Sermon: "What Saviour Means" March 28, 2021
This past week we were returning to town from Saratoga Beach. And maybe you’ve seen it before, but on the side of the road down from the Country Market is a sign on a fence in front of a house. This wooden sign has an image of a cross in wood on a blue-painted background, and the words, all caps SAVIOUR. This past week, the vertical piece of the cross was missing. Probably vandalism, which is really too bad.
Before I was a Christian I sort of felt like these Christians were trying to shove their religion down my throat with roadside slogans. I saw things like this as a bit of a combative display meant to stick it to us heathen secularists. They made me mad.
Now they don’t make me mad anymore, for obvious reasons maybe. But I must admit that signs like this tend to worry me for another couple different reasons.
One is that there are many people who will see it as aggressive as I used to. Yet another reason to be annoyed at Christians.
The other, though, might be just as important. That people might not even know what it means. What’s a Saviour? The word comes with plenty of baggage. And do we need saving? I mean, so few people out there are worried that they are headed to hell. So what do we need saving from?
Our passage for today from Palm Sunday is all about this. They’re all about salvation, the meaning of Jesus as Saviour. In fact, our first hymn began with the word “Hosanna” meaning “Lord save,” or “Lord, rescue us now!” Which comes from the words from the crowd. The people shout “Hosanna!” “Lord, save!” they shout, and “blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the King of Israel.” Then Jesus hops on a donkey and rides it into town. They wave Palm Branches in joy.
If Palm Branches don’t mean much to you, let me clue you in. You see, Palm branches are a symbol of national triumph and victory for Jesus’ people. Because about 200 years prior, Jesus’ people—the Jews—had revolted against the local Greek empire that occupied and oppressed them. Led by this general Judas Maccabeus,[i] they actually succeeded in tossing these enemies out and establishing an independent country. And when they did, they marched into the city, smashing pagan idols and pulling down foreign altars, purifying the temple of alien influences. All the while waving palm branches.[ii] And singing Psalms like the 118th Psalm, a hymn of thanks after victory in battle. Which is where that word “Hosanna” comes from.
Unfortunately, though, this newfound Jewish independence only lasted a little more than a century before the next empire—the Romans came in and did it all over again.[iii] And they’re the ones in charge when Jesus shows up on the scene.
So when this crowd begins whippin’ out the Palm fronds and starts chanting Hosanna, you know they’re expecting the same kinda thing. It’s like waving the stars and stripes after the American Revolution, or the North Vietnamese flag after the fall of Saigon. Both—Palms and Psalms—mean national independence. The crowd’s expecting revolt, they’re expecting revolution. And this miracle-working, dead-body raising Jesus. He’s the one who’s gonna bring it, and toss out the Romans for good. This is Jesus’ victory march. No one can stop him now.
The story is playing out just as it should. Everything is on the up and up, Jesus is on a roll. But it doesn’t play out the way it’s supposed. Just as he seems unstoppable, they do stop him. If you read ahead.
When Jesus finally makes his way in, there’s no great victory march. Jesus ends up betrayed by one of his closest friends, abandoned by most others, reviled as a traitor by his own people. He’s beaten. He’s tortured, he’s spit upon. But the worst part is the way they mock him. Remember how the crowd was amped up and waving palm branches. Remember how they declared Jesus the King of Israel on his way in to the city. Well the Romans satirize Jesus by weaving him a crown for him out of thorns. They dress him in a purple robe, the colour of royalty. They parade him in front of the crowd, and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor says “here’s your king!” You can imagine the laughter as well as the jeers. The crowd replies “crucify him, crucify him, we have no king but Caesar!” And on Pilate’s orders, they nail Jesus’ hands and feet to timber, set him high on a hill. Above him they nail this sign that reads “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” One more finally mocking jab. And then they leave him to die.
If you think about it, it’s kind of strange way for a story to go. But we don’t tend to realize this. This satire. Kings don’t look like this. Kings aren’t captured, put on trial, or executed. Because if you’re a king and this happens to you, it means you ain’t a king no more. Crucifixion is a criminal’s death. This whole scene is an ancient version of a Saturday-night live skit. Like Alec Baldwin showing Donald Trump’s less-than-presidential behavior. Here, Jesus couldn’t be any less royal. Once crowds shouted “Lord save.” But here Jesus is the one who needs saving.
Today, Palm Sunday, is huge let down in that way. Because what began as a lively celebration turns in to a humiliating failure.
When you think of the phrase “to save the world” what do you think of? Jesus’ contemporaries hoped for the overthrow of their Roman oppressors. We picture the overthrow of communism (or capitalism), or “radical Islam.” Terrorists foiled before they can set off the nuke. Or the bad guys get beat and peace, truth, justice and democracy are restored and reign forever. Chemical weapons and airstrikes. This is the strangeness of this story that we who hear this story year after year seem to miss. Jesus doesn’t accomplish anything like that at all. The crowd calls out to Jesus “Lord save.” Jesus suffers. Jesus dies.
No “mission accomplished” banner for Jesus. Jesus doesn’t save anyone from anything in any way they expected. Jesus is no Saviour by any measure out there. He’s a complete failure. He doesn’t even save himself from the cross.
But if you jump back to today’s passage, there’s this fascinating line. Where it says that Jesus’ disciples stood at the sidelines at the Palm parade. But they didn’t actually understand what was happening. There was more to this event, there was more to Jesus than meets the eye. Something they didn’t understand, it says, until he was “glorified.” In John’s story, you’ll remember, Jesus is “glorified” on the cross. Looking back on it the whole thing in the light of his resurrection (spoiler alert), this lightbulb goes off for them. They finally get it. They get how Jesus saves. At the palm parade they expected a rightful king to have a jewel-covered crown placed carefully on his head. Instead, Jesus was crowned with jagged thorns. They thought Jesus was on his way up to have a golden scepter placed in his hand. Instead the palms of hands are pierced with nails. They thought he was on his way up to take his rightful seat in a gilded golden chair. Instead his is a throne of wood, and his coronation takes place on a cross. According to John, on the cross Jesus trades all power for powerlessness and is crowned king. The disciples don’t fully understand the Palm Parade until his glorification, until his crucifixion. This is salvation itself unveiled.
We live in a world that believes that it will be saved by force, by power, by control, by violence. By bloodshed. By the defeat of the enemies of what ever our cause may be. Whether it’s chemical weapon attacks, suicide bombs or airstrikes. Whether we are enlightened modern people or not. Whether it’s the mastery of nature through technology or the mastery of people by public perception. Liberal, or conservative. Christian or otherwise. Ever since the first murder, the spilling of Abel’s blood by Cain, as a species we have believed that peace, justice, and all of those good things will be won by the right people gaining power from the wrong people and holding it. That good will triumph by forcibly stamping out evil. But the scriptures teach us that in Jesus Christ God brings salvation to us and the whole world.
“In him,” the Apostle Paul writes, “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”[iv] Not by not by killing the bad guys, not by vanquishing his enemies, but by giving his life in love for them. Jesus saves not by settling all the right scores but by shattering vengeance with incredible acts of love and forgiveness. Jesus saves by giving of himself completely for the world, and giving his life over to the will of God to the point of death.
They didn’t know it when Jesus rode in to town, but in Christ on the cross God would win a mighty victory not in military might. But in complete vulnerability, self-sacrifice. And death.
They didn’t know it at the time, they didn’t understand this at the Palm Parade. But when Jesus was glorified they finally understood.
This is how Jesus saves. Christ comes not just to save us from a fiery afterlife, but comes to save us in this life, too. Comes to save the world as it is, to bring heaven, the eternal presence of the everlasting life to a world that is perishing in its own suffering and Sin. Jesus saves us from ourselves. From the mess we’re in. Human being against human being, one retaliation after another. Playing out on the global scale, playing out in our everyday lives. In the cross he puts an end to it all. Jesus saves not by spilling the blood of others. But by shedding his own. Pouring out his life for the sake of the world. To transform it. To make it new.
This is what the word “Saviour” means. This is what that—now defaced—sign on the highway means. How appropriate to have defaced in the same way our Lord took the defacing of his body. Because this is how Jesus works. This is how God saves the world, the only way it will be saved. Through self-offering, through self-empyting. Through self-sacrifice. Through self-giving love. Jesus has paved this path out of the way things are.[v] And we can experience this salvation here and now by taking up the cross and following in his footsteps. It means that we don’t have to repay each other evil for evil. It means we don’t have to be enslaved by anger and hatred. It means we can be freed from our petty grudges, our bigotries, and our selfishness. It means we can forgive instead of being consumed by our pasts, by poison and pain. Because “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).
Brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world… and this is how he does it. God in Christ has paved this path for us to become whole new and different people living in a whole new and different world! So wave your palms! Shout hosanna! And cling to that old rugged cross for dear life! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!
AMEN!
[i] https://www.enterthebible.org/resourcelink.aspx?rid=1233
[ii] Gail R. O’Day, “The Gospel of John,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, v. IX, gen. ed. Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 707.
[iii] This is typically referred to as the “Hasmonean Period” after the monarchy established. See https://www.enterthebible.org/periods.aspx?rid=899
[iv] Colossians 1:20.
[v] “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2.