Awaiting Easter

Luke 19

Introduction: Palm Sunday is the day in our church calendar that marks the beginning of the Passion Week of Christ. Why, you may ask, is it called ‘Passion Week?’ Certainly the Lord Jesus was not involved with lust or evil desire in the way the word ‘passion’ is most commonly used in the Scriptures and in our vocabulary.
The expression ‘Passion Week’ is a reference to Christ’s suffering during the week that led up to His crucifixion and resurrection. If we were reading from the Authorized Version of the Bible this morning, we would find the word ‘passion’ in Acts 1:3 where Luke is writing about the Lord Jesus presenting Himself alive after His ‘passion’, i.e., after His suffering and death on the cross. I don’t suppose any of us use the word passion for suffering today, but in days of old, that was how it was used. And we don’t want to be ignorant of our church history and traditions, do we? Of course not! 
So, Palm Sunday is the beginning of the week that culminates in the Lord Jesus’ death on the cross and His placement in the tomb. As a symbol, the ‘palm’ of Palm Sunday certainly gave no hints to what the week would hold for our Savior, the Lord Jesus. In fact, the ‘palm’ as a symbol stands in stark contrast to three other symbols that figure prominently in the unfolding of this momentous week.
In our time together in the Word this morning, I want us to look at these four symbols and see how they capture perfectly for us the importance of this day and the Sunday that follows, Easter.
For some days are more important than others, aren’t they. And if our days could be filled with joy and peace and hope, we would mark them out in our memories as important days, days to be remembered, days to be savored, days to be reported to our friends and shared with our loved ones. If our days were marked by more confidence and less depression, more patience and less anger, more mercy and less judgement, more forgiveness and less revenge, more sensitivity toward others and less focus upon ourselves, more trust in God and less frustration with the way things turn out… we’d have quite a story to tell, wouldn’t we?
Palm Sunday and the Passion Week that follows are marked by four symbols that point us toward the things that make for important days, for memorable days, for life changing days, and I invite you to join me this morning toward those ends.
The first of our four symbols is the palm. We find John making reference to it in his Gospel account of the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. John 12:12-16 reads like this:
“On the next day (now five days before the Passover, according to John 12:1) the large crowd who had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took the branches of the palm trees and went out to meet Him, and began to shout, ‘Hosanna! BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD, even the King of Israel.’
Jesus, finding a young donkey, sat on it; as it is written, ‘FEAR NOT, DAUGHTER OF ZION; BEHOLD, YOUR KING IS COMING, SEATED ON A DONKEY'S COLT.’ These things His disciples did not understand at the first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things to Him.” (John 12:12-16)
The palm, as a symbol in the Scriptures, always represented joy. It was a symbol of gladness and exultation. The Old Testament city of Jericho was known as the City of Palms. When the children of Israel came out of Egypt and finished their excursion in the terrible wilderness, the first city they came to in the Promised Land was the city of Jericho. It was the first city they captured and always represented the first fruits of God’s gift to them of a marvelous homeland. When it was captured, there was great joy in the nation!
When King David’s daughter was born, he was so filled with joy he named her ‘Tamar’, the Hebrew word for palm. In Revelation 7:9, the great multitude that surrounds the throne of God is made up of people wearing white robes and holding palm branches, and the text tells us they are full of great joy. Knowing what the palm stands for, we are not surprised they are holding palm branches.
So on the day that King Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, the people rejoice in His arrival with palm branches. This is a great day! This is a marvelous day. This is a day to commemorate and celebrate!
We may want to ask, “So what was the big deal?” Knowing our Bibles as we do, we know that this was the very day that the prophet Daniel had predicted that the Lord would ride His donkey into the city of Jerusalem.
Johnny Hart, in his comic strip “B.C.”, communicated this truth a year or two ago in this way. (See power point slides)
Luke, in his Gospel, had said, “When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace!” (Luke 19:41-42) That little phrase, ‘in this day’, or ‘on this day’, is a crucial phrase. That day, the day that the Lord Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt, is actually a Monday, Monday, March 30, 33 A.D.
How do we know that this day is this date and why is it important? If we go back to Johnny Hart’s Daniel, Daniel 9, we find a clue that gives us some understanding of what Jesus was saying.
Dan 9:20-25 “Now while I (Daniel) was speaking and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God in behalf of the holy mountain of my God, while I was still speaking in prayer, then the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision previously, came to me in my extreme weariness about the time of the evening offering. He gave me instruction and talked with me and said,
‘O Daniel, I have now come forth to give you insight with understanding. At the beginning of your supplications the command was issued, and I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed; so give heed to the message and gain understanding of the vision.’”
Now these next two verses are key, verses 24 and 25. It is from understanding their meaning that we define the date of Monday, March 30, 33 A.D. We can know the very date that Jesus rode into Jerusalem from understanding the time-table that Daniel is given here by the angel Gabriel.
(Daniel 9:24-25) “‘Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place.
So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.’”
Now there are 70 weeks or, literally, 70 sevens in verse 24. There are 69 weeks or 69 sevens in verse 25 – 7 sevens and 62 sevens. This morning we are primarily concerned with the first 69 sevens referenced in verse 25. These 69 sevens are a time frame with a definite beginning and a definite ending.
The beginning, according to our text, is a date on which a decree is issued to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. The ending is a date on which the Anointed One, the ruler, comes.
See again how verse 25 states it? “So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks…”
So, if we could know the beginning date, we could figure out the ending date. And we do know the beginning date. It is March 5, 444 B.C. This is the date that Nehemiah went in to see the King and Queen and got permission to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. (Nehemiah 2:5) Now if we use the King’s decree date, March 5, 444 B.C., and we add 69 sevens worth of years… Daniel’s 7 sevens and his 62 sevens, totaling 483 years…
And if we convert those 483 years into days… understanding that a prophetic year had 360 days in it, we come to 173,880 days. If we add those days through the centuries to March 5, 444 B.C., we arrive at March 30, 33 A.D. That was the very day the Lord Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a colt, all the while being hailed as the king.
Daniel 9:26 says, “After the 62 sevens, the Anointed One, the Messiah, will be cut off and will have nothing.” In fact, 4 days after riding into Jerusalem, the King, the Lord Jesus, was “cut off”, that is, crucified on Friday, April 3, 33 A.D.
(My source for all these calculations is the Ph.D. dissertation of Dr. Harold Hoehner, done at Cambridge University, published the year he graduated as “Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ”.) The point I want us to understand this morning is that the Lord Jesus arrived in Jerusalem right-on-time! And what a day that very day was!! No wonder there was great joy in the city!
So the symbol of the palm branches conveyed the joy of God bringing His plan for all the ages to completion right on time, according to His own very accurate time-table, right to the very day, just as the angel Gabriel had said to Daniel hundreds of years before.
What all this means to us on this Palm Sunday is that if God is a part of our lives, every day is full of meaning! Every day is just one slice of God’s eternal plan that will come to pass. I’ve told you about Mr. Arnold Beckman, the inventor of the pH meter. A research chemist friend of his needed to know how to measure acidity in lemon juice. Arnold Beckman was inducted into the Inventors’ Hall of Fame in 1987 for this meter. His philosophy: “I tried to make the most I could of each day.”
If Mr. Beckman thought each day was a day of opportunity, of importance, then surely we know who God should too! If God is a part of our lives, then each day has meaning – no matter what happens – and we can rejoice in the knowledge that He is accomplishing His purposes, for His glory, for all eternity! Well did the psalmist write, “This is the day which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Ps. 118:24)
Helen Keller rejoiced with great joy on the day that Annie Sullivan arrived in her home to be her tutor. At 19 months of age Keller fell ill with a high fever. When the fever passed, it took with it both her hearing and her sight. Unable to communicate in a world that only confused her now, she became known for violent rages. She would kick, bite, and pinch family members and had a track record of breaking things. Family friends encouraged her parents to put her in an insane asylum where she might be controlled.
Helen’s parents refused that option and began looking for a tutor. It was a long search; but by the time Helen Keller was 7, they had found the perfect candidate. Annie Sullivan was a partly blind, 24 year old teacher, and she began to teach Helen a touch-based version of American Sign Language so that Keller could begin to communicate. By spelling out words in the palm of Helen’s hand, Annie taught her how to identify objects, spell, read, and most importantly, how to communicate with other people. There are many interesting facts from Helen Keller’s life that we could share this morning, but one of the most significant ones is that she would graduate cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904.
Helen Keller would later say, “The day Annie Sullivan arrived in our home was the most important day of my life.” Surely a day of rejoicing, especially in hindsight!
The special nature of Palm Sunday helps us understand how important every day is in the grand purposes of God. Rejoice!
The second symbol of Passion Week is a cup. For after the glory and the joy of Palm Sunday, we next find the Lord Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane talking with His heavenly Father about a cup. The cup will be a symbol of suffering. Luke mentions the cup in 22:39-44. “And He came out and proceeded as was His custom to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples also followed Him. When He arrived at the place, He said to them, ‘Pray that you may not enter into temptation.’ And He withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and He knelt down and began to pray, saying, ‘Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done.’ Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him. And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.”
Now this experience in the garden takes place on Thursday after the triumphal entry on Monday. Monday had been a pivotal day in history; Thursday would be a day in the valley. For Biblical writers, what was significant about the cup was its contents. In many cases, the cup’s contents were a blessing. From the cup would come life-sustaining liquid; from it would come a thirst quencher; a shared cup was a sign of fellowship. Do you remember when the prophet Nathan told King David about his sin with Bathsheba? Part of the story Nathan told to make his point concerned a poor man who loved his little lamb so much the lamb drank from the man’s cup (2 Samuel 12)!
On the other hand, often the cup’s contents were a curse. In this case, the liquid in the cup induced a drunkened stupor and sometimes the cup contained the poison of death. All of us are probably familiar with the phrase, ‘the cup of God’s wrath.’ This cup is a symbol of God’s judgement upon sinners; the cup is handed to the guilty and he is made to drink. A classic example is found in Jeremiah 25.
In the case of the cup in the garden of Gethsemane, the cup the Lord Jesus didn’t want to drink, what was represented was the anguish of bearing the sin of the world, the experience of suffering the wrath of God for satisfying the justice of God. Drinking from this cup would be a horrible experience! In fact, the Expositor’s New Testament describes Jesus in the garden in this way: “He fell again and again against the ground, staggering, stumbling and falling.”
But out of the experience of this cup would come the cup of the New Covenant. The contents of this cup would be forgiveness, fellowship with God, a forever in eternity, adequacy for all of life, confidence, and a thousand other blessings for those who would believe. So, the cup of Passion Week was a cup of grief and suffering, the likes of which has never been fully comprehended.
How is it that we deal so lightly with sin in our hearts in light of the symbolism of this garden cup? How is it that we live so poorly, condemned by guilt, constrained by regret, and bound by memories of past failures when Christ drank from the cup and set us free? Some of us today need to make a decision of faith because of the healing that is available because the Lord Jesus downed the contents of a most bitter cup.
The third symbol of Passion Week is a crown, a crown of thorns. Now, it’s Friday. Matthew, in his account of the events of this week, wrote (Mt. 27:27-31), “Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole Roman cohort around Him. They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. And after twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand; and they knelt down before Him and mocked Him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ They spat on Him, and took the reed and began to beat Him on the head (where the crown of thorns is resting). After they had mocked Him, they took the scarlet robe off Him and put His own garments back on Him, and led Him away to crucify Him.”
The crown normally depicted a state of honor or blessing. We’ve all seen a homecoming queen crowned, and we know what an honor that coronation is. And the crown in the Scriptures is generally a reference to a representative of God who rules. But this crown is one of thorns. The thorn in the Bible always represents something negative. The thorn always represents something worthless or useless, something of punishment, torture, or suffering. The Proverbs tell us that “the way of the sluggard is as a hedge of thorns, but the path of the upright is a highway.” (15:19) Proverbs 26:9 says, “Like a thorn which falls into the hand of a drunkard, so is a proverb in the mouth of fools.”
The most famous thorn in the Bible was probably Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’ which caused him great torment and pain. So when we put the symbols of crowns and thorns together, we get the image of a worthless, suffering king. That is surely what the soldiers thought of Jesus as they mocked, beat, and ridiculed Him.
So, in His Passion Week, the Lord Jesus bore the brunt of ridicule and pain from the very ones He came to save! To drink the cup of God’s wrath would be terrible; to be innocent and misunderstood by the ones you came to save would be almost unbearable! The cup and the crown of thorns amounted to double punishment.
Because the Lord Jesus knew the pain of a crown of thorns, He can feel the pain of the thorns in my life. He knows about rejection. He has experience with betrayal and abandonment. He can identify with the suffering we are dealing with. In His own special way, He is weaving all that together into a tapestry of glory that He will delight to share with you on that appointed day.
Later on Friday, the Lord Jesus experienced the fourth symbol of this Week, the cross. Again, it is Matthew who writes, “As they were coming out, they found a man of Cyrene named Simon, whom they pressed into service to bear His cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means Place of a Skull, they gave Him wine to drink mixed with gall; and after tasting it, He was unwilling to drink. And when they had crucified Him, they divided up His garments among themselves by casting lots. And sitting down, they began to keep watch over Him there.”
The cross was of course a symbol of death. Death by a cross was so vile it was forbidden to be used on Roman citizens, no matter what their crimes may have been. The cross for Jesus was a symbol of anguish and abandonment at His death. It was the capstone of His suffering. The cup had been the prospect of facing God’s wrath for you and me. The crown of thorns was a commentary of rejection. But the cross was both the wrath of God and rejection by God all bound up in one sad, painful, and terrible experience. The cross would be the instrument of Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of the world.
Because of the cross, you and I win, even when it looks like we lost! Every time we die, we live. Every time we lose, we win. Every time we act unselfishly, we gain. Every time we share, we benefit. Every time we give, we get. When we love, we are blessed. The devil looked at the cross and thought he had won. In reality, he had only sealed his doom. The angels had a hard time with the death of the Son of God. Little did they know that his death would mean life for millions.
The Passion Week of the Lord Jesus, His week of suffering, began with joy branches from a palm tree and ended with two other branches formed as a cross. In between came a tough cup and painful thorns. Because of Palm Sunday, we can go from this place with a new sense of freedom. God gives real meaning to every day! We are a part of His plans for all eternity. Our sins have been cleansed. Christ drank the cup!
Because of Palm Sunday, we can go from this place with a new sense of purpose. It is God Who oversees every dimension of our lives, especially the parts inflicted and infected by thorns.
Because of Palm Sunday, we can go from this place with a new sense of life. Palm Sunday ushered in a week of suffering that climaxed in a cross, the same kind of cross that the Lord Jesus asks us to pick up and carry every day, so that we might die to ourselves and then really live.
Freedom and joy, purpose and life… gifts from God for every day, clearly seen in the symbols of Passion Week. Don’t go from this place without making a decision. You are here by divine appointment.


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