The Servant King - Palm Sunday Sermon

Palm Sunday B

April 1, 2012

“The Servant King”

Isaiah 50.4-9a; Mark 11.1-11

Palm Sunday is full of tension. We celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem knowing the he comes to die. So, it’s tempting to take some of the sting out of the tension of this day with a play on “April Fools.” For instance, we could say, “When Jesus bids us to come and follow he bids us to come and die; April Fools!” But this is no joke, and God is deadly serious about repairing the break that exists between him and us. There is no getting around it: the road to Easter goes through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. The road to the empty tomb goes through the Last Supper and the cross. The road to new life goes through sacrifice and death. Today, we stand on the last leg of that road started on Ash Wednesday, and we find ourselves betwixt and between.

Many people choose not to walk that road, to take a short cut to Easter, bypassing Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. That’s why the liturgical folk added the Passion to Palm Sunday a few decades ago, because so many people weren’t taking the full journey. We’re not doing that today. Instead, we are going to live with the tension the Palm Sunday brings and shamelessly invite you to walk all the way. Of course, I know that you already know the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death, but stories—and particularly this story—are for retelling. Taking a short cut to Easter robs the story of its power and depth of meaning, and it robs us who miss reliving it. We need to walk this road because, as Christians, each day we walk the way of the cross. We need to know the way.

We need to walk the way because Jesus is neither the Messiah nor the king one would expect. Jesus is the Servant King and, as we see in Isaiah, a most unlikely suffering servant king at that. This is the third of four so-called “Servant Songs” in Isaiah, sung to the people of Israel who were ravaged by the Babylonians, ripped from their country, and now oppressed in a foreign land. In today’s reading, we hear of a servant who has suffered abuse because of his faithfulness to God’s call on his life, but who is assured of God’s presence and care nonetheless.

Early Christians, in trying to make sense out of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, saw in this servant song another viewpoint of the Messiah. They had had a far different understanding of what the Messiah King would be, laboring under the warrior king idea of a rich and powerful ruler who “throws the bums out,” the bums in this case being the occupying Roman army and rulers. We still do that sort of thing today, don’t we? We are so enamored of the rich and powerful, especially those that have displayed the upward mobility of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to become players. We expect that’s the way things get done. But, God’s way is a different way; in Jesus God displayed the downward mobility of a servant.

Think for a moment of a person in your life who sacrificed himself or herself for your sake. I can remember my parents making many sacrifices for us, but I particularly remember my father leaving a job he loved and going back to a job he hated so they could afford medical care for my brother. The suffering of the Suffering Servant King is not suffering for suffering’s sake. Rather, it is the suffering that comes from standing against those forces that defy God: sin, death, and devilish powers. Palm Sunday not only anticipates in advance the victory that God will achieve over sin and death, it also invites to journey with the Suffering Servant King, Jesus, into the way of life. Who or what might God be inviting you to make a sacrifice for, to give yourself away? Walk the road through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to Easter. God will be with you. That’s no April Fool’s joke. Amen.