Sermon preached at Evensong on Palm Sunday 2025

This morning, we re-enacted Jesus’s triumphal entry into the holy city of Jerusalem. As the crowds acclaimed him, the evangelist St Luke gave us a vision of messianic power, a summing-up of the previous 19 chapters of his Gospel. Throughout Jesus’s ministry, we have seen flashes of the New Creation break in; shafts of technicolour light, which clothe reality with a new dignity. Luke’s is the Gospel above all others which shows us what the Kingdom of God looks like. From the earliest chapters, we hear of good news to the poor, sight for the blind, favour for those who are despised or oppressed. It is as if the whole of Luke’s Gospel until now, has been struggling to contain this message. Even the language Luke uses can’t quite explain it. The listener or observer has to come to his or her own conclusion from this orderly yet extraordinary account. But today, on Palm Sunday, it all comes into very sharp focus, as the scene unfolds and the celebrations of Jesus’s arrival into Jerusalem gather pace. Unsurprisingly, the religious elite ask Jesus to shut his disciples up. How dare they celebrate this vision of power in such terms. Jesus takes a deep breath, and in response, perhaps tells the pharisees to ‘do the math’, to work it out. ‘If these were silent, the stones would shout out.’

The procession which emerges from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem is a truth which will testify to itself. The logic of the Gospel is unfolding. This is a message which can’t be controlled, packaged up, or contained. Luke tells us – in most translations – that all Jesus’s disciples acclaim him as the one who ‘comes in the name of the Lord.’ But the language used here is slightly ambiguous, and context is everything. Jesus goes straight from the Mount of Olives into the Temple, the heart of Jewish worship and identity. You could instead translate that verse as ‘Blessed is the king who comes with the name of the Lord.’ On the Day of Atonement, in the Jewish calendar that one day of the year when the High Priest would make atonement for all the people, the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies wearing a turban on which was a golden plate engraved with the name of the Lord, that name so sacred that it could not be spoken. Jesus, then, comes with this name – which is perhaps why the religious authorities react quite so badly. Jesus of Nazareth has ‘the name of the Lord’ written all over him, and the setting of the next two chapters is the Temple. First, he goes to cleanse it, driving out those who were buying and selling. He takes possession of the Temple, a kind of first-century ‘occupy’ movement if you like, and the people who hear his teaching, we are told, are spellbound.

It is in this context that Jesus teaches the people the parable of the wicked tenants, which we heard read as today’s second lesson (Luke 20: 9-19). It is told as a warning, using imagery from the prophet Isaiah which we also heard today, and it is hard to imagine Jesus rubbing the leaders’ noses in it any more forcefully! There is a sifting going on here between people and leaders. The Chief Priests, the scribes, those in charge, are the builders who reject the cornerstone, and look to kill Jesus. The people, however, we are told, remain amazed and hang on his every word. Their response is a kind of ‘Heaven forbid!’ that the vineyard be taken away from the owners – they are aghast at how this has happened. The leaders, however, from this moment onwards, proceed to enact the parable, and fulfil the prophecy.

So much is shifting in this scene. Jesus is there, right at the heart of the Temple, a native in his Father’s house, yet increasingly under threat and in danger. Wider consciousness, too, is shifting. Some people surely get the warning of this parable. But perhaps what is shifting most in this whole scene is power. Jesus has gone from being an irritating rabbi, a problematic but inspirational teacher loved by those with whom he comes into contact, to becoming acclaimed as a divine figure, the High Priest, with the name of the Lord written all over him in huge, intimidating, unpronounceable letters.

What will this redrawn vision of power look like? Well, it will look like the ministry we have already witnessed on the shores of the Sea of Galilee – and that is why those who think they call the shots can’t cope with it. Jesus’s ministry and his proclamation of the Kingdom are the final truth about the destiny of the cosmos. This is just what it looks like when the Lord becomes King, as promised. That is why the stones themselves would shout out if the disciples were quiet. Everything that Jesus has said and done, all his teaching and healings, his very incarnation and the sharing of his life, are the redrawn vision of power. And this kind of truth was as threatening to those govern by might, dominance and self-satisfaction then, as it is now.

If you want to understand the kind of subversion that happens on Palm Sunday, you have to do two things. First, you have to look backwards up the Palm Sunday road. Back to Jericho and to Zaccheus the tax collector who had to climb a tree to see Jesus, and yet in whose home Jesus became a guest. Back to Samaria and Galilee, where Jesus cleansed the lepers, and received the love of one who was a foreigner to that already outcast community. Back through the parables of the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan, to the sharing of Christ’s glory at the Transfiguration, and the calling of the Twelve. There is a coherence to Jesus’s teaching, the logic of love which calls, which wins through, interrogates, serves, offers dignity, transforms. This is the redrawn vision of power which can now no longer be a matter only for a few.

And then, we have to look forward just a few days, through the bustling thousands in Jerusalem at Passover, towards a sign which will startle us beyond our imagining. This is the one at whom Kings will shut their mouths. The stone rejected by all the builders. The human being strung up in a frenzy of state-sponsored torture and violence, because most of the world – most of us – cannot cope with the shape and implications of this redrawn vision of power which Jesus incarnates and teaches. It is no wonder the earth will quake. And still, as he is dragged towards that sign of Calvary, which will tell us the truth about him and about ourselves, he loves. And forgives. And remakes. But that is to get ahead of ourselves. First, we must look back up the Palm Sunday road at everything Jesus has done, even to begin to comprehend what is going on over these days. ‘What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it?’, the Lord asks through the Prophet Isaiah. And then, we must allow ourselves to be drawn towards the Cross, where the one who bears the name of the Lord will remake the earth, in perhaps the only way that a bloodthirsty humanity could ultimately understand.