Breaking Bread with the Christ

 

Text: Luke 24:13-35

Focus: Incarnation

Function: to help people see the incarnation of Christ in each other and everything. (St. Francis)

We are going to do the prayer of St. Francis

^13-16That same day two of them were walking to the village Emmaus, about seven miles out of Jerusalem. They were deep in conversation, going over all these things that had happened. In the middle of their talk and questions, Jesus came up and walked along with them. But they were not able to recognize who he was.

^17-18He asked, “What’s this you’re discussing so intently as you walk along?”

They just stood there, long-faced, like they had lost their best friend. Then one of them, his name was Cleopas, said, “Are you the only one in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard what’s happened during the last few days?”

^19-24He said, “What has happened?”

They said, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene. He was a man of God, a prophet, dynamic in work and word, blessed by both God and all the people. Then our high priests and leaders betrayed him, got him sentenced to death, and crucified him. And we had our hopes up that he was the One, the One about to deliver Israel. And it is now the third day since it happened. But now some of our women have completely confused us. Early this morning they were at the tomb and couldn’t find his body. They came back with the story that they had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive. Some of our friends went off to the tomb to check and found it empty just as the women said, but they didn’t see Jesus.”

^25-27Then he said to them, “So thick-headed! So slow-hearted! Why can’t you simply believe all that the prophets said? Don’t you see that these things had to happen, that the Messiah had to suffer and only then enter into his glory?” Then he started at the beginning, with the Books of Moses, and went on through all the Prophets, pointing out everything in the Scriptures that referred to him.

^28-31They came to the edge of the village where they were headed. He acted as if he were going on but they pressed him: “Stay and have supper with us. It’s nearly evening; the day is done.” So he went in with them. And here is what happened: He sat down at the table with them. Taking the bread, he blessed and broke and gave it to them. At that moment, open-eyed, wide-eyed, they recognized him. And then he disappeared.

³²Back and forth they talked. “Didn’t we feel on fire as he conversed with us on the road, as he opened up the Scriptures for us?”

^33-34They didn’t waste a minute. They were up and on their way back to Jerusalem. They found the Eleven and their friends gathered together, talking away: “It’s really happened! The Master has been raised up—Simon saw him!”

³⁵Then the two went over everything that happened on the road and how they recognized him when he broke the bread.

Well, this morning, we are still focusing on the First Easter Sunday and its events.

I mentioned briefly last week how this was an important part of the story because the disciples who were walking with Jesus were ones well enough known to the eleven to be included into the inner circle because they mentioned the two Mary’s as two of “our women” and they were familiar enough with the hiding place that the apostles were using after the crucifixion.

We look at them as people of great faith, but it is important to remember that they were human, just like us. They were afraid and were hiding. But until these moments on that first Easter day, as the realization of the resurrection grew, they were ignorant and not to be held accountable. So far, the only ones who believed it were the two Mary’s.

And this is the famous walk to Emmaus, whereby Jesus reveals to the disciples how the OT scriptures were pointing to Him and the plan of God to redeem their nation. They didn’t understand yet that this was not just going to transform their nation, but it was going to transform the world entire.

All of that is for the future at this moment. At this moment, this is a small group of people whom are just now having the dawning of realization that their greatest fears were to be wiped away by the power of the Christ through the resurrection.

For some reason, the fact that no one recognized Jesus that first day initially has stood out to me this year during the Easter season.

I never really contemplated why. I mean, I remember questioning it, along with many other things when I was young, to be answered probably correctly that it was because Jesus had a glorified body that they didn’t recognize him.

1. Jesus said our resurrected bodies will be this way when arguing with the Sadducees who don’t believe in the resurrection. He told them that our resurrected bodies will be more like the angels in their nature and be without any gender identity. More like the angels might explain how Jesus was able to eat with the apostles and yet walk through walls to appear to them, or suddenly disappear from the men once they got to Emmaus and broke bread with the Christ.

Jesus the Nazarene was crucified on the cross as part of God’s plan of restoration. Jesus the Christ, the eternal Christ rose from the dead.

And yes, it was the same person, but as I have come to discover this year, a different identity. It was so different that his physical appearance, although human had changed and it wasn’t until he did something familiar, or spiritually familiar, that they recognized him.

It was when he called Mary by name, that she recognized him.

It was when the two men broke bread with him that they recognized him.

He appears again beside the lake after the men had seemed to have given up and went back to fishing and he blessed them. This is the time he ate with them to prove that he has a corporeal risen body and again, during this occasion, it wasn’t until he preformed the same miracle he performed when he called them, filling their nets with fish, that they recognized him.

Today we look at how they recognize him while they are breaking bread with Jesus, the Christ.

Somehow Jesus is able to convey a spiritual component to his interactions with these ones who, although they are hiding, have not fled.

He appears to them to build their faith. And he does it in the familiar surrounding and trappings of their everyday lives.

I am impressed this year as I went through Lent, I also went through the rigorous training that we have preparing for our Kairos weekend.

We are a diverse group of guys. And we come from varied backgrounds. There are baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, there is one Monk on the team, he plays the guitar, of course there are Ken Oren from the Pitsburg Church of the Brethren and me on the team.

We have very different opinions about what is important for churches to focus on. We have very different opinions about politics.

But none of that gets in the way of our desire for unity. I think that it is precisely because we are willing to lay aside our differences and work together in Christian unity that God blesses the weekend so much. God loves it when believers love one another and the world that he gave himself to redeem.

We break bread together and we join with the Christ in so doing.

I am reminded, then, by the Holy Spirit that Christ is in everyone, especially the incarcerated because Jesus numbered them among the least of these, my brethren, in Matthew 25.

When they broke bread in fellowship, the Christ was revealed to them at Emmaus.

When we live in community together, the Spirit of is incarnated within us.

So, next week, because of your help, we are going into a prison. Pray for me as I am going to break bread with the Christ in every one of the residents of Warren Correctional Institute.

The Power of Forgiveness

Text: John 20:19-23

Focus: Forgiveness

Function: To help people see the power of forgiveness

¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

I have read and preached this passage several times and because of the reading of it, I never really noticed that this appearance of Jesus to the apostles was also on Sunday.

He had a busy day when: he rose from the dead, he appeared to Mary, and then for some reason, he took a long walk with two other disciples as they were returning home to Emmaus. It was a 10 to 12 mile walk depending on how accurate our reckoning of their measuring system was.

After that walk, he broke bread with them and then disappeared.

So then, they, the two disciples, returned to Jerusalem to tell the apostles that they had seen the risen Lord. Then they heard the wonderful story of Jesus and Mary in the garden.

I can imagine that by the time the evening had come the excitement and realization among the disciples was really beginning to grow.

And in the middle of that excitement, Jesus suddenly appears in front of them.

The first words out of his mouth, as he is addressing the entire group, probably more than just the 12 apostles because it included at least the two men from Emmaus and from the book of Acts, we read that they were all hiding out together, so the two Mary’s were most certainly there as well. And those first words to this group of faithful followers were this: “Peace be with you…”

I can imagine that they might have suspected that he was a ghost because of his sudden appearance. The text says they didn’t recognize him until he showed them his wounds.

Remember, Mary didn’t recognize Jesus’ resurrected body until Jesus spoke her name and then she knew that it was the one she was pining for. I don’t mean in a romantic relationship, but an intense one that was healing and restoring her from her brokenness.

The two disciples didn’t recognize Jesus until he broke bread with them. Then they knew. They must have broken bread with him before he was raised and the familiarity of Jesus’ actions confirmed what they had been suspecting.

So, here they all are, in the room and suddenly a stranger appears to them, miraculously, we presume, and the first words that he gives them are given to assuage their fears. Peace be to you. I love it when during contemplation and meditation, I sense the Spirit of God whispering the same words in my ear. It has happened a few times. I wish my prayer life was disciplined enough for that to happen more often.

They were hiding for fear of the Romans, afraid because this man, who claimed to be setting up a greater kingdom than Caesar’s, had just been caught up in a Roman display of their absolute power of life, death and torture over those that they had conquered. And they justified it by calling it the peace of Rome.

Jesus refused to fight when he said he could call 10,000 angels to defend himself and willingly let they kill him in order to show us that the kingdoms of this earth are temporary and the way of God, doing justice, loving one’s enemies, even the Romans who oppressed them, loving mercy and walking in quiet submission to God are the true paths to peace. Both in the human heart, and in human governance over societies.

Jesus speaks peace to the entire world.

Peace, Jesus gives us real peace.

And that wasn’t all he gave them during this encounter.

I have to continue to remind myself that the kingdom of God is peaceable.

After they accepted that it was indeed Jesus, risen from the dead, because of the wounds on his body, they rejoiced and Jesus gives them a second aspect of this gift of peace.

It was and is the Holy Spirit of God herself living inside of anyone who trusts in Jesus.

He gives them the Holy Spirit and with that, he gives them the authority to forgive sins and withhold sins.

I could have titled the sermon, The Power of Peace, but this forgiveness thing, and the authority given to us is pretty profound.

When Jesus forgave sins, the religious leaders who were against him condemned him for doing it because they said that only God can forgive sins. They called it blasphemy. I don’t believe there is any scripture that actually teaches that only God can forgive sins. But it seems to make sense. We believe that God is the ultimate judge and we believe that God will judge with mercy. And we believe that only God is wise enough to be able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the hearts of the people that God is judging. All of that makes sense, but none of it is actually spelled out in the Jewish and/or Christian scriptures.

Jesus forgave people and then told the apostles to forgive and he gave them, what appears to be divine authority, to forgive sins.

“You forgive them” is the command.

We have been given the power and the authority to forgive.

Now, that isn’t consistent with protestant theology. Because of this teaching, the Roman Catholic church gives the priests the authority to forgive sins.

And I want to look in to that. They get the authority to forgive from this scripture. Protestants just ignore it, by the way. I like the concept that if we have the power to forgive sins, then we should be trained in it so that we do not “cheapen grace.” So a trained theologian can parse out differences and there are mortal and venial sins that carry different weights in the eyes of the RC church, and they make a lot of sense to me.

If.

Jesus went through a terrible ordeal on the cross, and he did it for us.

So, I say IF because although the price that Jesus paid for our restoration to God was his very life and that was not cheap. We can’t turn around and make grace expensive than what God intended.

God gives God’s mercy freely to everyone who asks it. It is free, but not cheap. And we can’t make it more expensive by adding to the command to love one another as ourselves by codifying a bunch of rules so that we know who is in and who is out.

Jesus’s command here is to carry on the mission that he had already started of bringing people into the kingdom of God that the self-righteous folks didn’t think belonged.

And sadly, there is the authority to deny grace to those that we don’t think deserve it.

Now I really wrestle with the last part of this command. I almost wonder if it got added into the text by a scribe who, just like the self righteous religious leaders that condemned Jesus, couldn’t accept that certain people could be saved.

The more I follow Christ, the more I am convinced that the tent that Jesus has is a lot bigger than I can imagine. I would not be surprised if it went even to the other religions which also teach that we should love others as we love ourselves. It is a pretty common theme in the world’s religions.

And story after story, time after time, he tried to teach the self righteous that the way included those that they wanted to exclude.

The move of the Holy Spirit throughout the church age has been to bring the Church into a place where more and more people are welcome.

Because it is in community where the Holy Spirit brings us into the presence of Christ Himself.

God is love and God wants everyone back in God’s family -loving God by loving others as well.

So who makes the rules as to who is in and who is out?

Jesus said, Don’t judge others. Doesn’t that mean that we cannot decide that their sin is worse than ours?

But throughout the ages the mission of God is to spread a bigger and bigger tent for people to join the family of God.

The early church suffered division because it was hard for some to understand this.

If you look at the OT you can see the importance of the Jewish ritual of circumcision.

There was a split in the first church over who was in and who was out based on whether or not they were following Jewish customs as gentiles or their own.

But before that split, Peter had a vision whereby God told him that the law about circumcision no longer applies when God sent Peter to preach to the gentiles.

Irv Heischman, the West Charlston Church of the Brethren pastor, pointed out to me that the Holy Spirit had them set aside a clear scriptural command so that we gentiles could be saved even though the scriptures say that the covenant of circumcision was permanent.

There was a group of early Christians who just couldn’t accept that God would change God’s mind about this when it really was a big deal in the OT.

And yet God opened the door for us to come in.

For the principle of inclusion, God set aside the command of scripture and now we are saved.

And the command is right there. All we have to do is say yes to the principle that God wants everyone to come to the knowledge of God’s peace.

You forgive them and they will be restored is the principle here.

So what am I really saying here? Let me give you an example about inclusion:

Personally, I advocate on behalf of people with different sexual orientations. We are called to forgive, not judge. This is why I believe that the church should give full acceptance and participation in its ministries and activities to people who choose to marry someone from their own sex because that is they way, I believe, that God has made them.

We have the power to include them.

We are called to be the ones who offer God’s forgiveness to them.

The Power of ( The) Christ

 

Text: Matthew 28:1-10

Focus: Easter

Function: To learn not to fear because of Christ

28:¹After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. ²And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. ⁴For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. ⁵But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. ⁶He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. ⁷Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” ⁸So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. ¹⁰Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Christ is Risen! (He is risen indeed)

Happy Easter Everyone.

Today we get to celebrate the resurrection of the Christ. I mis-titled this sermon. It is titled the Power of Christ, but I want to add the definite article”the” before Christ and say, the Power of THE Christ.

And we will get to that. But first, something strikes me as I read this passage. Twice, the women are commanded to let go of their fear.

The gospel accounts give different descriptions and order of the timing of events based, I presume, and what the Spirit was leading the author to emphasize.

According to the Matthew account, while the women were there, the earthquake happened, the light flashed and an angel appeared and rolled back the stone. And according to Matthew, the two Mary’s, Mary Magdalene and we presume Mary, the mother of Jesus, they were there and they were greatly frightened.

I suppose we would be if we saw an heavenly being in all of its glory.

And as I was studying this passage to prepare for today, I notice that twice the women were comforted and told not to fear.

The angel first points to their initial fear, which, according to other texts, was how were they going to roll away the stone and get to the body?

The angel tells them that Jesus is gone. And that because he has been raised, they had no reason to fear.

Because Jesus is alive, the angel says, we have no reason to fear.

I think the thing to be commended in this story is the devotion of the two Mary’s. Everyone else is hiding, or has ran away. But they are not afraid to be associated with Jesus and their greatest fear as they are approaching the tomb is that they had no way to access the body to prepare it for burial.

They did not know now to let go of Jesus yet. And they were doing what godly women have done through the ages. They were there to keep vigil at the body to express their love for the Christ.

Mary Magdalene becomes the first witness to the resurrection of the Christ. It is her job to begin the story that death and evil cannot overcome the love of God that we experience in the Christ.

Jesus choose 12 men as apostles to form the church, but he leaves the most important part of his witness to a woman. This again is Jesus going counter cultural. It was a male dominated society and women had few rights and privileges.

Jesus is already working through the Spirit to overcome the patriarchy of the day and allow women an equal place with men in the church.

That is why the first church proclaimed that race, class and gender were meaningless in the new Kingdom that God has established here on earth.

And that leads us to the second time the women are told not to fear.

According to John, Mary stayed at the tomb after discovering the resurrection and was weeping when Jesus appears to hear.

She doesn’t recognize him because he is in a glorified body and she supposes that he is the gardener. She questions him, even though the angel has already told her that Jesus is raised.

And then Jesus speaks her name to her. And when he speaks her name, spirit to spirit, she recognizes Jesus and knows that it is him.

That is John’s account.

Matthew tells us that in the garden, after the angel has informed them, Jesus appears and informs them as well.

And again, his first words are, do not be afraid.

By now, the earthquake and the flash of light are gone and the two women are merely speaking with a gentle soul who happens to be there in the garden.

They did have some fear, again if Jesus was raised, where was he?

The angel has told them to bear witness to the disciples and for them to wait for Jesus to appear to them in Galilee. Galilee is about 70 miles away from Jerusalem where they were at the time.

The angel gives them instructions and in the process of carrying those instructions out, Jesus appears to them and confirms that he is indeed risen from the dead.

Fear not. That is the command. The text doesn’t mention that they did not recognize Jesus at first, that detail wasn’t important to Matthew and it doesn’t mean the the accounts in the gospels are inconsistent here.

The text, along with what the Apostle John says seems to convey the peace that Jesus wanted to give them.

I wonder if they were still afraid, God knew it, and God comes back to them, almost as if God just couldn’t wait to comfort them and see their joy when they realize that Jesus is not gone from them.

I wonder. I wonder at the love of Christ shown to these two women at this time.

And that leads me to the title. The Christ.

Do not be afraid is the command. And the answer is because we are all given the incarnation of God in Jesus, the Christ.

The Jewish people always have the hope of the coming of the Messiah. The word Messiah means the “Anointed One.” In Greek, the word is Christ.

Jesus is the anointed one who came to set the world free from its bondage and wickedness.

I find it significant that the body of Jesus has changed at this point. Mary didn’t recognize him at first. He was new.

In one sense, he was no longer Jesus the Nazarene. He was Jesus, the Christ.

And that is consistent with the OT understanding of Jesus. Jesus appears many times in the OT. He appears as the burning bush to Abraham. The Prince of Peace who had not beginning or end, again to Abraham, “The Lord” who was accompanied by two angels right before the destruction of Sodom. He also appears as the 4^th man in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and he appears as the pillar of fire and smoke when Moses was leading Israel.

The Christ has shown Himself to humanity through the ages in the Jewish story.

And Jesus is the Christ. The Anointed one who has come to set us free from our fears.

And the power of Christ comes to us to deliver us from our fears.

So John goes on to talk about how the Christ delivers us from fear in letter he writes to the churches commonly known as First John. He says, there is no fear in love, but God’s perfect love casts out all fear. The one who fears still believes in a wrathful God. But God has demonstrated His love to us by becoming the Christ, the Anointed one who takes away our fear of punishment and sets us free.

The power of the Christ the power to redeem all of humanity. And the resurrection proves it.

He is Risen (He is risen indeed)

The Power of Hope

Text: Matthew 21:1-10

Focus: Palm Sunday

Function: To help people see the nature of salvation.

21:¹When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, ²saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. ³If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” ⁴This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:

⁵“Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
    humble and mounted on a donkey,
        and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

⁶The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; ⁷they brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. ⁸A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. ⁹The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹⁰When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” ¹¹The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.”

Welcome to Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week.

I remember this day distinctly as we went through the Easter Season in the Church I grew up in.

I was drawn to the story probably because it was fun for us to be the leaders in the worship service as children and it was always fun to see how many adults we could get to circle around the sanctuary waving palm fronds.

Children participating in our Christian Action is an important way to create generations of people who learn to serve humanity like Jesus did.

But the theological point that was stressed to me during this special day of Holy Week was that Jesus was worshiped.

Of course, that is not what the text says. But there is a important point to be made about the symbolism of Jesus riding into the city on a foal of a donkey.

Don Crabill describes the Kingdom of God as the upside down kingdom. What he means is that although it is a kingdom, it isn’t human and it does things in a contrary way to some of the ways that humanity has developed to govern itself and to worship.

And Jesus riding in to town on the foal of a donkey is the kind of upside down thinking that Crabill is talking about. If, for example, Jesus were coming in to town as the military conquerer, like many hoped He would, then wouldn’t He be riding in to town on some sort of majestic steed fitting of the high rank?

By choosing the lowly foal of a donkey, Jesus is making a very direct and political, or I should say, anti-political statement, and that is that the kingdom of God is full of humility. Remember, God has asked three things of us, Do justice, Love Mercy and Walk humbly before God. The Colt was the symbol of humility.

Jesus demonstrates His anti-power agenda. He shows us the new Kingdom of God placed in the hands of the people and not Him as just another form of leader who will inspire for a while but then revert back to business as usual for the poor and the dispossessed.

The People were crying out Hosanna. It was a cry of hope for a better future.

Throughout Jesus’ ministry, He shows people what to do by His actions, and it isn’t about what to believing the right thing and saying the right words, or praying the right prayer, but doing what God wants us to do. And that is to love one another. It seems pretty simple to me.

And the story does not say that worshiped HIM. They were certainly praising Him, but they weren’t worshiping him. They were praising him as the prophet Jesus from Nazareth according to the text.

What they were shouting is what leads me to that conclusion. Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

The word Hosanna is the salient part of this sermon. Hosanna literally means, “Pray, save us.”

Save us. That is what they were crying. Remember, the people were being oppressed severely by the Romans. The story of the nativity and the manger and Jesus being born in a barn is all a result of the roman occupation and the Romans forcing people to give up their homes and move to their ancestral homes so that the Romans could tax them more efficiently.

Imagine being forced to move to a new town with no promise of an income just to pay your taxes. It was oppression that didn’t care for the way it disrupted the lives of those under its bondage.

Save us from those who oppress us is the cry of the people. They had hope for a better future.

The Roman masters were cruel. When they cried Save us to Jesus, they were also crying Save us from the crosses that we see all to often on our landscape that was a reminder to them that it was Roman law and subjugation or a very visible and horrible torture designed to scare those who witnessed it.

The people have strong hope for a Savior. But God is done with war, apparently.

Jesus, on the other hand, was making a completely different statement. Instead of organizing them into an army, as it appeared he might be doing when he asked a crowd of 5,000 to sit military fashion in groups of 50 and then instead of leading an army, he fed them.

He fed them instead of calling them to fight.

I wonder if the crowd is just fickle. Was it the same people on Sunday crying out to him, Save us that cried out Friday morning, Crucify him?

Is the mob that fickle? Were they disappointed that instead of challenging the Roman oppressors, he went into the temple and challenged the political system that allowed the poor to be exploited?

We have been through terrible election cycles over the last decade and maybe that proves that mob is that easily swayed. Maybe.

And Jesus really did demonstrate a different kind of Kingdom.

Jesus brings us a kingdom of love and justice that was and is designed to transform society, politics, kings, presidents, dictators, prime ministers or whatever leads people into a society that loves and cares for the least of these as much as it cares for the rich and the powerful.

Obviously we haven’t gotten there yet.

They didn’t understand it. We still haven’t grasped it. But Jesus is was and is on a His own mission of salvation that looks different that what people expected.

Where they disappointed that the message of Jesus to forgive and love, even their enemies, was a message that Jesus actually meant.

And when he didn’t save them from the Romans, I wonder if that is why the crowd so quickly rejected him.

Or, maybe it was a different crowd. And the text tells us that still even though he was famous, not everyone knew about him yet. So I can’t tell you for sure that this why the crowd rejected Jesus. But it is a huge irony and tragedy how he could have the triumphal entry on Sunday and be killed on Friday.

I think the people rejected Jesus notion of love and forgiveness toward enemies when they realized he meant the Romans as well.

We want to be tribal and care only for our own. We want our side to win. And when it doesn’t, we feel miserable. We are evolutionarily wired to win, for out side to win and us feel good about it. It kept us safe.

And we still do the same thing.

Jesus message of salvation was one of change inside literally of the human psyche to give up the notion of hating “the other” simply because they are not us.

The people hoped for a savior.

And God gave them one in the form of Jesus.

But Jesus wasn’t just there to save the Jews from the Romans, that didn’t happen. Instead, Jesus came to save humanity from violent retributions toward enemies by forgiving the ones who murdered him while he was on the cross.

And for the sake of hope itself, I hope that it was a completely different crowd that cried out “Crucify” on Friday.

Because there were many, many, just and God fearing Jews in the culture at the time who understood as the teacher of the law said to Jesus when he said that loving our neighbor was the greatest commandment.

There were many hoping that God’s love and power would be made manifest and there were thousands who loved and believed in Jesus.

And Jesus did not disappoint them.

The power of Hope, I believe, is ultimately salvation.

The Christ did not leave us abandoned. I know it seems like the world is a violent place and there is a lot that we could be afraid of.

But God is still in the world in us, and in the Church and God still is calling the world to love their neighbor as themselves.

And the mission of Jesus is still being accomplished until the day when the promise is fulfilled that people will beat their swords into plowshares