Help us to trust that our times are safe in your hand, O Lord ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“It is very beautiful over there,” said Thomas Edison. “Oh wow. Oh wow,” uttered Steve Jobs. Jane Austen said, “I want nothing but death.” Oscar Wilde is reported to have said, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Ludwig van Beethoven said, “Friends, applaud, the comedy is finished.” Harriet Tubman said “Swing low, sweet chariot.” Those are some reported famous last words. As we enter Holy Week, we are seeing the final words and actions of Jesus.
Those of you who participated in the Seven Last Word class in Lent know that Jesus’ last words are quotations from the Psalms, most notably Psalm 22. Throughout his final week, Jesus repeatedly turns to the Psalms – both signaling that his Passion is the fulfillment of the promises of Scripture and that in the Psalms we can find comfort and wisdom to guide us. The sermons this week will, therefore, focus on the Psalms.
Today’s is the 31st, and in particular, I want to focus on the final three verses that we heard: “But as for me, I have trusted in you, O LORD. I have said, ‘You are my God. My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies, and from those who persecute me. Make your face to shine upon your servant, and in your loving-kindness save me.’” This is a Psalm that Jesus would have known well and provided the strength he needed to endure his Passion. When, in the garden on the night of his arrest, he says “Not my will but thy will be done,” Jesus confidently puts his trust in God because he knows the truth of Psalm 31 – that our times are in God’s hand.
I’m not sure exactly what your suffering looks like, but because we are all human, I know that you have some. Perhaps it’s a health issue, a difficult decision, financial pressure, an addiction, depression, conflict at home or work, struggles with children or aging parents, a sin that you struggle to forgive, the doubts about faith that you have, uncertainty about the future. The list could go on, of course; life is certainly full of blessings, and it is also full of hardships. What a gift that Jesus gives us in his final and holy week – the gift of using the Psalms to find hope and faith in the midst of whatever it is that we are facing.
Palm Sunday and all of Holy Week are still a part of the Church’s season of Lent, and so that theme of death that we’ve been considering remains, as does the new life that God grants to us. Later in the liturgy when we get to the reading of the Passion, the theme of death is unmistakable. Death is present beforehand as well. Sin and Death are inexorably linked. As we know from the very beginning of Scripture in Genesis, it was the sin of eating fruit from the forbidden tree that lead to the eventual death of Adam, Eve, and their descendants. In Romans, St. Paul writes, “The wages of sin is death.” These two, Sin and Death, are two sides of the same coin, and in Holy Week, for us and for our salvation from both, Jesus battles Sin and Death.
We see this in his entrance into the Holy City. Jesus did not just happen to be in Jerusalem. No, he very intentionally went there at the start of the Passover celebration. Nothing about Holy Week is coincidental, it is all scripted by Jesus to make clear the love and mercy of God. The Passover celebration is the Jewish festival that calls to memory God’s saving deeds in Egypt. The Hebrew people were enslaved in Egypt, and God, through Moses, liberated them from their oppression. To accomplish this, there was a plague of death that swept through Egypt and killed the firstborn of every household. This disaster is what prompted the Pharaoh to relent and let the people go. However, this plague of death did not visit the homes of the Hebrew people – they had been instructed to kill a lamb and smear its blood on the doorposts of their homes. This would cause Death to pass over that house, hence the name Passover. The point though is this – through the blood of the lamb, the people are spared from death. Jesus knows this story well and his blood is what allows us to pass over from death to eternal life.
Sin though is also on Jesus’ mind on Palm Sunday. He enters the Holy City riding on a donkey. But he’s very specific, as we heard in the Psalm Sunday reading, that it is to be a donkey that has never been ridden. This sense of purity is tied to ideas from the Old Testament about sacrifices made for the atonement of Sin. The sinless one rides into the city on an animal that is evocative of a sin offering. By the time we read the Passion, we will see that Jesus became obedient even unto death and becomes the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. It’s not so much that God demanded or needed a sacrifice, but rather that through the sacrifice we can be assured of our forgiveness. We know that what needs to be done has been done.
As we heard in the Gospel reading in the Liturgy of the Word, when Jesus enters the city, he has a destination in mind. He goes right to the Temple and begins to drive out those who have corrupted it; he is beginning the process of cleansing sins. Centuries earlier, the prophet Ezekiel received a vision in which the presence of the LORD left the Temple, essentially turning it from the Temple to just a really large building. However, it was prophesied that one day, from the east, the Divine presence would return to the Temple and usher in the messianic age. Well, the Mount of Olives from which Jesus comes is to the east.
Palm Sunday sets off all sorts of connections. The donkey mirrors the descendants of King David who take the throne after him, and Israel had been waiting for the rightful heir of David to reclaim the throne. When the charge against Jesus is that he is the “King of the Jews,” this is no accident. The prophet Zechariah also spoke about the Messiah coming from the Mount of Olives on a donkey. In the shouts of “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” the crowd is quoting Psalm 118 and “Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest” is an allusion to Psalm 148. And when Jesus arrives in the Temple, he fulfills the promise to return the presence of God to it.
In these Palm Sunday actions, Jesus is choreographing the meaning and the purpose of Holy Week. It is to restore to God’s people what has been lost to Sin and Death. There’s a lovely prayer of blessing in the book of Numbers that says in part, “The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” In Psalm 31, we hear that through God’s faithful and loving kindness that we shall be saved; that the blessing of God shall be upon us. And this is the point of all these connections. It’s not “How neatly these puzzle pieces fit together! The Bible is such great literature.” No, these connections are assurances, signs that as Psalm 31 says, we can trust in God to rescue us from our enemies of Sin and Death. These connections are to assure us that we can find comfort and confidence in having our times be in God’s hands.
So much of our strife and anxiety comes from trying to clutch onto our time as if it were our own. Try as we might, we cannot make our own purpose. As St. Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” Sure, we can put our hearts, our priorities, our time, and our resources in other places, but we will not find peace there. We cannot determine the meaning of our lives or our legacy. Our times, our lives, are in God’s hands.
In Holy Week, Jesus, with Psalms on his lips to guide and bolster him, puts his time in God’s hands and wins for us victory over Sin and Death. At St. Luke’s, we have many opportunities to gather and hear this story of our salvation, to contemplate the Psalms of Holy Week, to come and see the difference that Christ makes, to be nourished by God’s grace. My prayer and encouragement for you is to intentionally and fully enter into this Holy Week and thereby practice putting our trust, our hope, our times in God’s hands instead of our own. In the reading from Philippians, we heard the opening line, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Thanks to the Psalms, we have an idea of what was on Jesus’ mind during his Passion. In words and actions, Jesus enacts Psalm 31 this week, saying “I have trusted in you, O LORD. You are my God, and my times are in your hands.” Take that prayer with you into Holy Week – Our times are in your hands, O LORD.
