Be Careful What You Wish For
Dear First Pres SLO Family,
Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus the Messiah, the one who walked this journey to the cross for us. We retrace those steps in Holy Week.
On Sunday we celebrated the Triumphal Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. Unfortunately, our livestream and recording technologies all crashed just before the service started. Several people asked me to print the message from Sunday as the Midweek Reflection, and so that’s what follows. I hope it’s a blessing to you.
In Christ,
Pastor John
Be Careful What You Wish For Mark 11:1-11
There is an old Twilight Zone episode where a genie offers four wishes to an elderly couple. They use the first to test him—and he fixes a cabinet. The second wish is for a million dollars, which is great, until the tax man takes it. Third wish is for supreme earthly power. The result of this is that the man finds himself trapped in a bunker in Berlin as the Allies close in—you know who I’m talking about. Finally, they use the last wish to set things back to where they started.
It’s an episode about our tendency to wish for the wrong things.
Why talk about that today? Because Palm Sunday reminds us not to wish for the wrong things. Palm Sunday is a reminder not to wish for a different Jesus than the one who came.
The problem with Palm Sunday is a misunderstanding of the difference between Realm and Reign thinking. A realm is a place with limits and boundaries, like a country or state. Realms are held within certain lines—people are either in or out.
But reign is a word that describes authority and power and presence. In Christian terms we think of the reign of God as the ongoing, limitless demonstration of God’s power over all places and times and things, even death.
When Jesus comes he introduces us to the reign of God, not some realm where God is in some places and not present in others.
In the Old Testament, the people of God lived under God’s reign. They were a people, defined by their relationship to God more than some place. They were called to be a blessing to all the nations, not just one more nation on the block.
But they weren’t satisfied. They saw other nations with clearly defined boundaries and kings, and they wanted the same. God tried to talk them out of it, but in the end God gave them what they wanted.
It was a disaster. Kings were murdered and replaced—sometimes by family members.
The royal houses of Israel were nothing like a blessing to other nations. They were too busy fighting each other.
Even though God tried to tell them it wouldn’t work, the people of Israel wanted a King because they thought it would make them stronger in the eyes of their neighbors.
It was another case of wishing for the wrong thing.
Something like that is happening behind the scenes of our text today.
Text: Mark 11:1-11 (NIV)
11 As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’”
4 They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, 5 some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” 6 They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. 7 When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. 9 Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted,
“Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
10 “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
11 Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.
Some interesting things to notice here:
Mark’s gospel covers three years in 10 chapters—almost all of Mark’s story of Jesus and his ministry fits into the first 10 chapters. And then Jesus enters Jerusalem, and we get six whole chapters covering this one last week in Jesus’ life. It tells you that this is important. When someone who moves as quickly as Mark decides to slow down right when his story gets to the end, we should pay attention to that.
We start with the strange story about the donkey. Look at the details. Mark doesn’t take the time to tell us about the birth of Jesus, but he can spend a paragraph and a half on how they got Jesus a donkey to ride.
As Jesus entered the city the people laid branches and even their coats down so that even the donkey’s feet would not touch the ground. Jesus enters Jerusalem, the home of the Jewish faith, a city and country occupied by foreign invaders. The Romans were the authority there—the Romans had the power over life and death.
Then we hear the song they’re singing.
“Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
This song combines naming Jesus as the successor to King David, the great military leader of Israel, and calls on him to save them from the Roman occupiers.
Finally, they thought, God had answered their prayers to cleanse Jerusalem of the pagan Romans who kept them from controlling their own lives.
Finally, they thought, God had come to make everything right.
But we know that’s not what happened.
Let’s be clear. The people who lined the streets and cheered for Jesus expected him to lead a revolution that would crush the Romans and get them out of Jerusalem. Instead, they got the Jesus we see in the gospels.
It wasn’t that God didn’t give them what they wanted.
It was that they wanted the wrong thing.
The point of that Twilight Zone episode is that we should be careful what we wish for.
The key message for us every Palm Sunday is the same:
When we get to the point of realizing that we need God—that we need Christ’s redeeming power in our lives—when we’re finally willing to acknowledge that we need God’s help, we have to be careful of what we wish for.
Because it’s easy to recognize our need, and then want the wrong thing to meet it. It’s easy to call on God for help, only to realize that we’ve made God in our own image, instead of the other way around.
Israel wanted a King so they could be like other countries, instead of taking the harder road of being God’s people and sharing his blessing with their neighbors.
The people in Jerusalem wanted a King so they could drive the Romans out and establish their own greatness in Israel, instead of embracing the Jesus who came and loved and forgave and sacrificed.
What do we wish for?
What are we wishing God would do?
Wipe out our enemies?
Erase people who are different from us so that we don’t have to
love them?
Enforce one way of believing and one way of living and one way of loving on everyone so we don’t have to be bothered by learning to be gracious?
Make our own nation great, no matter who else gets trampled in
the process?
It’s easy for us to make the same mistake as those people waving palm branches in Jerusalem that day. The key is to recognize it when we see it, or hear it, or do it.
Because anyone who tells you that greatness comes from military power, or political authority, or social systems, or national pride—anyone who tells you anything like that is a liar who has perverted the gospel of Jesus Christ and torn it into little, useless pieces.
Palm Sunday forces us to be clear on that.
And so what do we wish for?
That’s the question we’re confronted with every time Palm Sunday rolls around.
What do we want? What’s our wish?
What happens when we wish for the wrong thing?
The Jesus of the Bible comes to us.
Jesus comes and teaches us something different.
Jesus comes and forgives and redeems a world that has gone completely off the rails.
Jesus comes and shows us how to be hopeful and not just optimistic.
Jesus comes and walks a path from sacrifice to victory, and turns the world’s values completely upside down.
The real issue becomes:
Are we disappointed with the Jesus we got?
Is the Jesus we got, really the Jesus we wanted?
Maybe that one is better the other way around.
Do we want the Jesus who really came, or are we hoping he turns out to be more like us than who he truly is?
Palm Sunday is a bittersweet holiday, because we don’t always get the right answer to that question, not always.
Jesus entered Jerusalem and the people who sang his praises were so blinded by what they wished for that they missed the point of the savior who actually came.
Many of the people who sang “Hosanna!” on Sunday were shouting something very different on the following Friday.
The invitation to us as we enter this holiest of weeks, is to avoid making the same mistake.
Here are four ways we can do that.
Learn what we can about Jesus.
Tend our relationship with Jesus.
Shape our lives around the values of Jesus.
Allow ourselves to be transformed by the spirit of Jesus.
Notice who’s at the center of all four of those statements. It’s Jesus.
That’s how we avoid wishing for the wrong things. That’s how we become the disciples Jesus calls us to be.
And so welcome to Holy Week. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but it’s going to be worth it.
Amen.