Palm Sunday – “A BETTER Hero”
Verse: He replied, “If they kept quiet, the stones along the road would burst into cheers!” Luke 19:40
Read: Luke 19:28-44
It’s hard to move away from cultures definition of hero. We’ve been conditioned to the idea that a hero is someone who’s stronger than the normal person. They’re smarter than your average Joe or at the least the have the money to hire the stronger and smarter people to do their hero work for them. Jesus makes his way into the city to be just that, the hero. But it’s not the hero anyone was expecting or looking for.
The Israel of Jesus’ time had certain expectations of what a messiah (hero) should look like. Even for those few who did recognize that Jesus was the Messiah, they expected Him to be a conquering king who would come victoriously to reclaim Jerusalem as His earthy kingdom and save them from their circumstances. Instead, Luke 19:28-44 paints a picture of a suffering servant who chose to ride humbly into the city on a colt. The Messiah appeared to be the very opposite of the people’s expectations.
Palm Sunday aligns our expectations with the Father’s expectations of Jesus. This passage reminds us that Jesus is not bound by our expectations. We see that He is consistently who He says He is: one who has come not too conquer but to suffer so that we might be in a relationship with him for eternity.
This Sunday spend time reflecting on the expectations you’ve put on Jesus and compare those to who He says He is. Jesus did not come to necessarily save you from your circumstances. But He did come to save you from your sin.
Would you so willingly lay down your life for strangers? Do you see Jesus as He was, a suffering servant, or do you expect Him to be a conquering King to take you away from your suffering? Can you allow Jesus to be the fix not just the fixer? Even the stones knew that Jesus was the fix that creation yearned for.
Do you?