Luke 19:28-48

Mark Smith preaching from Luke 19:28-48. 

Connect with us here:

Website: citychurchdublin.ie

Facebook: facebook.com/CityChurchDublin

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Today's reading is from Luke chapter 19, verses 28 to 48. And when he had said these things, he went up ahead, going up to Jerusalem. When he drew near the Bethphage in Bethany, at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of his disciples saying, Go into the village in front of you, where on entering you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, Why are you untying it? You shall say this, the Lord hasn't need of it. So those who were sent away, those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them. And they were untying the colt. Its owner said to them, Why are you untying the colt? And they said, The Lord has need of it. And they brought it to Jesus, and throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. And as they rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road, and as he was drawing near, already on the way down to Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord, peace in heaven and glory in the highest. And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, Teacher, rebuke your disciples. He said, He answered, I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out. And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that this make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you, and surround you, and hem you in every side, and tear you down on the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you do not you did not know the time of your visitation. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying, saying to them, It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words, and so reads God's word.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

If you've got a uh a Bible or at your phone, you can look along uh at Luke chapter 19 and that passage that uh that young read for us. So we're we're coming into the final week of Jesus' life today in the church calendar, is Palm Sunday. Luke doesn't record any palms, but it'd be weird if we called it cloak Sunday. Um, and we are coming into what Christians have for generations called Holy Week. Uh, not that it is the holiest week of the year, but it is a week that is uh heavy with meaning as we approach uh Good Friday and again uh next Sunday, Easter Day, uh Easter Sunday, the day where Jesus was resurrected bodily in history, uh, that day that changes uh all of human history and that has changed uh countless billions of people's lives. And uh so with that in mind, we turn to the beginning of that week in Palm Sunday, and they the proclamation of the disciples is that uh is that Jesus is bringing peace. And so the question then is where do you usually feel at peace? Sitting here this morning, do you feel at peace? Where is the most peaceful place that you escape to? Maybe it's out in nature lying on the ground because you like to count. Or maybe you're an indoor cat like me, and it's more about being cosied up by a fire. Or maybe it's getting on a plane and sitting on a white sandy beach. Maybe peace is not a place, but the principles that you live by, the ways that you deal with the chaotic voices inside your head, or the uncertainty of your life, or the anxiety that you feel. Certainly, our world could do with more peace. Ben mentioned a couple of places in his prayers that weren't even on my list. We could talk about Gaza or Iran or South Sudan or northern Nigeria or Ukraine, and the list could go on and on and on. Places that could do with more peace. And the thing is, we don't even need to look all that far across the sea to know that more peace is required in a land like ours, in a city like ours, where there's community rivalries, tensions, racism, and bigotry. And we can go even closer than that. I imagine every one of us has some degree of family tension. Things that have gone unresolved and unsaid that upset the delicate equilibrium even in our own relationships. And then there's the need for peace internally. In our own minds, the disquiet that we feel, the worry that disturbs our internal equilibrium and spills out into all of the ways that we react, particularly to the people that we love. Peace is easily fractured, isn't it? Yeah, we're all chasing it, we're all looking for more of it. In the relationships we pursue, the successes that we chase, the control that we exert. So again, sitting here today, do you feel at peace? Do you know what makes for peace? That's the question that Jesus raises in this passage as he looks at Jerusalem, he says, Oh, that you would have known the things that make for peace. Do you know? Do you know the things that make for peace? Because the shock of this passage is that peace is not a strategy, it's not a state of mind, it's not something you build, it's someone you meet. Peace is a person. That's our first point this morning. Peace is a person. The disciples run on ahead of Jesus as he rides into Jerusalem and proclaim to the crowds that peace has arrived. When? When Jesus arrives. As he rides into Jerusalem, they're saying the peace of God has come near to human beings. And in the details around that Palm Sunday triumphal entry, Luke gives us a glimpse of what kind of peace-bringing person this Jesus really is. And the first thing that we see there is that this peacebringer, this Jesus, is one who is in complete control. That makes sense, right? If you're going to meet somebody who's actually going to give you peace in your life, one of the things that you would like for them to have is complete control. Because one of the things that we do when we feel anxious and upset is we try and grab control in order to achieve that peace ourselves. And what Luke shows us here is that Jesus is the peacebringer, and one of the reasons why he's a peacebringer is because he is in complete control. He's not swept along by an overly enthusiastic crowd. He is deliberately orchestrating events all along the way. He descends the disciples to a specific place with specific instructions to a specific animal, a cult, as a baby donkey, right? Or a young donkey. And he specifically refers to himself as Lord, not teacher, not rabbi, not say the rabbi needs it. No, the Lord. The one who is in charge has need of it. The master, the one who is in control. He says, go and tell them that. See Jesus' self-understanding here. He's being proclaimed as the peacebringer, but he understands that he is the one who is in sovereign control. That is the kind of control that he is exerting. Not influence, not popularity, sovereign rule. That is what all of the symbols point to. A couple of weeks ago, Patty's day, our uh our political class, so the the Taoiseach, the Irish Prime Minister, and uh loads of other government ministers, where do they go? They head over to America, head over to the uh to the White House, and every year they give uh a crystal bowl of shamrock uh to the president. So they were over there and they gave the shamrock, and uh there was loads of uh Irish-esque symbolism. So everything was in green, okay, of course, and there's the shamrocks, and uh the vice president J.D. Vance had his shamrock socks because he's so cool. Um and all of the symbolism spoke of Irishness. Every attention to detail, every symbol communicated something. And it's the same with what Jesus is doing here. Every little thing that he is concerned about, every little thing that he is orchestrating, is telling us something, it's communicating to us the kind of person he is, the kind of peace bringer he wants to be in your life. And so when he sends the disciples to find a young donkey, a cult, he is deliberately thinking in his mind of an Old Testament prophecy. See, back in the Old Testament, there was a prophet, a man called Zechariah, Zechariah chapter 9, this was written about 600 years before Jesus' birth, says that when the king comes, God's forever king, God's Messiah, when he comes, he's going to come riding on a donkey. So let me read to you Zechariah 9:9. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shad a light, O daughter of Jerusalem. Behold, your king is coming to you, righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the full of a donkey. The king's coming. He's gonna save you, he's gonna redeem you, he's gonna change your life, he's gonna bring you peace, and he's humble. How do we know that he's humble? He's riding on a donkey. The colt, the foal of a donkey. Here is God's chosen king in complete control, in utter sovereignty over events, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Because this king isn't just in complete control, this king is also uniquely humble. You need those two things together, right? You just imagine it. Imagine if somebody says, right, I'm going to give you peace and I'm gonna do it by having complete control over your life, but no humility. What there's another word for that. It's called tyranny. If somebody has complete control over everything that you say and do, and yet has no humility, no regard, no love for you, that's tyrannical rule, right? Now you could flip, you could flip the pendulum the other way, and you say, well, imagine somebody is like, oh, I want to bring you peace because I really, really, really love you. And say, okay, can you can you effect any of the change that I need in order to achieve peace in my life? And they go, I'm not in control of anything. Do you see? You need both complete control and unique humility. That's what Jesus brings to us. That is how he is able to be the peace bringer. The world offers us power without care or care without power, and Jesus alone brings both of these together. The donkey in Zechariah's prophecy is supposed to be deliberately jarring to the first reader. It would have been jarring to see Jesus on a donkey riding into Jerusalem rather than, you say, a war horse, a white steed. It's jarring in our minds, and why? A donkey of all things? This is clearly not the arrival of Air Force One. You know, Jesus hasn't stepped down the steps of Air Force One and got into that big black sedan they called the beast. He's not like Julius Caesar riding at the head of columns of centurions and Roman soldiers. No, this is this is kingship, folks, but not as we knew it. Jesus rides on a donkey. A beast of burden, a lesser being in the world's eyes to majestic horses. G.K. Chestern, who was a uh uh a Roman Catholic theologian, wrote a wonderful poem called The Donkey. Let me, it's short, let me read it for you. He said, Um, when fishes flew and forests walked and figs grew upon thorns, some moment when the moon was blood, then surely I was born, with monstrous head and sickening cry, and ears like errant wings, the devil's walking parody of all four-footed things, the tattered outlaw of the earth, of ancient crooked will, starve, scourge, deride me. I am dumb. I keep my secret still. Fools, I too had my hour. One far fierce hour and sweet. There were shouts about my ears and palms before my feet. This is the way that Christianity works. This is the way of Jesus. This is the way of the good news, what Christians call the gospel. That it looks ridiculous to the world's eyes. But it carries within it something sublime, something majestic, something world-changing. That foolish donkey carried on its back, the peace bringer. The king comes as lord and as servant, and in less than a week he will be crowned, not upon a throne, but upon a cross. The Old Testament prophecies that we read don't speak of a warlord but a prince of peace, righteous and having salvation, humble and mounted on a donkey. With this odd juxtaposition, Jesus perfectly embodies both meekness and majesty, utter control and unique humility. This is why he is the only person that can bring you peace. This is why peace is a person. To know peace is to know Jesus, to come and meet this king. How should we respond to such a peace? Well, the right response is that of the disciples. They burst out in praise, they shout for joy, they say, Blessed is the king. Verse 38, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace, peace in heaven and glory in the highest. At the start of Jesus' life, Luke records that the angels showed up. They met some shepherds out watching their flocks by night, and the angels proclaimed peace to them. Peace on earth. Jesus' arrival into human history was the arrival of the peace bringer. And now, as we approach the final week of his life, we come to the climax, the culmination of his peace-bringing work. Because on the cross, he will bring the peace of heaven to the hearts of humans by forgiving our sin. That's why Paul can say later that he made peace by his blood shed on the cross. If this is the peace bringer, then praise is the only right response. Not only right, not only appropriate, but inevitable. The Pharisees, because the Pharisees are always there to kind of ruin a good time, they they turn to Jesus and say to him, Teacher, not Lord, teacher, rebuke your disciples. Tell them to shut up. What's Jesus' response? I love this. It's the only time that this is recorded in the four gospels. He says, I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out. There might be a little bit of a joke there. Maybe. But certainly what it's saying is that the praise of Jesus, the praise of Jesus as the peace bringer is the most appropriate, most inevitable thing in all creation. It's unavoidable. Even the stones speak and praise his glorious grace. Does it elicit praise in your life? Do you revel in it? Do you enjoy it? Do you speak about it? Sing about it? Delight in it? Rash it relish it? Revel in it? Or does that just sound like a fanciful idea? It doesn't really it doesn't really touch the sides of the tumult and anxiety that's swirling inside of you. This is this is the king of peace. The king of peace would speak peace to your life. With his complete control, with his perfect humility. And sadly the Pharisees couldn't see that peace because religious people often cannot see the peace that Jesus brings because they're always anxious, always insecure, never at peace, because they're always thinking, have I done enough? Am I good enough? The tragedy is, as Jesus goes on, that you can end up missing the peace that he offers. That's point number two. So peace can be missed. You know, in this in this moment of, you mean imagine in your mind's eye, play it out like a uh like a film reel in your mind's eye. You see this uh this crowd swirling around Jesus, and he is uh he's riding on this uh on this cult, and everybody is cheering. And they crest over this hill. This hill on the Mount of Olives. And as they crest over it, Jerusalem rises from the horizon, and you see the temple might that great kind of cuboidal structure of Solomon's temple in the old city of David. And Jesus glimpses it for the first time. And everybody's cheering. It's so loud. Everybody's like, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Peace on earth. And what's Jesus doing? He weeps. He sees Jerusalem for the first time, and it breaks his heart. He weeps over her. The city of David, the city of kings. Why? Because they've missed him. They've missed the peacebringer. They're going to reject him. They're going to murder him. They've missed their opportunity. Jesus weeps the same way we would weep when we watch someone walking headlong towards disaster. You know, those people, those people who we love who have made decisions and choices in their life, and maybe that has been you, and people have weeped over you of the decisions that you've made. Those people who won't be, who won't be told, who won't be reasoned with, who won't be helped, who won't listen. And it breaks your heart. He feels the grief. Because they might have wanted peace, but they didn't want the peace bringer. They thought that peace would mean political liberation, national strength, control, and domination of enemies, but peace doesn't come from a change in circumstances. Real peace comes when you are reconciled with the God who made you. Real peace comes when you are brought into right relationship with your creator, when you know that the worst thing that you have done, the thing that you are most ashamed of, has been forgiven, and that you've been transformed from the inside out. These are the things that make for peace, the peace that King Jesus brings. But with tears staying fast, Jesus says that they didn't recognize it. They didn't recognize the time, they didn't recognize him. They didn't know the day that peace visited them. They had the scriptures in their hand pointing to the peacemaker. They had the miracles, the signs of the kind of peace that he would bring eternally. And they missed him. They missed him. And the tragic consequence of missing the peace bringer is destruction. It's chaos. It's judgment. That is what he says. Verse 42 Would that you have known on this day the things that make for peace, but are now hidden from your eyes, for the days will come upon ye when your enemies will set a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children with ye, and they will not leave one stone upon another in ye, because you did not know the time of your visitation. That is, you did not know when peace was right before your eyes. Again, remember, as Jesus speaks these words, he does not speak them with any delight. He speaks them with tears streaking down his face. And he speaks of something that did happen. And destroyed the city of Jerusalem, tore down that temple, brick by brick, offered profane sacrifice on it. And that temple was never rebuilt again. Jerusalem was destroyed. No more sacrifice, no more priests, no more holy city. This is the tear-stained warning to every one of us. Rejecting God's king, rejecting the peace that Jesus offers will always lead to destruction, to judgment. Jesus' warning here is stark, but it's also personal. Nine times in these verses, he uses the second person singular pronoun, you. You didn't know. You missed it. You didn't turn. You nine times. You missed the opportunity to find peace. What a tragic thing to know. What's still worse, a tragic thing to hear for ourselves. But the warning here is stark that there is an opportunity offered to you by Jesus to find peace, to know the forgiveness of sins, to know the restoration of your life, to know peace with God and with one another. Do not let that opportunity pass you by. Do not let that opportunity lapse. Paul, again, writing later, says, now is the time of salvation. That there will come a time not when God will judge Jerusalem again, but when God will wrap up all of history and judge the world. And people rejected it. And the people here who reject it are the most religious people in the world. They're the people who grew up with the scriptures, who grew up knowing their Bible, going to church, and they still missed Jesus. They knew the language, they knew the system, and they missed it. We're still working out how the um how to do kind of after-service stuff in screen one. Um, because you don't all have to kind of file past me uh anymore and kind of look at me awkwardly in the eyes and say bye-bye. Uh so what I've been doing is I've been standing down here. If anybody wants to come and talk to me, I don't know if you've noticed that. But what I'll say now is if you're here and you know you've you've been missing the peace that Jesus offers, if you know that he's been holding out something to you and you've been rejecting it for so long, don't leave, still having rejected the peace that Jesus offers you today. Don't miss it. Come down and talk to me. We'll pray together. We pray that you will receive the peace of knowing that Jesus forgives your sins and has restored you to new life. I'll be right there. They missed it. And that was a tragedy. Jesus enters Jerusalem. And as he does so, he gives us a glimpse of how peace might be restored. That's our final point. Peace can be missed, but it can also be restored. You know, verses 45 to 48, a very famous scene where Jesus enters into the temple. Excuse me, my stride. Um, he enters into the temple and he sees the the money changers and the sellers. Money changers because you had to have a particular currency in the temple. And so if you were coming from, you know, overseas, you had to go to the bureau de change. And like most bureaux de changes, they stuck the arm in, and you got a bad kind of you got a bad rate for your um for your exchange, and there's people selling livestock and birds, all the sacrifices for the temple. And Jesus overturns their tables. Quick sidebar, why does Jesus overturn the table? Is he just kind of he's he's just against free market capitalism? Um, he's just not, or he's just having a bad day. He's already emotional, and of course, it's kind of spilled over into anger. Neither of those things are true. Why does Jesus turn over the temple uh the tables in the temples? Uh it is because of where they were. The place where all of this market was set up was a place called the Court of the Gentiles. You and I, I imagine most of you in the room, we're all Gentiles, right? We don't come from a Jewish heritage, right? And the court of the Gentiles was the closest place that you and I could get to worshiping God. Everywhere else, closer in the court of the women, the court of the men, the court of the priests, holy place, the most holy place. They were all excluded to us. Great big uh keep out signs. In fact, there was a sign between the court of the Gentiles and the court of the women saying, if a gentile crosses this line, they are responsible for their own death. Okay, so pretty serious. That's as far as you could get to worship God. And what had they done to it? They turned it into a market. And so you're coming as a broken-hearted Gentile, wanting to know the true and living God. You're wanting to come to a place of peace and of prayer and of reflection and solitude where you could cry to God and say, Have mercy upon me, a sinner. And what's going on? Well, there's a there's a there's a sheep running around you, and there's there's people bartering, selling doves and money changers trying to get business over here, and all of your prayers are disturbed and they fall in vain, and so that's why Jesus says, This should be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. This isn't random anger from Jesus. Jesus says that the temple was to be a place of prayer, a symbol of God making peace with his people through sacrifice, but it had been corrupted. And the true meaning erased. Imagine you break a bone or you have a medical issue and you head to hospital. You walk into hospital, and all they're interested in you doing or interested in doing is selling you merch. Like your shoulder, your shoulder's broken or whatever, your clavicles hanging off, whatever it is, and they're like, Do you want to buy a t-shirt? And you're like, hello, you've missed the point. Your purpose is gone. But in what Jesus does and says, He shows us how peace might be restored. You know, in order for peace to be restored, sometimes often, maybe always, it requires confrontation. You know, if you want peace in your life, you're gonna have to face up to some stuff. Some stuff that you need to turn away from, that you need to repent of, things that need to change. See, the king of peace is not passive. Yes, he weeps, but he confronts us. Sometimes lasting peace requires disruption, a cleansing, a removal. Has the king of peace turned over some tables in your life? Has he flipped over some stuff and gone, no, that's not how we do things in my kingdom? If he has never disrupted anything in your life, never overturned anything, never challenged anything, then don't be surprised if the peace that you feel is easily broken. If it feels shallow, if it feels that it's built on something that cannot hold. If the Jesus that you're following never challenges you, never disagrees with you, never overturns the tables in your life, then how do you know you're not just following an idealized version of your own preferences? Peace will be restored through confrontation. But peace is restored also by listening to the voice of the king. Luke concludes this chapter by saying, verse 47, that he was teaching daily in the temple, and the chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything that they could do. For all the people were hanging on his words. How do you know peace? Listen to the king. Listen to Jesus. Listen to his words. Hang on his every word. In the last week of Jesus' life, as chaos swirled around him. Those who delighted in him listened to his words. His word is the sure and steady anchor in the chaos of life. His word is the reassuring calm in the midst of uncertainty. It is how we know his unwavering control and his gentle humility. Together, they are what make for peace. We started our time looking at this passage saying that everybody is searching for peace. Everybody wants it. You'll not find it trying to exert more control over your life. You'll not find it trying to define your own identity. You'll not find it by just avoiding authority and Jesus' claim over your life. Peace is not found by ruling your life yourself, but by surrendering to the king who rules it perfectly. He is a king unlike any other. He comes in humility, he offers peace, he weeps when rejected, he gives his life for his people. And those, those who hear his voice, those who hear his voice and follow him, and find in him all of the things that they've been searching for all along. What they find is true and lasting peace that overflows with joy, praise, and gladness. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we praise you that you are the peacemaker, that the sovereign Lord would shed his blood, that would come in complete and unique humility to save the likes of us, to forgive our sins, to calm the raging seas inside each of us, to bring us home. May we not be those who miss what makes for peace. But who invite you in, even though that means some tables in our hearts need to be overturned. But because we know that you are the one who has the words of eternal life. We hang on your every word. Restore peace, deepen it. We ask. That as we journey into this week, this holy week, and have the cross ever before our eyes as we come to Good Friday. Where we know deep in our souls the lengths that you went to to achieve peace for us. Give us the help of your spirit. We ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

If you found this helpful or want to know more about City Church Dublin, visit our website found in the links below.