Palm Sunday – The Fulfillment

04/21/25 • -1 min

Sermons – St. Brendan's Anglican Church

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrina (1842-1848)

Palm Sunday 2025
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Luke 23:1-49

Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here
– Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, St Thomas Aquinas

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It was the week before Passover, and so the Jewish people were making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. During the time of the Temple, the focus of the Passover festival was the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb, eaten during the Passover Seder. Every family large enough to completely consume a young lamb or wild goat was required to offer one for sacrifice at the Temple and eat it that night in the ritual meal which looks back to the Exodus. It is, in a real sense, the story that makes the people Israel. It is both the occasion of their creation and their deliverance. The Passover remembers this. It is the reason behind the procession of the people to Jerusalem.

Another procession is coming to the city as well. Too many of the restive Jewish people in one place often led to riots, and to political instability, and so Pontius Pilate is coming up from Caesarea Maritania. The soldiers of Imperial Rome are coming up with all of their Roman standards and weapons and might to just let everybody in Israel know that whatever their God did in the past, that was then and this is now. Rome is in charge- don’t mess with us.

And then there is Jesus. He, too, is going up to Jerusalem. He is perhaps unconcerned with the festival- and with Rome- for his time has come. On the Mount of Transfiguration, he had spoken with Moses and Elijah about “ton exodon” – his exodus. The point of their discussion is now made clear: though Moses led a great exodus of the children of Israel out of sin and bondage, out of the house of slavery in Egypt, Jesus will lead a greater exodus in Jerusalem by means of the new covenant sealed by his blood. This exodus will liberate from sin and misery and death. This will be the climax of his vocation. Jesus knows well enough what lays ahead, and he has set his face towards Jersualem, to go and meet it head on. His announcement of the coming kingdom must now be embodied in his very flesh. The living God is at work to heal and save, and the forces of evil and death are also gathering in Jerusalem to oppose him, like Pharaoh and the armies of Egypt trying to prevent the Israelites from leaving. But this was to be the moment of God’s new Exodus, God’s great Passover, and nothing could stop Jesus from going ahead to celebrate it.

When he gets near Bethany, which is a little village about two miles from Jerusalem, Jesus climbs upon the mount his disciples have brought him. Unlike Pilate, he rides no high horse, just a lowly colt. There are branches of leaves instead of swords. Strewn garments instead of shields. He chooses to enter a deadly situation without force or protection. He gives himself freely and without reservation. Though he is God, he empties himself, taking the form of a servant. This is a prophetic act, a sign of God’s vulnerable love, which risks everything and promises to gain all. In Jesus, God will create peace. The true might in the story lies not in the armies of Caesar, but with the simple Son of Man. Political and military might will ultimately fail. True holiness lies no longer in the Law, true sacrifice will no longer take place in the Temple, rather this itinerant rabbi is the center-point of both: the last remnant of Israel becoming the means by which the whole world shall be saved. In Holy Week, we move beyond the promises, types, and shadows of the Old Testament, and are now instead in the fulfillment and substance of the New Testament. In Christ, God is reconciling the world to himself. Jesus is making all things new. Now, mix Empire with religion, populism, and fallen human will, and you have a volatile situation. A showdown is, by this point, inevitable. The powers that be will not give in without a fight. Making all things new will prove costly to God.

The week is busy. Pilate and his legions are trying to keep a lid on things. The Jews are busy with their preparations for remembrance: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday would have been consumed with finding accommodation, familial reunions and above all with selecting, procuring and preparing the sacrificial lambs.

Jesus is busy, too. However, he is consumed, not so much with preparations for remembrance as with what is to come. He cleanses the Temple first off- and this is not simply mounting an angry protest about the commercialization of Temple business. Jeremiah and others have proclaimed that if the Temple becomes a hide-out for brigands, either literally or metaphorically, it will come under God’s judgment. Jesus the prophet now renders that judgment. His teaching and arguments with both the Temple hierarchy a...

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrina (1842-1848)

Palm Sunday 2025
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Luke 23:1-49

Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here
– Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, St Thomas Aquinas

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Previous Episode

Lent 5 – Our Story in Christ

Rev. Doug Floyd

Flagellation by Georges Rouault (1949)

Lent 5
Rev. Doug Floyd
Isaiah 43, Luke 20:9-19

Last week, Fr. Les exhorted us with the story of the Prodigal Son who wasted his inheritance and the Prodigal Father who pours out his love on both sons without restraint. As it turns out, Christ comes into the far country to pour out His love upon us and present us as blameless before the Father. As Fr. Les said, “We are forever in a state of acceptance.”

This week our parable is a bit more troubling. A man sends his servants to collect fruit from his vineyard. Each time a servant comes, he is beaten and sent away empty handed. Eventually, he sends his son. They kill the son. The owner will go to the vineyard and destroy the tenants.

Our story takes a dark turn this week. The scribes and chief priests know that Jesus is talking about them, and they want to lay hands on him.

We can feel the tension building. The week before Palm Sunday and then Holy Week, we are standing at the edge of the great collision between man and God. When humanity will seize God in Christ and kill him. But that story is still to come.

Let us reflect on today’s parable through the lens of our Isaiah reading. This word from Isaiah is sent to God’s people in captivity.

As the kingdom of Judah ends, Babylon captures a group of the ruling class. They are God’s chosen people and in spite of their failures, they have absolute confidence that their stay in Babylon will be short. The prophet Ezekiel tells them again and again, this is your home now. You are not returning to Jerusalem. It is not until the Temple is destroyed and the rest of Judah is taken captive that the people realize, Ezekiel’s words.

They had held onto the story of the Exodus. God rescued His people from the hand of the Pharoah and lifted them up on His eagle wings to the land of promise. They had heard this story their whole lives. In spite of the failure of God’s people, He would come and restore them again and again.

But now they sit in Babylon. The Temple destroyed. The land ruined. The promise forsaken. It would seem that God had abandoned them. The Lord spoke to His captives through Ezekiel, and the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah. He would comfort, he would restore, he would tell a new story.

¹⁸“Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
¹⁹Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?^[1]

The God who rescues His people from Pharoah will tell a new story in and through these captives. He will make a way through the wilderness. They will walk through the valley of the shadow of death but will fear no evil. The Lord will go before and behind and above and below. The wild beasts will not consume them. The fire will not burn them. The water will not drown them.

The I AM will preserve them, will glorify them, will restore them. He will give them a new heart to serve Him. And the nations will stream to Jerusalem.

As Isaiah says earlier in chapter 43,

⁵Fear not, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you.
⁶I will say to the north, Give up,
and to the south, Do not withhold;
bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
⁷everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”^[2]

When the Lord restores His people, it will not simply be the captives of Babylon, but the captives of all nations. For the Evil One has held humanity captive to sin. A day of deliverance is coming. A day of restoration is coming. He will call His people home and they will come running.

A group of captives from Babylon return home with this new story burning in their hearts. Over time, it would seem that parts of this story are lost. When we come to our parable today, we find the scribes and the chief priests do not recognize the story.

The leaders are expecting the Messiah to come and vindicate Israel as God’s chosen people, to restore the Temple, to cleanse the land, and to defeat the oppressors like Rome. They are not looking for a Messiah who embraces the weak, the marginal, the sinner, and even those outside of Israel.

Jesus will make a way to fulfill Isaiah’s words. He will do it through the very conniving of the Pharisees, scribes, and chief priests. Even as they come together with Herod and Pilate to kill Jesus, He will work through their rebellion to fulfill the very promise of God. As Jesus declared in today’s Gospel,

“ ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’?

Next Episode

Maundy Thursday

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Washing of the Apostles’ Feet by Master of the Housebook (1475 and 1500)

Maundy Thursday
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Do you understand what I have done for you?
John 13:12b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In Judaism, during the Passover Seder, there’s a section at the beginning known as The Four Questions. The most famous one being the one asked by the youngest child who is able: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The four questions all have to do with the meal, at least on the surface. However, the answers point to how the meal brings to mind the time of the Exodus.

Holy Week is our Exodus. The Triduum (trid-you-um) or three great nights of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, our Passover. It’s fitting, therefore for us to have a question of our own. Jesus asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” We might also ask it this way: what do we receive tonight?

When Jesus gave the cup to his disciples, he said to them “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Our liturgy, drawing from a different text says, “ Drink this, all of you; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.” The thing that is important for our purposes tonight is that word “covenant.” In Greek, it is diatheke, and if you look it up, the definition is perhaps more precise. It is a certain kind of covenant- one declaring a person’s wishes regarding the disposal of their property when they die. Like a Last Will and Testament. This is why the old King James Version says “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

Now, if this meal is Jesus’ Last Will and Testament, what do we receive? An inheritance- and what an inheritance it is. He bequeaths to us his life, his perfect submission to the Law, and his merits, for we are accounted as adopted daughters and sons.

The story is told of Paul Brand, a missionary doctor in India. When an epidemic of measles spread through the town where he lived, his daughter came down with a very bad case of it. Since he had no vaccine to treat her, Brand located a person who had recently recovered from measles. He drew blood from them and injected the plasma from their blood into his daughter. She was healed with blood that was borrowed from a person who had overcome the measles. We, too, are healed with borrowed blood. As Lutheran theologian and Pastor John Kleinig writes:

Full remission! That’s what Jesus provides for us by the blood he shed for us and now offers us in his Supper. He grants us full remission from the spiritual sickness of sin, the malignant cancer that infects us in our souls and bodies, for which there is no natural treatment or human remedy. The wages of sin—its outcome and cost—is always death (Rom 6:23). Jesus reverses this by giving us his blood to drink in his Supper. Through it we have the eternal remission of all our sin.

Free to live without condemnation, guilt or fear. That would be food enough. Yet, in this meal, we receive even more. In our Epistle tonight Paul asks us pointedly, “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16) It is not just that this meal grants us the inheritance of our remission from sins, it brings us into communion- a common union- with our Lord.

“Just as by melting two candles together you get one piece of wax,” St Cyril of Jerusalem writes, “ so, I think, one who receives the flesh and blood of Jesus is fused together with him. And the soul finds that he is in Christ and Christ is in him.”

In our eucharistic liturgy we pray for God to use the sacrament in this way, praying that we may “be made one body with him, that he may dwell in us and we in him.” God answers that prayer. As we take the Sacrament , what we eat is what we become- and that changes us gradually, from the inside out. We become more and more spiritually alive as we feed on Jesus. We draw our life from him as we remain in him and he remains in us. By the means of the bread and the wine we consume, we become his body. We grow up into him who is our head.

At the end of the dinner, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. He does this, per his own words, as a teacher- showing us just what kind of a body we are now. We receive clarity as to the nature of our identity as the Body of Christ. It involves giving ourselves away in love, just as our benefactor and our head, Jesus did.

After washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus says “I have given you an example – you should do just as I have done for you.”(John 13:15) Later, after the meal, he will be even more direct, saying:

I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. If there ...