“From Palms to Passion”
Original sermon given on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025 written and delivered by Pastor Jeff Leininger at First Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church.
Watch the sermon live.
“From Palms to Passion”
Luke 23.1-49
Luke 23.1-49
In the name of the Living God and the crucified Christ. Amen.
We’ve gone from Palms to Passion this morning at First Saint Paul’s. This is no accident, for what we do in worship is intended to reflect what happened in Jerusalem nearly 2,100 years ago. During Holy Week, Jesus also went from Palms to Passion. If it seems rather jarring or disjointed for us — starting with Palms waving and children singing and shouts of “Hosanna!” and then shifting to fists shaking, women weeping, and shouts of “Crucify Him!” — if this seems odd to us, then perhaps we can just begin to understand what Jesus went through and know more fully the purpose behind the passion.
Let’s start with the Pilgrims just outside of Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday. It’s called “The Triumphal Entry” because the religious and patriotic and political furvor had reached heights perhaps never before seen in Jerusalem. It’s all centered on one figure, Jesus, who embodies the hopes and dreams of thousands. The whole scene is unmistakably messianic: the palm branches a nationalistic symbol of liberation, the riding on a colt, the fulfillment of prophecy, the shouts of “Hosannah” as a cry for God’s triumph over enemies, the “blessed is he,” the acclamation for a king expected establish a new messianic reign.
But then it all seems to go so terribly, tragically wrong. A lot happens that week, and none of it appears very good to our immediate, earthly eyes. Rather than being received in the temple as the greatest teacher and rabbi, Jesus cleanses it, confronting both their pocketbooks and their pride (that never goes well). Rather than ruling in triumph over Jerusalem, Jesus will weep over her and prophesy her horrible destruction. Rather than recognized as messiah and king, his origins, his motives and his authority are all questioned. A trap is sprung to have him betrayed, arrested, and arraigned. Rather than being surrounded by an army of loyal followers ready to die for him, he’ll be abandoned. By sundown on Friday, he’ll breathe a last, excruciating breath in seeming defeat. From Palms to Passion.
If you didn’t know the full story — if you had only read the events of today and experienced only this chapter, you might wonder how this could have all gone so terribly wrong. Perhaps you might want to plead with this pathetic Jesus figure — just say something, anything, and Pilate will let you go free. He seems to care more about your life than you. Or perhaps you might be filled with righteous anger over the injustice of it all — an innocent man beat, bound, and dragged back and forth, between what in the end will be three religious hearings and three civil ones, all in the course of 4-5 hours. Pilate acquiesces either to save his own skin (he was under pressure from his boss to keep the peace), or so that he can just be done with it and get to the baths early on his day off, as was his custom. Or perhaps you might read this Palms to Passion story as a classic tragedy — Greek, Roman, or Shakespearean: this Hero, Jesus, can only be himself, but who he is will mean his inevitable destruction.
But you’d be wrong in all this. This is not the last analysis, a human tragedy, a miscarriage of justice, or the sad story of a misguided martyr. It is, in fact, a divine drama unfolding for us and for the salvation of the world.
You see, it is clear from Holy Scripture that Jesus at any point could have stopped the whole process, got off the Passion bus. I was struck by this as I re-read St. Luke’s account of the passion as we heard it this morning. Pick a moment — even the worst and most difficult — at any point he could have said, “No, enough, not for me.” I know I would have.
When he gets on that donkey and rides into Jerusalem to die — why, in Revelation 19 at the end of all things, the Lord rides a white horse of victory, his eyes like flames of fire, and upon his head a diadem of many crowns. All the armies of heaven ride with him in the Apocalypse (Revelation 19.11-16). He could have conquered Jerusalem on that Palm Sunday in the flash of a moment.
When he’s questioned before Pilate, not only could Christ have declared his own innocence, he could have turned and questioned him, confronting the governor’s own sin and confounding him with all the great truths of the universe.
When this pathetic puppet-king Herod taunts him, asks for an entertaining miracle, the Lord could have picked any one of the many he had already performed — water into wine, healing a blind man, multiplying the loaves. Indeed, the Lord had raised a four-days dead man to life but a few days earlier.
When the soldiers array him in mockery, adorning him with a purple cloak over his bloody back, he surely could have revealed his full glory to them, blinding them with clothes gleaming like lighting as at the Transfiguration.
When the rabble cries out, “Crucify him!” three times, out-shouting Pilate’s protestations, the growing noise echoing throughout the courtyard, with a single word — as he had calmed the raging winds and the waves — with a single word he could have silenced them all.
Or at the sixth hour, when he hung on the cross and darkness likewise hung over the whole land for three hours: at any moment, he could have shone forth as the light of the world, brighter than the sun, blinding all in his unveiled glory.
Yet, he didn’t. And to understand why is to understand the most important thing you’ll ever need to know. This was God’s appointed plan for the world and Christ’s love in action for us.
It was God’s appointed plan. St. Luke, after he writes this gospel will write part two, second scroll: the Book of Acts. (This is not so much a sequel but a necessary second act). In it, he records the first Christian sermon ever preached at Pentecost. Peter stands up and proclaims, “This Jesus (was) delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God…” (Acts 2.23). In the account of Palms to Passion, we see God’s greatest act of Passover deliverance. God would intervene into our human bondage with a mighty hand and outstretched arm and offer the Passover Lamb, whose shed blood would bring redemption. After being led to the slaughter, he would rise on the third day, passing through death to life, in victory over the greatest enemies of death and hell. This was God’s plan of salvation, his “exodus event” for the whole world. It was for this very reason that Christ was sent to earth — to take on our flesh and blood, die our death, and bring eternal life to all who believe. It was no human tragedy, but a divine drama of God’s intervention into our human story.
This was Christ’s love in action for you and me. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends,” Jesus told them on the night he was betrayed. He called them “friends” and he calls us “friends” too. What a friend, indeed, to go from Palms to Passion for us. At any moment — so easily, so understandably — he could have turned away. (Any one of us would have.) Yet, he endured it all, his divine heartbeat of love pulsating through every moment. “I will ride that donkey, wear that robe, receive those blows, carry that cross, bear that sin, die that death.” And I tell you that his kind of love is not only life changing, it is world changing. It pulsates even throughout eternity.
From Palms to Passion. It would be the greatest irreverence to think that you’ve gone through something like our Lord. Yet, I think we all know in small ways what it’s like for life not to work out as we planned, for things to go unexpectedly, terribly, perhaps even tragically wrong. But as we cannot watch the events of Holy Week unfold with earthly eyes, so with how we read the story of our own lives. To read the world only through the lens of tragedy, or injustice, or exasperation, is to live a life of emptiness, is to miss the divine drama.
God’s plan is still at work. His love pulses through it all, from Palms to Passion.
Come soon, Lord Jesus. Amen.