds, maybe even thousands of people came out of the city gate to meet him. And just as Moses had parted the Red Sea, the crowd separated into two sides and formed a perfect walkway for a parade.
When we joined the crowd, we saw the disciples take off their cloaks and place them on our donkeys. Other people laid their cloaks on the ground cut palm branches and began to wave them with patriotic fervor and everyone started shouting and singing, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest heaven.” For those of you who may not speak Hebrew, the word “hosanna” is an expression of praise that means “save now.” By shouting this, the crowd was proclaiming Jesus to be the long awaited Messiah who was going to liberate our people from Roman oppression and restore the kingdom of David.
Amidst all of the pleas for a display of political power and military might, I was shocked to see Jesus gently mount the young colt and ride him through the parade. If this was supposed to be a royal procession where Jesus took up his rightful position as King of Israel, it was all wrong. He should have been riding a great war-horse, a strong white stallion, which would have symbolized his true power and authority. A colt of a donkey, especially one that had never been ridden before, made Jesus look clumsy, meek, and gentle! Our beast of burden was in no way worthy of a king’s coronation.
My father must have seen the bewilderment on my face. He smiled with wisdom and softly whispered in my ear, “Son, long ago the prophet Zechariah foretold, ‘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.’” And as we entered the city, the whole place stirred and people kept asking, “Who is this?” Other’s shouted back, “This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee!”
As I contemplated everything I saw and heard, I remember thinking, “Just what kind of Messiah is this Jesus?” I had always thought that the Messiah would reclaim the throne of David, amass a mighty army, overthrow the Romans, and take back our land, but as I watched Jesus ride on the gentle donkey and heard the shouts of hosanna and pondered Zechariah’s prophecy, I began to realize that Jesus was not the kind of Messiah that I thought he would be. But if he didn’t come to liberate us from political, military, social, or economic oppression, what was his plan?
The Tantrum in the Temple (12-17)
Well, what happened next gave me more of a clue. Jesus paraded through the crowd of people and proceeded through the city gate until he reached the temple courts. When he saw how the merchants set up shop in the temple and how they were taking advantage of the tourists who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, his face flushed red with righteous rage and he ripped through the temple and overturned the tables of the money changers and tipped the benches of those selling birds for sacrifices. He shouted, “My house will be called a house of prayer, you have turned it into a den of robbers!” He spoke with such authority that the merchants ran off and left their things behind.
After everything calmed down, a multitude of disabled people came up to Jesus and asked to be healed. One by one, the blind and the lame walked away healed. It was an incredible sight to behold. When I saw this, I knew that all of the other stories that I had heard about his miracles were true.
To celebrate all of the wonderful things Jesus did, a group of children formed a circle around Jesus and began singing, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” I instantly wanted to go with them, and when I looked at my father, he motioned for me to take my younger siblings and join the choir. As I looked at Jesus and the adults around us, their faces were filled with joy and delight. That is, everyone except the chief priests and teachers of the law who came to investigate the commotion—their faces were fraught with fury and indignation. One of them interrupted our song by asking Jesus, “Do you hear what these children are saying?” Jesus simply smiled and responded, “Have you not read the Psalm: From the lips of children and infants, you, Lord, have called forth your praise.”
Everyone began to laugh at the irony of Jesus asking the teachers of the law if they had read the Holy Scriptures. Of course they had, but they completely missed their point. By this, Jesus was saying that he was the Lord! With that, we all burst into song again but Jesus and his disciples slipped off back toward the village of Bethany. And when we arrived home later that night, we found both of our donkeys tied to the same tree where that morning.
Epilogue
Throughout that whole Passover week, I had a lot on my mind. I had wanted to meet Jesus for a long time, but after everything I had experienced that day, almost all of my expectations about him had been shattered. At first, amid all of the shouts of hosanna, the laying of the cloaks, and the waving of palm branches, I was so disappointed to see him ride my little colt. What should have been a triumphal entry seemed more like a tragic entry into Jerusalem. I realized that he was not the political organizer or military warlord that I was hoping for. But when I watched him chase the money changers from the temple courts and stand up to the chief priests and teachers of the law, I recognized that he was not some puny pushover either.
It was all so confusing at first, but when I started to put the clues together, it began to make sense. The missing pieces were found in the prophecies! Yes, that was it. Why did Jesus ride on a donkey? Why did he charge the money changers with turning his house of prayer into a den of robbers? Why did he tell the chief priests that the Lord called forth praise from the lips of children? Because all of these fulfilled prophecies pointed to the fact that Jesus was not only the Messiah and the Son of David, but he was also the Son of God. And that explained why he could perform all of the miraculous signs.
Jesus was exactly the kind of Messiah and king that God always wanted him to be. He wasn’t going to conform to mine or anyone else’s expectations of who or what he should be. He didn’t come to the earth to fulfill some political or military mission; he came to fulfill the spiritual mission that his Father gave him. And he proved that a few days later by going to the cross to suffer and die to pay the penalty for our sins. Can you imagine that—the Son of God would willingly be crucified for sinners like you and me?
I guess that is why I wanted to share my story with you today. All of this happened many years ago and I am much older now, but unfortunately, so many people still misunderstand who Jesus is and why he came to earth. Jesus is both meek and mighty! He is filled with holiness and humility! He is ferocious and forgiving! He is indignant toward the arrogant but kindhearted to the humble.
Jesus is not a good moral teacher! He is not a wise religious guru. He is not some kind of political advocate or social activist. He is the prophet from the Podunk town of Nazareth in Galilee, but make no mistake: he is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords!
He did not come to set up a physical kingdom on earth! He did not come to promote a political position or to establish some social structure or to push some economic program! He did not come to conform to our expectations of who we think he should be! He came to pay the penalty for our sins by dying on the cross! He came to make a way for us to enter his eternal kingdom in heaven! Indeed, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!