Today we continue our sermon series on spiritual exercises. We're going to look at the spiritual exercise of submission.
And some of you are already thinking, “Hey, wait a minute. This is Palm Sunday. This one of the big days of the church. We cannot just go on with our sermon series as if nothing special was going on. We need to wave the palm branches. We need to celebrate Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Palm Sunday's not about submission. Palm Sunday's about celebration!”
Well, yes and no. If we look at it from the standpoint of the crowds lining the road, that first Palm Sunday certainly was a celebration. They were cheering, they were having a good old time. If they'd had those big foam fingers back then, they'd have been waving them, yelling that Jesus is number one. The people certainly were celebrating the coming of Jesus into Jerusalem.
From Jesus' standpoint, though, there was really nothing to celebrate. Jesus knew all this cheering, all this praise he was getting, was all meaningless. These people were just there for the show. Oh, some of them might have thought they were sincere. Some of them might have thought they believed. But Jesus knew that when crunch time came, they'd all leave him. He knew there was no one there, not even his closest friends, the disciples, who were going to be with him at the end. None of them would be there for him when he was arrested, and when he was tortured, and when he was killed.
How do you suppose it made Jesus feel? To see all these people cheering him on, and to know none of it meant anything? It'd make me pretty mad. I'd want to stand up and shout, “You jerks! You hypocrites! You don't mean any of this! You could not care less about me. All you want me for is what you can get from me. You're going to be gone in a few days anyway, so just get out of here now. Go away and leave me alone!”
Well, Jesus did not say that, of course. In fact, Jesus says it had to be that way. When the Pharisees told him to get the people to quiet down, he said that if those people were not cheering for him, the rocks themselves would cry out.
What Jesus realized was that everything was happening as it had to happen. The cheers on Sunday, his arrest on Thursday, his death on Friday, those were all things that had to happen on the way to his resurrection on Sunday.
Except, of course, that they did not. Things did not have to happen that way. Jesus had the ability to make things happen differently. He could have stopped things at any point. He could have refused to go to Jerusalem at all. He could have stopped Judas from betraying him. He could have fought when the soldiers came to arrest him. He could have started a battle, a revolution, the way lots of people wanted him to.
That's why the story of Palm Sunday is a story of submission. Jesus knew everything that was going to happen over the next week. He could've stopped it at any moment. He could've made things go differently. But he knew, if he made any of it go differently, he would not be doing God's will. He knew that the whole point of his coming to earth was to teach us, then to die for our sins, and then be resurrected, overcoming death itself. So he went through with it. He went through the false praise of Sunday, the betrayal of Thursday, and the death of Friday, because it was the only way to get to the resurrection of Sunday, a resurrection that does not just apply to Jesus, but applies to all of us.
Jesus knew what God's will was. But I wonder if he knew why. I mean, he knew the result of it would be our salvation. But did he know why our salvation had to come that way? Did Jesus know why people could not be saved some other way, some way that did not require him to suffer and die?
Some of you might say, “Well, of course he knew. Jesus was the divine Son. Jesus was God and is God: God the Son.” Well, maybe. Jesus was fully divine, I'm not questioning that. But he as fully human, too. And after all, he did pray to God that, if there was some other way for salvation to come to people, then please, God, use that other way. That makes me think he was at least hoping, even at that late time, that there might still be some other way. But, ultimately, he did what he was supposed to do. Jesus followed God's will, all the way to the cross.
Submitting to God's will is sometimes not easy. It was not easy for Jesus. And it's not easy for us, either.
Now, the chances are that you and I will not be asked to do anything like Jesus did. It's possible. There are people in this world who are being arrested because of their faith. There are people in this world who are dying because of their faith. There's no guarantee that you and I won't be asked to do that, too.
It's not something that we think about much, though. In fact, I'm guessing that a lot of us, as we go through our lives, don't think very often about the whole idea of submitting to God's will. Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying that anyone here is not a Christian. I'm not saying that anyone here does not have faith in Jesus. And I'm certainly not pointing a finger at anyone else that I'm not pointing at myself, too.
What I'm saying is that, as we go through our lives, the whole “Thy will be done” thing tends to be more theoretical than real. When we do the things we do every day, we don't very often think “am I following God's will in this”? We may do that when we're facing the big things, when we're making the big decisions that we know will change our lives. When those things happen, we may pray and ask for God's guidance. Even then, though, we tend to spend a lot more time looking at all the options and weighing the pros and cons ourselves than we do praying and asking for God's guidance. When it comes to the decisions of everyday life, we very rarely consider that God's will is going to be involved at all.
But it is. God is not just the God of the Big Things. God is the God of everyday life, too. Now, I'm not saying we have to pray to God about every last detail of our lives. I don't know that God cares a lot whether we have Wheaties or Corn Flakes for breakfast. But God is not just involved in our lives when we have a big decision to make. God is involved in the common things that come up every day in our lives.
What we're talking about here is having a relationship with God. If we have a relationship with God, if we feel God's involvement in our everyday lives, then it'll be a lot easier for us to hear what God has to say to us when it is time to make a big decisions.
Jesus knew it was God's will that he go to the cross. He may or may not have understood why. But he was able to submit to God's will, whether he knew why or not, because of his relationship with God the Father. The gospels refer to Jesus praying on twenty-five different occasions. Some of these occasions are referred to in more than one gospel, but this count of twenty-five does not double up on any of them. There are twenty-five separate times that the gospels refer to Jesus praying. That's in addition to all the other times that Jesus, as a religious Jew, would have prayed just as a matter of course.
The point is that Jesus talked to God the Father a lot. There was a close relationship there. Jesus sought guidance all the time, all throughout his ministry and probably before that. Submitting to God's will was not something Jesus just decided to do on Palm Sunday. It was not something he just started doing at the end of his earthly life. It was something he did all his life. Because Jesus had made it a habit to submit to God's will, he was able to do it at crunch time, when quite literally his life depended on it.
The reason we call these things spiritual exercises is that they are like physical exercises. If we want them to work for us, we have to do them consistently. It's going to be hard for us to spend our lives sitting on the couch eating junk food and then go out and run a ten-K race. The only way we can run a ten-K is if we've made running a habit. And it's going to be hard for us to spend our lives ignoring God and then submit to God's will when our crunch time comes. The only way we can submit to God's will is if we've made submitting to God's will a habit.
Jesus was not fooled by the cheering of the crowds on Palm Sunday. He knew their celebration was meaningless. If Jesus celebrated anything on that Palm Sunday, it was the fact that he was submitting to God's will, and that he was close enough to God that he would be able to continue submitting to God's will, all the way to the cross.
So, on this Palm Sunday, let's follow the example Jesus gave us. Let's get close to God and stay close to God. Let's get into the habit of submitting to God's will. If we do, we'll be able to submit to God's will at crunch time. It may not be easy. We may not understand why it's God's will that we go through what we're going through. But we'll be able to go through it anyway. We'll be able to submit to God's will, and we'll be able to submit all the way, even if that way leads to the cross.
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