Luke 19:28-44 –
the King Expected
Introduction: Expectations
Today I'm going
to be talking about our expectations – specifically, what we expect
from God, who we think God should be, how we think God should act,
and how that shapes how we relate to God.
Once upon a time
I was offered a job as national director of a Christian charity here
in Australia. It was a big deal, and I went to my church leaders at
the time and asked his advice on making my decision. Of course, what
I wanted him to tell me was that it was a great opportunity doing
God's work, and to go for it. But that's not what he told me. He
told me to look carefully at the leadership, the work environment,
and the expectations they had. He knew a thing or two about this
charity, and he thought once I had done that, I would probably decide
not to work there. It wasn't the answer I expected, it wasn't the
answer I wanted, but it was probably what I needed to hear at the
time. I did what he said, and I ended up not taking the job.
In New Testament
times, the people of Judea knew from scripture, from prophecies
predicting what was to come, that God was going to send them a king.
And so they had some expectations of what that king would be like.
Jesus: The King Expected From
Prophecy
He would be born
of David's line. A prophet would point him out. There would be
miracles. So you can imagine that when Jesus of the line of David
hits the scene, announced by John the Baptist, doing miracles all
over the place, people are pretty excited. This seems to be a real
contender for the promised king. So now Jesus is coming to
Jerusalem, and how he enters the city is important. It's important
because there is a prophecy that talks about how the promised king
will enter Jerusalem.
Zechariah 9:9
says pretty clearly, “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout,
Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and
victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a
donkey.” And so when Jesus gets to the Mount of Olives, just
outside Jerusalem, and he mounts a colt that has never before been
ridden, and starts to ride towards the city gates, everyone knows
what that means. It is how God's promised king will enter the holy
city. The picture is clear.
The King People Expected Would Do
What They Wanted
The people were
eager for God's king to come, because life for them was hard. They
were under the thumb of a foreign government – they had been
invaded, conquered, and were treated as second class citizens in
their own country. They wanted their freedom back, and so they
thought if ever a time was coming for God to send them this promised
king, now was the time. They expected this king to come and get rid
of the Romans, give them back their freedom, and that under his rule
they would become rich and powerful again, just like they had under
king David of old. And so people come out in droves to sing and
dance and celebrate, and to lay down their cloaks and other things on
the donkey's path, to give this expected king a king's welcome.
Only when this
expected king gets to the city walls, he stops and weeps, and says
something about the city being attacked, besieged, defeated,
destroyed, and the people inside are going to be killed.
That's bad news
for the people who laid their cloaks in the mud – they thought they
were singing and rejoicing at the coming of a great king who would
save their city. Instead, he has just foretold that it will be
destroyed. Not what people were expecting at all.
The King Pharisees Expected Would Be
Like Them
Now the
Pharisees had been watching and listening to Jesus throughout his
ministry. He had been saying things and doing things they did not
agree with. He had not just been calling himself a king – he had
been calling himself God. He had been forgiving people's sins, which
only God alone could do. He had been socialising with prostitutes,
tax collectors for the Romans, and other sinners. He had disregarded
the Sabbath, God's holy day.
This guy
couldn't be king – he didn't fit into their picture of what God's
coming king would be like. They were the righteous ones, the ones who
kept God's laws to a fault, and even came up with new laws for people
to follow. They knew God, so surely God's king would be like them,
would agree with them. But Jesus wasn't like them, he didn't agree
with them. He wasn't the king the Pharisees expected. So they come
up to him while he's riding along and say, “Teacher, rebuke your
disciples!”
The King Jesus Is – The Unexpected
God
Jesus' response
is not an agreement. He says, “If they keep quiet, the stones will
cry out.” Jesus knows what he's doing. He is claiming to be the
expected king. And if he really is the expected king that God
promised to send, then he needs to ride that colt, and people need to
sing and rejoice, because that's how God's king gets welcomed. If
his disciples didn't do it, then the rocks themselves would sing,
because God's king is entering God's holy city as God promised. And
then when he weeps over Jerusalem, he says it's because when God
turned up at their city, the people did not recognise him. Jesus
calls himself God again.
If it's bad news
for the people with their muddy cloaks, it's worse for the Pharisees,
because not only are their expectations wrong of what God's king
would be like, but their expectations of who God is are also totally
wrong. By speaking those words, Jesus is showing not only is he an
unexpected king, he is the unexpected God.
Jesus didn't fit
their expectations of a king – he wasn't a military ruler coming to
oust the Romans. Moreover, he didn't meet their expectations of God
- he wasn't a self-righteous legalist who turned his back on lesser
people. God didn't just send his people a king – he came to them
as their king. And they weren't expecting that. And that wasn't
what they wanted. He wasn't like them. But he is God.
What King/God We Expect
The inevitable
question arises, then: Why wouldn't God give them what they wanted?
They wanted freedom, they wanted wealth, comfort and security, they
wanted God to be glorified like he was in Solomon's time – are they
bad things? Does God not want his people to be free and safe, does
he not want to be glorified? We have probably all asked a question
like that at one time or another. There are times in our own lives
when there is something we really want, and we know God has the power
to give it, and sometimes we even know that God wants it too, and he
tells us to ask for it, and yet we still don't get it.
Let me give you
an example. I have a friend who became a Christian as a teenager,
but no-one else in her family believes. When she was just out of
university, her father died sudden of a heart attack. For her the
funeral was agony, because she knew that her father was not a
Christian, and she would never see him again in heaven. For all the
family this was goodbye – but for her, it was a goodbye that didn't
need to be forever. Why did God not answer her prayers for her
father? God wanted her father to go to heaven... so why didn't he
believe?
Now these are
huge questions that will be talked about forever. But let me just
raise three brief points for us to think about and reflect on –
three points that I have struggled with my whole Christian life, and
probably will struggle with till the day I die.
- God is
Complicated
The first one is
a big one: God is complicated, and we will never fully understand
him. In Isaiah 55:8 it says, “For my thoughts are not your
thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as
the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than
your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” That can make you
want to give up and say God is a mystery we will never understand.
But it doesn't mean we can't ask these questions, or that we won't
get answers – it means exploring God's thoughts is never going to
end, that we shouldn't be surprised if we cannot fathom the depths of
God's mind. Accepting with humility that we can't grasp the ways and
thoughts of God gives us a much better footing for thinking about God
realistically.
A Christian
worker at my university once told me, “Even if the two of us come
to a complete agreement about every point of theology and doctrine,
we will still be wrong about something. Why? Because we're human,
and fallible.” God is God, and we are not.
- God is a
Person, not a Problem
Secondly, we
have to ask who God really is, what God is really like, and what God
wants. And this isn't just a theological puzzle, it's a real
question about a real person. We can't just ask, '”If I was God,
what would I want?” because we're not God, and God is not us.
That's like asking, “If I was Ben, what would I want for
Christmas?” It's better to ask me what I want, or look up my “What
I want for Christmas” blog. (No, I don't have a “What I want for
Christmas” blog.)
This is exactly
the problem the Pharisees had – they were looking at God as if God
was one of them. But God is not a Pharisee – he is his own person,
he is God. God wants things to work in a certain way, and so that is
how they work. And the only way we are going to learn more about who
God is and what he wants is to read the Bible and learn it, and to
walk with God in our lives and see it for ourselves.
- God's
Actions Cost Him
The third brief
thing I want us to realise is quite often we assume that God can just
click his fingers and make things happen at no cost to himself,
because God is all-powerful. Why do people suffer when God could
just click his fingers and end all suffering? But we have to
remember that sometimes, when God wants to do something, it does come
at a cost to him.
The people of
Jerusalem wanted their freedom, they wanted their problems with
foreign occupation to be solved, and so they wanted God's promised
king to solve those problems for them. But God wanted to solve their
problem of sin – he wanted to free them from their slavery to
selfishness and doing wrong. He was sending a king to deal with
their biggest enemy in God's opinion, not in their opinion. And it
cost God his Son. Jesus came as a king, and died like a criminal.
And if you say, “Oh, yeah, but Jesus was raised to life three days
later, so it's not a big deal,” then you're saying God doesn't have
a right to weep and feel pain at watching the people he loves kill
the Son he adores. Jesus himself is God, and felt that pain,
suffered that loss, died for our sin.
Why would I
think that God doesn't have feelings, and wouldn't be hurt by our
sin, by his son's death, by me spitting in his face and saying, “I
don't agree with you, God,” or, “I don't want to follow you in
this area of life”?
The King That Expects Service, But
Allows Questions
But I have
thought these things. I have questioned why God lets things happen
that I don't like. I still question it. I still think about God
simplistically. I still devalue God's feelings, because he's so high
and powerful, I just figure he should deal with it better than me. I
still have questions and doubts, and sometimes they are really,
really hard to deal with. I don't understand God. But so far, I
have kept serving him, kept coming back to him, kept coming back to
the fact that he is God, and I am not.
When I was a
brand new Christian, soon after my conversion as an 18 year old man,
I sat down in the home of one of the elders of my church - his name
was Eric Reid - and had a long discussion with him, asking him all
sorts of difficult questions about Christianity. He gave me a lot of
fine answers, too. But then he said something that sticks with me to
this day, “It's fine having all these questions. But if you wait
till you have all the answers before you start serving God, you will
never do anything for him.”
When Jesus got
to the Mount of Olives just outside Jerusalem, he sent two of his
disciples to go get a donkey for him, and so they did. They knew
what it meant, just like the people of Jerusalem knew. They knew
that Jesus claimed to forgive sins, just like the Pharisees knew.
They knew Jesus was coming to Jerusalem to die – he had told them
three times! And you know what? They didn't agree – Peter rebuked
Jesus for saying it, you'll remember – but when Jesus told them to
go get the donkey, they did it. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, they
still sang praises to God for all the great things that God had done
through Jesus. “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the
Lord!” they sang from the Psalms. They didn't understand, or even
necessarily accept, everything Jesus said or did, but they knew he
was from God and so they obeyed him, and they worshipped him, and
they gave him honour and glory.
I think that's a
lesson we have to learn, and keep learning – there is nothing wrong
with asking questions, there is nothing wrong with questioning God,
and it is completely human to misunderstand God and be unable to
fathom his ways. God will always do things we don't expect, and
sometimes that we don't like. But at the end of the day, Jesus is
still God, and we are his people. He wants us to serve him, so we
serve – without all the answers.
