Palm Sunday 08
March 16, 2008


Matt 21:1-11 (NRSV)

The Greatest Moment

What a great moment for Jesus. Imagine, thousands of people thronging around the road to the great walled city, the palm branches waving in the air, thousands of voices like the roar of a great tide, shouting “Hosanna! Hosanna!” What a great moment for Jesus.

I wonder what your greatest moment will be. Or do you think it has already come and gone?

I remember in my days as an actor one summer when I played Malvolio in Twelfth Night and after every performance during the curtain call 800 audience members would rise to their feet as one when I came out. Have you ever had an experience like that? That might have been my greatest moment.

Of course, a year later I was homeless. And it was during that time that, alone in a friend’s kitchen, I had a powerful experience reading the bible. Hmm. That might have been my greatest moment.


But then, not many years after that, I saw my daughter open her beautiful blue eyes for the very first time. Could that have been my greatest moment?

Or maybe it was when I promised Liz to be her husband until death parted us. I keep a picture of that moment on my wall at home. That might very well have been my greatest moment.

What about yours? I wonder what your greatest moment will be. Or has it already passed?

Jesus did a lot of work, a lot of preparation, and a lot of strategic planning to get the welcome he got in Jerusalem that day. You’ll remember back at the beginning of the gospel, all the forces that were out to nip his whole life in the bud. You’ll remember old Herod slaughtering all those poor children in the hopes of killing him. You’ll remember him being baptized by John, and then John being arrested and killed. You’ll remember him running out of the area to put some distance between him and Jerusalem for a while. He did his whole early ministry up in the northern region of Galilee, mostly because he knew he didn’t have the popular support he needed to face the big city, the center of the region, Jerusalem.

So he did lots of healing and lots of miracles and announced one heck of a lot of good news, particularly for the poor and the outcast. Of course, as we saw throughout the stories of Matthew, Jesus himself kept to a strict discipline of study and prayer throughout these days. We know also that he spent very little time in any place that didn’t accept him, and that even he really couldn’t do any miracles in those places. That’s interesting, isn’t it? You’d think someone like Jesus surely could do anything anywhere, but it appears that he depended very much on the faith of the people.

Some historians have said that history is not really the story of great individuals. It’s really the story of masses of people moving like great tides in one direction or another. The individuals we remember, the great leaders or thinkers or saints, were simply people who successfully surfed the waves. If we look at the ministry of Jesus in a very down-to-earth way, as a strategic effort to lead people, a lot of the more complex things he said and did become a bit simpler.

We’re seeing the somewhat less dignified process of campaigning going on right now on our national stage. Campaigning is a strategic activity; it involves travelling around, identifying potential followers, wooing them, staying away from people who could undermine you, playing up to the people who will endorse you, training and sending emissaries to speak for you and organize things in advance, handing out whatever it is you have to hand out so that people will follow you.

What Jesus had was the power and authority of the God of Israel. What Jesus had was the Holy Spirit.

And yet, all that power and authority of the Holy Spirit was dependent on the faith of those who received it. Wherever people believed and gathered around Jesus, he was able to do great things.

Another part of his strategy was training his disciples to do essentially has he did. He even promised them they could do even greater things than he. He sent them out and built up the movement by twelve-old or even seventy-fold, depending on the story you’re reading.

He said things like “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” This makes a lot of sense when one is thinking about building a movement. There are plenty of people who could be shifted in a new direction, more than enough to turn a tide, but what is lacking are the leaders to inspire them.

Only when Jesus had established a name for himself that spread throughout the land, only when he had enough adherents that he could organize some farmer to be waiting for him near the gate of Jerusalem with a donkey and its foal, only when he had enough support for there to be hundreds of people willing to get up that morning and cut palm branches and wait by the side of that dusty road, only when there were thousands of stories circulating about healings and resurrections and mind-blowing sermons about turning the world on its ear, only when great crowds were following him around like the a rock star, did he turn his face to the center of power in his world, Jerusalem.

Because Jerusalem was where the fight really was.

Many years before, Judas Maccabeus had ridden into Jerusalem in triumph when his Jewish freedom fighters had defeated the Greeks. That was the last time palms had been waved at the gate of Jerusalem. Every Jew who saw those palms would have known they meant revolution.
And every Jew who saw those two animals would have known Jesus was laying claim to the ancient prophecy of Zechariah about the Messiah coming as a prince of peace, not on a horse with a chariot like the empires of the day but humbly, on a simple donkey.

I’m sure his disciples, the twelve and the others that travelled with him, did not know about the whole riding-the-donkey plan. Jesus was well aware of how much money was being offered for information on his activities. It’s not unlikely people were already being arrested and interrogated. If the authorities had known anything about this idea, he would have been arrested long before he got anywhere near Jerusalem.

So this whole thing was most likely a great surprise to the disciples. And I’m sure they thought, “Wow, this is big. We might just pull this off.” I’m sure they thought, “This is it, this is Jesus’ greatest moment.”

What will be your greatest moment?

You know, this Christian way opens up a lot of possibilities, if you want them. If you want to learn the way of Jesus, it is something that you can learn. Many here have learned it already and are continuing to do so.

But the main message that I want you to hear this morning is that one of the most central truths of the power of God in the Holy Spirit is that is manifests itself through community. Let’s put it another way.

If you want to move toward your greatest moment, presuming it has not already passed you, there are roughly two billion living souls in this world who are cheering you on. If you want to get up on your own version of that donkey, and ride into the teeth of your life’s great moment, there are two billion people who are ready to stand by you. They are called the Christian church on earth.

About a hundred of them will gather here this morning. But there are millions more gathering all over the planet.

We have a denomination that we call the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). One of the reasons I’m a disciple is that we believe everyone who calls on the name of Jesus Christ is a member of the body of Christ, that is, the whole church on earth. We’re a denomination mainly for the pragmatic purposes of getting things done, but we are not denominational. And while we’re congregational in our polity, we are not Congregationalist. We believe that everyone, everywhere, who gathers in Christ’s name stands with us.

As a congregation, we are here to offer to each other every good gift we can offer to help each other toward our greatest moments. We are here to help you toward yours. And we have the whole church on earth behind us, offering all kinds of insights and resources and practices to build us all up.

What will be your greatest moment?

Jesus seems to be having his as he rides through the gates of Jerusalem on the great tide of love and faith he has so carefully built over the course of his ministry. But he alone understands this is not his greatest moment.

On Thursday night this week, we will gather to remember that moment, and on Friday, as we pray through the day, I hope we will let that moment sink deep into our hearts.

Jesus’ greatest moment will be his three hours on the cross. I don’t know what he was thinking as he suffered and died. We have only the barest evidence. But I can’t help but wonder if he didn’t hear those voices, those great thousands outside the gates of Jerusalem, shouting “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna!”

And you know what “hosanna” means, don’t you? It means “save us.”

This is perhaps what he heard in his heart as he died. The crowds calling out to him:


Save us.


Save us.


Save us.


Amen.