Amen. You may be seated. We are once again in the Gospel of Luke today. Chapter 19, beginning in verse 28. The text is printed there on page 10 in your bulletin if you wanna look at it. Very familiar story. And when Jesus had said these things, he went on ahead going up to Jerusalem. When he drew near to Bethphage and Bethany at the mount that is called Olivet, he sent two of the 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 yet sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you why are you untying it, you shall say this, the Lord has need of it. So those who were sent went away and found it just as he had told them, and as 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 he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near, already on the way down the 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. Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, teach a rebuke, your disciples. 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 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 on every side, and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, it is written, my house shall be a house of prayer, but you've made it a den of robbers. And he was teaching daily in the temple. The chief priests and 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. This is the word of the Lord. And now, our God, we ask you to move in us by your spirit and just open this text to our hearts and change our lives through it. In Jesus we do pray, amen. Well, every day, every one of us human beings uses two mental tools without noticing it. One of these is a line, the other of these is a circle. The line is how you narrate your life, and you do, you have a story of you, you have memories, you have a certain imagination of what your future will be. And in fact, if you think about it, this way of narrating your life, this kind of storyline of your life that you tell, it is very much tied up with your identity, isn't it? If you had no memories, would you even know who you are? And if I want to know who you are, I wanna find out who are you as a person, I'm gonna find some way of asking about your story. That's your line, you use it every single day. The other tool is a circle. The circle is how you prioritize your life. Because all of you got some of the stuff that's closer to the center. This is what's really important. This is what's worth pursuing. And you've also got stuff that's kind of more out on the periphery, just not so very important. The circle is the realm of our, all important free choice that we hold up so high in the modern world. Choices, what to put in the center, what to push to the periphery. Well, it's interesting that when Jesus came preaching what he calls the gospel, the good news of the kingdom of God coming to earth, In preaching that gospel of the kingdom, Jesus right-sized, Joe Amato taught me that word and I love it, Jesus right-sized all the human lines and circles. He just kind of shrunk them down to the right size that they really are. Because as he preaches the good news of the kingdom of God, this is the story. This is the big story. In which all of our micro-stories are actually situated, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, this is the story we're all in. And it kind of right sizes our tiny little stories. And the kingdom of God is more than that. It's the central reality, isn't it? It is the very central good around which Jesus wants all of our other values to be arranged. So we have a... macro line, and we have a macro circle, as it were. And this very, very familiar triumphal entry story, you've probably heard it a zillion times, it captures both of those dimensions of the kingdom, the line and the circle. And what I wanna do today, just very quickly, I want to ask how this story, thinking of our lines, how it shapes our expectations, how this story actually should shape the way we kind of narrate the trajectory of God's work in the world. Like where is, what is the story of God's work in the world and where is it going? What should we expect from God as he works in the world? This story speaks to that. And in addressing our lines and our expectations, I'd like to also just look briefly at how this story addresses our Christian witness. How are you and I to share the good news about this king we just read about in a world that insists that every one of us be the center of our own circle? Jesus, I wanna talk about two things today. Jesus brings a new future and he brings a new center. Let's look at both of these. In verses 28 through 40, Jesus brings a new future. Now, the sheer familiarity of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, I think. We just know that story so well. You've seen, you know, little cartoons in children's books, but it can blind us to what an enormous storyline Jesus is compressing into this little scene. One thing you'll notice right away if you know your Bible well is how far back into Israel's story Jesus is reaching here, because if you go all the way back to the first book of the Bible, Genesis 49, where Father Jacob is blessing his 12 sons before he dies, when he gets to Judah, he says there's gonna be a king that's gonna come from Judah who will carry a scepter, and the language is that this king will bind his foal to the vine, his donkey's colt to the choice vine. So it's this very picturesque image of a king taking his donkey's colt and tethering it up to a rich grape vine. He's not riding on a war horse. He's not trampling over his enemies. He's on a donkey. Donkeys are kind of placid. Stubborn, but placid. And his rule brings peace. He rules a land full of grapevines, a land of plenty, and a land of... of goodness, where we can sit under our grapevines and have peace. And that early donkey image, in connection with this king from Judah, probably explains why, as you move on in the story of the Bible, say in the time of the judges, many times the sons of the judges would ride lots of donkeys. You see this with Jair, the Gileadite, and Abdon, the Perithonite. Their sons would ride donkeys as they ruled the land. It's strange that lost donkeys, you'll remember, are the occasion for Saul's coming to the throne. It's as he goes out to look for a bunch of lost donkeys that he's anointed king. Young David, as the kingship is about to change, young David comes riding into Saul's camp. He'll eventually slay the giant, but he's leading a donkey full of provisions. The usurper Absalom, that wicked son of David who tried to overthrow King David, He is pulled by his hair from a donkey right before he is murdered for his sin. And Solomon rides his father David's own donkey to his anointing as king. And all of these very peaceful images of kingship throughout the Old Testament, they become focused in the prophets. on this coming Messiah figure, the son of David, and you know this text from Zechariah, the prophet Zechariah, really well. Listen to how he describes the coming Messiah. He says, shout aloud, 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 fold of a donkey. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem and the battle bow shall be cut off and he shall speak peace to the nations. His rule shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth. That's the coming king. And so all that is just captured here, that backstory. But Jesus is not just on this kingdom line. He's not just reaching way back in the storyline. He is also really projecting a very striking image of the future. And I do think a lot of Christians in the 21st century have lost and understanding of this. Because he is riding into the city on a donkey with all this Old Testament imagery in the background, he is absolutely prompting his disciples, they should expect a king. And a kingdom. Because kings rode into conquered cities this way, they should not just expect a king and a kingdom, but a victorious king. And a victorious kingdom riding in triumph into the city of God. Now here's the problem. My friend Alistair Roberts has written on this and it really made me think. He said the problem with us as we're reading this is we already know the rest of the gospel, don't we? How does the gospel of Luke end like all the gospels do? It ends with the cross where Jesus is killed. And then, of course, you have the resurrection. And in Luke's case, you get almost right up to where Jesus goes back to the Father, what we call the ascension. But that's the end of the gospel. And so it's very easy to think that the kind of climax of Jesus' whole story is he's murdered, and then he rises from the dead and goes back to the Father. And that's just kind of it. That's the climax of the story. But before he even gets to Jerusalem, in this story, Jesus is telling his disciples, y'all need to keep expecting more. Because more is coming. In fact, we can say it quite strongly. Jesus' sufferings and death, even His resurrection, I would even go so far as to say His ascending back to the Father's right hand, all of that is just means to the end of being Lord of heaven and earth. Do you notice the song of the angels the night Jesus was born is echoed in the song of the disciples here? That night Jesus was born, heavenly hosts are shouting out, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace. In this image of the king, now a grown man, riding into Jerusalem as an obvious conquering figure, victorious figure, all these throngs of disciples from earth are kind of shouting up to heaven, glory to God in the highest and in heaven peace. And the Pharisees, those cranky religious people, are just annoyed by this. They tell Jesus, make your disciples be quiet, and he says, listen to me, if these angels and disciples stopped shouting out my praises, the rocks would start crying out. Because from the angelic host down to the rocks and dust of the earth, creation says, yes, Lord, the King. It will be a kingdom of peace, but it will be a kingdom. And it will put down, with God's own authority, all of the kingdoms. As the prophet Isaiah told us to expect, of the increase of his government and of peace, there will just be no end. And so I want to ask, how does this story shape our expectations? It is actually amazing to me, I have heard this from Presbyterian pulpits, it is amazing to me how many Christians, including us Presbyterians, many of us, will actually think and say that the next major world-changing event after Jesus ascends to the Father is his second coming. Some of you think this way. You think the last major event in world history from God's side of things was the ascension of Jesus back to the Father, and now we're just kind of sitting here waiting for the second coming of Jesus. That's the next big thing. And in fact, the kingdom is really gonna get started then. You know, we have these brothers and sisters in the body of Christ who are called dispensationalists, and they have this kind of funny teaching. They say that God has two plans, one for the ethnic Jews and another plan for everybody else, and when Jesus came the first time, he offered the kingdom to the ethnic Jews. They rejected it, so now God kind of put that plan on pause. We're living in what they call a parenthesis, where God's kind of doing whatever else he's gonna do, saving people in the world, and then when Jesus comes again, that's gonna be the end of the parenthesis, and then the kingdom gets started again, Which we believe is deeply unbiblical, but in truth, you and I often live like we're in some kind of parenthesis right now. Like this whole thing that is the Kingdom of Christ, between His sitting at the right hand of the Father and His coming again to put the last enemy down, which is death, this is a parenthesis? We're just kind of sitting here waiting? Well, but we can easily read the story of Jesus, you know, and kind of think that's what, isn't that what happened to Jesus? I mean, what is the story of Jesus? He's a victim, the cross, then he's vindicated, the resurrection, and then he departs and he goes to live in heaven with the Father. Isn't that what we should expect, too? That's gonna be our story, too. We just suffer and wait and suffer and wait, and then we are resurrected from the dead, that's our vindication, then we go live with God in heaven. Isn't that just the exact same storyline? No. No, because when Jesus went back to the Father, he sat down to rule and reign over all things, and that is what you and I are living in. And that other parenthesis way of understanding history, what it codifies is passivity and pessimism. We are sitting, waiting for Jesus, expecting just to suffer, suffer, suffer. Will we suffer? Absolutely. You and I will live the cross every day of our lives, but it's just this expectation in history that things just get worse and worse and worse, and the enemies of Christ triumph. We just kind of sit and wait, and we're just kind of pessimistic and passive. That is not what Jesus leads us to expect. This king sitting on this donkey in this story now sits on the throne of the universe, and he is not wringing his hands and just praying until he can return. He is ruling. He is reigning. He rose and ascended for this image that we see here, to be this to the nations. So, church, our expectations, we should preach about the atonement on the cross? Absolutely, that is, without that, there's no life, no hope. Jesus paid for our sins. He gave us his righteousness. We should preach about that. We should preach about what we call justification. We can stand before God, cleansed of our sins and righteous in his sight through Jesus. Amen to that. The cross, the resurrection, preach it, amen. But we should also preach not just our justification through the cross and resurrection, We should preach the sanctification, the sanctifying of everything in life now, in every sphere of human endeavor now, through the power of the Holy Spirit poured out by this King now. So our expectations are not exhausted by the cross and resurrection. Our expectations are not exhausted even by the ascension. Our expectations look to this promise that is depicted here of what this ascended Lord, this reigning Lord will be among all nations. And we should pray and pray and pray as we do every Sunday. God bring all peoples of the world to bow to your authority, to sing your praises like these disciples, to live in your peace. Amen? That's the vision for history. And the shape of Christianity that arises from that vision of the future, it will be triumphant without being triumphalistic. It'll be extremely humble, like this king. It'll be full of grace, full of love for fellow sinners, full of hospitality, very, very patient, because our king will build his kingdom by his own gracious means, in his own good time. We do not bring it about through muscle and violence or anything of the sort, or even because we're just so all persuasive. We are humble, we are patient, we are loving, we are gracious, but we are absolutely confident as we go forth to the work of this kingdom because the gates of hell, Jesus said, will not stand before this kingdom. And so we are active, we're not just sitting on our hands waiting for Jesus. We will not valorize passivity or pessimism in the name of this king. Jesus brings a new future. He also brings a new center. Because as you work through that first scene there with the disciples and the rocks even about to cry out, then in verses 41 through 48 you see a new center. Because not only does Jesus illuminate the past and the future of this kingdom storyline, when he gets close to the city, and especially when he comes into the city, he rather forcefully asserts that the center of God's kingdom, the center of God's cosmic plan, is no longer a city, but a person. It's no longer Jerusalem, it's Jesus. Notice how this happens. His arrival focuses, obviously, on kind of two locations, as from some distance away, he sees the city, Jerusalem, and then when he gets there, he enters into the temple to even get more to the center of things. Now, you'll remember, again, if you know your Bible well, throughout the Old Testament, There's this kind of gradual narrowing of the geographic focus in the Old Testament from kind of the world to the land of Canaan, eventually under David to this one particular city that he captures in the Jebusites, Jerusalem, sometimes called Zion. And then under Solomon, we even focus more on this temple that Solomon builds inside of Jerusalem because this is the place where God is going to live. not just the human king of Israel, but the high king of Israel, the Lord of heaven and earth, he is going to live in this city. And from this city, he is going to reach his rule forth to the ends of the earth. You see this in Isaiah chapter two, where you have all nations streaming like water uphill to Zion, to the house of the Lord. Now for Zion, Jerusalem, to be that center between heaven and earth, And among all peoples of the world, obviously for any of that to be possible, there had to be the temple. Because if God's going to live among sinners, he has to deal with the sin. And through the sacrifices of the animals in the place of the worshipers, God can live in peace. because sin has been atoned for there in the temple. And so by God's appointment, this isn't any human idea, by God's appointment, Jerusalem is gonna be the socio-political center of the world and the temple in Jerusalem is gonna be the spiritual center of the world. Jerusalem will be the center of the world and its peoples, and the temple in particular will be the connection point between heaven and its hosts, and earth, where we human beings live. And it's interesting, for the first century disciples, they would have said, and that means, guess what? Rome is not. Mighty Rome, master city of the world. The Jews and the disciples of Jesus would have said, nope, because from God's vantage point, Rome was a very tiny little thing. For God's plan, Jerusalem's the center. The temple is the center, not Rome and its pantheon of gods. And you can see all through the Old Testament how this kind of geographic focus works. I mean, in Israel, all the individual life circles and all the community circles They were all kind of in orbit around God's purposes in Jerusalem. There was a constant, literal, physical turning toward Jerusalem to remember that our lives are all revolving around God, the great king, and the city of the great king. Remember Daniel? Where did he pray? He opens his window toward what? Toward Jerusalem, and he prays toward that center of God's purposes. And I think that all of that history perhaps explains why Jesus weeps as he comes toward the city. God had such great things in store for Jerusalem. But despite what's it been now, almost a half millennium of the hard lessons of exile under first Babylon, then Medo-Persia, then Greece, then Rome, it's like have we not lived what happens to this city and this temple when we reject the Lord? What is Jerusalem without God? What is the temple without the high king? You'd think Israel would have understood. It's all about God. But Jesus knows history's about to repeat itself again because the Son of God is here and they're gonna kill him. If only, if only, if only Israel would understand that their city and their temple are about him. They're about God, the Lord of life, the King of peace, and he weeps. But despite the sorrow in his heart, you'll notice as he comes into the city, the king has come, despite the sorrow, he has come to assert God's rule, starting in this temple. And this is actually quite astonishing, because what Jesus' enemies do not understand, as he comes into the temple, does this strike you as a little bit violent? We're told in another gospel, he takes kind of a scourge and he drives out these money changers. But what the enemies of Jesus do not understand is that God, beloved, what's he doing here? What is this scene about? What they don't get is that God could rule this world simply through judgment. God could come and just destroy all the sinners that oppose him. That would be a perfectly righteous, and from our perspective in many ways, a perfectly understandable way to go about establishing the rule of God. But Jesus, the Son of God, God has sent him because God has chosen to rule through mercy. He wants restored fellowship with us sinners. And so what is Jesus doing here? You know what he's doing? He has come into this temple not to destroy sinners. He has come into this temple for the exact purpose of replacing these sacrifices of animals that can never take away sin, to replace those sacrifices with himself. Because here's what a lot of people don't understand about this scene. There's nothing wrong with the buying and selling here. That's what you had to do when you travel a long distance to Jerusalem. You have to buy a sacrificial animal. You don't bring your cow all the way from the other end of empire. You come to Jerusalem and you buy a cow, or whatever it is you're gonna sacrifice, and you offer it to the Lord in the temple because you paid for it. So the buying and selling is just part of the Jewish sacrificial system. What Jesus is doing here is bringing that whole system to a halt. Because what needs to happen is for these worshipers in this temple to stop busying themselves with all this stuff that cannot take away sins and listen to Jesus. Listen to Him. This is an act of authority. And the brief prophetic references that Jesus mentions in what we guess must be a snippet of a sermon, these brief prophetic references tell all of what's going on here. Because he quotes Isaiah 56, which prophesies a time when God is going to bring many, many, many foreigners to Zion and make them joyful in what he calls his house of prayer. Isaiah says, my house, God speaking, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples, So Jesus says, you've taken this place that's supposed to be a gathering place for all the peoples of the world, and you've turned it into a den of robbers. He's quoting Jeremiah 7 there, a very sobering text which prophesies that God is going to abandon this house. Now, in those days, in Jeremiah's time, it was the house built by Solomon. This, where Jesus is, was built by King Herod. But God prophesied, told Jeremiah he was going to abandon his house, his temple in Jerusalem because it had become a den of robbers. And what did he mean by that? Jeremiah rebukes Israel because the people of God think that that temple is going to be like some protective charm. We're good because we got the temple. Meanwhile, Jeremiah says, you're oppressing. the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow. You're shedding innocent blood in this place. You are worshiping other gods in this place. And you think your temple's gonna protect you from judgment to come? You think that's how this works? You made it a den of robbers. And so this is Jesus saying in this little sermonette, God is now taking this house, this center, and he is replacing it with another center because a new temple is here. a new meeting place between God and man. And around this new temple, God is gonna build a new city, a worldwide city of living stones. This one in that temple that day, he is the site of peace between God and man. To which all peoples will be gathered for worship and fellowship and then sending out to bear fruit among the nations. That's what's going on. New center he brings. And I wanna ask as we close, how that should speak to our witness. So the line of the triumphal entry speaks to our expectations, but this new center here talks to us about our witness, because we know exactly what the message was for the first century audience. What's the message? You need to look away from Jerusalem and start looking to Jesus. He's the center of God's purposes now, but what is the message, dear saints, for a 21st century audience? And I thought about this, because we are now living in a world that insists, as I said, Everyone must begin with no circle, no center. You draw your own. You draw your own circle and you figure out your own center. That is, if there is a almost religious dogma in the 21st century, that would be it. You do you. You're your own circle. There is no treasure you should seek. There is no authority you should serve. There is no good that commands our choice. You decide. How do you talk about this king in a world like that? Listen to the world, God has established a center, but everyone thinks they're gonna establish their own. And I wonder, we just started talking about this last week in Sunday school, but I wonder if maybe before we can even talk to people about this center whom God has appointed, I wonder if we have to find some creative ways to try to show people in love the impossibility, I would go further, the crushing emptiness of creating your own circle. The only way I can think this week to describe what we want to do today in the 21st century is this. Suppose I took you to a table and I blindfolded you. And on that table, I laid out a dozen coins ranging in value from a million dollars down to a cent, only they're all mixed up. And you're blindfolded. And I said to you, you get to pick one coin. And you know that in these 12 coins, they range from a million to a cent. And you're like, but I would really like to get a coin that has more value, so could you tell me anything? They all feel the same. No, I say, because the only thing that matters is your choice. You choose. You must not have any value outside of you dictate to you what your choice is going to be. You choose. That's what matters. Just choose. It is your choosing that is the thing. You would say, that's insane. You're trying to rob me. I need to know what the value of things is. No, because it is your choice that gives things value. You draw your own circle. You can't be conforming to any circle outside of you. You'd say this is insane. And it is, because that kind of thing works only if the only basis for choice is choice. If the only thing that creates any real value is blind, unguided, absolute, autonomous choice, like you have a blindfold on. The only problem with that is, beloved, we know that is not true. Everyone knows that's not true. And I wonder if in our time we need to try to help people understand if you are just drawing circles, you are picking coins blindfolded and valorizing your own choice with no understanding of what has any value. Jesus just cuts through all of that. He says, you seek first the kingdom of God. You wanna find treasure? Seek first the kingdom of God. Seek me. And beloved, when people in our time hunger as we all must, We hunger for a center that isn't just my center, but a center that we can actually gather around together. You know, in the United States, we are crying for this right now. Or maybe it's not even so much a place to gather, a center to gather people around, which Jerusalem was to be and Jesus is. Maybe it's just people in our time finally begin to realize, more kind of on the heaven and earth axis, they just begin to realize that we're not just beasts. It does not work, humanly, to just live as if all you have is instinct and appetite. Your heart hungers for more. There are things that cannot be reduced to matter and energy that your heart just yearns for because God made you. Whether it's kind of the negative experience of things like shame, or hopelessness, or emptiness. I mean, how do you explain that if you're a beast? Or on the more positive side, when people begin to feel this hunger for truth that's true truth, like capital T, true truth, or they begin to hunger for a goodness that is real, not just something I say is real, but it's actually real, and it summons my desire with a kind of authority. When I want something that is real and not just because I say so. When people begin to experience these kinds of hungers, and they must because God made them in his image, that perhaps is when we can call them to Jesus. That heaven and earth meet in him alone, and around him all the peoples of the earth can be gathered in peace. We're living in a time when there are lots of broken lines and lots of broken circles. So many stories that do not have any real ultimate purpose or direction. And often we find there's no place around which we can gather in unity. There is no source, there is no center of transcendent value, transcendent truth, transcendent goodness, transcendent meaning. And to all of that we say to the world, this is the king who brings peace. And beloved, he is our king. So shout for joy, daughter of Zion. Amen. Bless these things to our hearts, we ask our God in Jesus' good name. Amen.