Palm Sunday and the Point of No Return

In preparation for my fifteenth Palm Sunday standing in a pulpit, I was reminded of a particularly lucid quote from an oft-used passion week commentary. On Palm Sunday Jesus enters Jerusalem as a king riding on a baby donkey, and is heralded by crowds with the very words of Psalm 118:25-26, which ask the Lord for his messianic salvation, rejoicing that he’ll provide in due time. For crowds to praise Jesus as the king from David’s line who fulfills these words would not have only been controversial. It would have been treasonous. Here they’re saying Jesus—not Caesar—is king. And Jesus, who often would deflect such treatment because it wasn’t yet time for him to be treated as king (cf. Jn.6:15), here receives the treatment as appropriate. 

Reflecting upon this Andreas Köstenberger and Justin Taylor conclude:

The whole city is shaken by the events, and the crowd keeps spreading the word to any in Jerusalem who have not yet heard who Jesus is (Matt.21:10-11). Some Pharisees instruct Jesus to rebuke the crowds for their dangerous messianic exuberance, but he refuses to correct or curtail the excitement of the crowd over his entrance into the city (Matt.21:15-17; Luke 19:39-40). It would be hard to overestimate the political and religious volatility incited by Jesus’s actions—the Pharisees were taken by surprise and had no idea how to respond (John 12:19). Up to this point in Jesus’s ministry, he could still have managed to live a long, happy, peaceful life but his actions on Sunday set in motion a series of events that could result only in either his overthrow of the Romans and the current religious establishment—or his brutal death. He has crossed the point of no return; there would be no turning back. Caesar would allow no rival kings.*

Imagine what must have stirred in Jesus’s heart as he rode the colt, treated with praise by a crowd likely mixed with true believers and unbelievers who are just subject to that day’s zeitgeist. The latter would, in a few days, call for his crucifixion. Was Jesus smiling at people? Was he looking at them with a broken heart because he saw their fakeness? We know that he then weeps as he enters Jerusalem (Luke19:41-44). We also know that when the religious leaders told him to tell the people to stop praising him, he responded that if they stopped, the rocks would cry out (Luke 19:40). So he’s engaged in the moment, then gets emotional when approaching Jerusalem, understandably so. 

But whatever was going on internally, this Sunday was no normal Sunday, and neither was it the typical bright, celebratory and somewhat chipper Sunday that precedes the darkness of Good Friday. No, this, as the quote above said, was the point of no return. To receive the label of promised King from David, and to do so with signs that reflect both Solomon (1 Kn. 1:33) and a newly anointed king of Israel (2 Kn. 9:13), was to challenge the (divinely-appoint) establishment and say, “This whole creation, from the Emperor of Rome down to the scum on the public bathroom floor, is mine, for the purpose of glorifying me.” Jesus knew what he was doing, and that his kingship would soon include with a painful crown of thorns, and a throne from which he’d hang until his breath gave out.

So I don’t know what he felt and thought as he rode. But I bet the heaviness was beginning.

 

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*Andreas Köstenberger, Justin Taylor, The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived (Wheaton: Crossway, 2014), 32. 

Piper on Anxiety and the Promises of God

Where I live it is currently deep winter. There are about 18 inches of snow on the ground outside, and the temperature hasn’t risen above freezing all week. There is supposed to be more snow coming this weekend. 

Now let me be clear: I very much enjoy winter. Snow is beautiful, and I think American life is so hopelessly busy that the slow-down of winter storms is a healthy thing. It’s also basketball season, to which I look forward all summer. 

But it’s no secret that the short sunlight days, long hours inside, and relative isolation has a depressing and angst-producing effect on many people. Whether it’s some sort of seasonal anxiety or depression thing or whatever, the majority of winter, following Christmas, can be a hard time of peace for many. 

So I was especially struck rereading through a section of John Piper’s monumental Future Grace today. I call the book “monumental,” because I think that if only one of his many books is still being read generations from now, if Jesus doesn’t return before, it might be this one. The chapter in which this section comes is entitled “Faith in Future Grace vs. Anxiety,” and in the chapter Piper does well to show the reality of fear and anxiousness all of our lives, and how it is in those moments that we learn God’s nearness. 

For example, the psalmist says “When I am afraid, I trust in you” (Ps.56:3). As Piper shows it is not “So that I’m not afraid, I trust in you,” but “When I am afraid.” It is in the moment of fear that there can also be trust. Consider also Peter’s words, “Cast all your anxieties on him (Christ), because he cares for you” (1 Pet.5:7). There is never promised a time when there won’t be anxieties; but there is definitely promised the ever-present nearness of Christ in those times, so that we can cast our anxieties onto him.* Indeed, he is an ever-present help in time of trouble (Ps.46:1). 

So, Piper concludes the chapter with an excellent list of Scriptures he recites to himself in times of particular anxiety. See, we’ll fight unbelief all the time: Abraham followed God despite his unbelief (note that no unbelief made him waiver in following God, Rom.4:20, which must mean that he had some unbelief in the first place. But he didn’t let it win). But we fight the unbelief with God’s promises, and therefore we “live not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth.” Here’s Piper’s helpful list for particular anxieties: 

-For some risky new venture, Is.41:10: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for 

I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” 

-For the fear that ministry will be useless and empty, Is.55:11: “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” 

-For weakness in work, 2 Cor.12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” 

-For hard decisions, Ps.32:8: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.” 

-For facing opponents, Rom.8:31: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

-For our children’s well-being, Matt.7:10-11: “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” 

-For fear of sickness, Ps.34:19: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all,” and Rom.5:3-5, that “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, for God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” 

-For fear of getting old, Is.46:4: “Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.” 

-For fear of dying, Rom.14:7-9: “None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.” 

-For fear of making shipwreck of faith and falling away from God, Phil.1:6: “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ,” and Heb.7:25: “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”**

By such promises, Piper says, we make war with our own unbelief. Armed with God’s loving, Fatherly promises, we can be confident, because as Luther famously wrote, God “must win the battle.” 

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*John Piper, Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God, rev. ed. (New York: Multnomah, 2020), 54.

**Ibid., 58-59.