Audio recording Sermon manuscript: To the disciples it appeared that everything was going well as Jesus made his way into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. In fact, things were going very well. If they would have thought back on the past few years they would have recalled things that kings and prophets would have liked to have seen and heard. Jesus did many powerful signs. He made the blind see and the deaf hear. He fed the 5,000 and the 4,000. Jesus taught as one having authority, instead of like the teachers who were only trying to fill the time and cash their paycheck. Many were converted to faith in him. Jesus’s overwhelming success might be one of the main things we should have in our mind’s eye when we imagine that Palm Sunday. All around Jesus there were spontaneous acts of love, honor, and devotion. There was no campaign manager artificially pumping up the crowds with stirring music. That wasn’t necessary. The crowds loved him, and worshipped him, and this is the only way to understand their actions: They threw down their garments on the road so that the donkey’s colt, a small animal carrying a fully grown man, might walk on them. They cut palm branches in their hands and waved them about. Nobody was embarrassed. Nobody was self-conscious. All that they were conscious of was Jesus. They wanted to catch sight of him. They were praising God joyfully, with a loud voice, for all the miracles that they had seen. The words that the crowd said were heavy with all that those words signified. They sang, “Blessed is the king who comes in the Name of the Lord.” They are identifying Jesus as the king. This would have come as news to Pontius Pilate, the highest Roman official in that region, or to Herod, who ruled in Galilee. Jesus had no earthly office or authority. He was a poor Jew from the hinterlands. But these people recognize him as king. Furthermore, they do not recognize him as the king pending the approval of the Roman Caesar or any other human authority. They say that he is the king who comes in the Name of the Lord, the God of Israel. They do not see Jesus as an upstart, making his way to the top by his own bootstraps. They recognize him as the Christ, the anointed King, sent by none other than God himself. How else could he have done the signs or taught the way he taught? Believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, which means “the anointed one,” is the shortest Christian creed. These people have this confession of faith. The other thing that the crowds say is so outrageous that it makes the Pharisees embarrassed. They say, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest.” This was a bit too much for the Pharisees. The Pharisees, like every believing Jew, was looking for the Christ, the one who would be like King David, but King David was just a man. The Pharisees fear that these people’s theology is getting dangerously out of whack. A human being might be able to bring about peace on earth, but what is this about peace in heaven? Only God rules in heaven. Furthermore the people are giving him glory in the highest. Only God, and certainly no man, should be given glory in the highest. The Pharisees tell Jesus that his disciples are in need of a stern rebuke. But Jesus is not alarmed. The Pharisee’s theology is correct, as far as that goes. But they do not see what the people see, and therefore they are wrong. The people see that Jesus is God. All glory, laud, and honor are to him, the Redeemer King. If he were but a man, then it would be inappropriate to say what they had said. Since he is God in the flesh, what they have said is entirely appropriate. All creation sings its praises to Jesus the King: Fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy, repeat, repeat the sounding joy. Palm Sunday is when everything was going splendidly for Jesus’s disciples. This is just how they had hoped everything would go once it was revealed to them that Jesus is the Christ. Exciting things we