Reflection on the Word for Palm Sunday of 2022, on April 10. Blessed Be the King – LUKE 19:37-40 As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out." …………………………………………………………………………… Palm Sunday received its name exactly because of this type of greeting Jesus received, for the crowd greeted him as a king in the ancient way of waving palm branches. Jesus entered Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, as it is written in the book of prophet Zechariah, as it is written that “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion! Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King comes to you! He is righteous, and having salvation; lowly, and riding on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” There is an astonishing claim right in the Gospels, that Jesus may have had a real claim to the throne of Jerusalem also as a legal heir, a physical descendant of King David, as it is given in the genealogical charts in the Gospels. It makes sense, that his claim was not only a spiritual ambition, or at least it was not a mere spiritual one in the eyes of his contemporaries. Not even in his disciples’ wishful eyes. Once, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came near to him, asking, that "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we will ask." ... and ... They said to him, that "Grant to us that we may sit, one at your right hand, and one at your left hand, in your glory." And they very likely meant it literally. The kingdom of the Messiah King is a very earthly kingdom, as in Heaven there is no need for even Messiah Kings. Thus, they requested real positions, like the second and the third in command in the supposedly very soon upcoming kingdom, when Jesus, and together with him his disciples, will rule Jerusalem and Judea. On that Palm Sunday Jerusalem was filled with hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. The regular crowd was mingled together with the pilgrims coming from all over the known world for the Easter Holiday, called Pesach or Passover, which is one of the biblically ordained Three Pilgrimage Festivals together with the Shavuot (Weeks or Pentecost), and Sukkot (Tabernacles), when all the able Israelites, would have made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, as commanded by the Torah, in the Bible. And the crowd of the day greeted Jesus as a king. However, a the delegation from the city authorities met him at the gates, stopped him blocking his way and ordering him to make his followers quiet, because they kept shouting, that “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The authorities made it clear that they denied the kingship of Jesus. It sounds like an odd behavior, because who would not want Jesus as king? Among his contemporaries there were quite many, during the history they were even more, and also nowadays his real kingship is not that popular among the oligarchs and their clients, among dictators and their vassals. Among the oldest cunei-form documents, the Sumerian Kings List says that the kingship had descended from Heaven to the city of Uruk way before the Flood. Those Sumerian city state kingships might have been glorious or beneficial, who knows anything certain about prehistoric events, but the Bible registered that the tower of Babel built by emperor Nimrod was erected in order to besiege Heaven and impeach God from his divine kingship, and destroy the angels, as well, if it is possible. When it came to the people of Israel, Moses rejected the idea of creating a kingdom state and the establishment of an unchecked leadership of a king, because he could have said, that in this way we will end up like Egypt, what we just left behind on the account of slavery. There must be no king over Israel, but God only. Actually, this statehood has a name. It is theocracy. The Mount Sinai nation was led by the prophet as a prophet and not a king, by the priesthood and the council of the tribal elders. When it had come to the land of Israel, approximately 1000 years before Jesus was born, during the era of prophet Samuel, the tribes demanded that Samuel should anoint a king to them, saying to him that “Behold, you are old, and your sons don't walk in your ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” Samuel prayed to God, and God answered him that "they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not be KING over them." … “Now therefore listen to their voice: however you shall protest solemnly to them, and shall show them the manner of the king who shall reign over them.” -1. Sam. 7:- Samuel told the people, that they must not reject God as king. If they do and they will let a man to rule over them, then it will not be a honeymoon, especially not a long lasting one. Because the tyrannical earthly king will draft their sons into his army, he will enslave them to plow his field and to reap his harvest and to do other indentured labors. The king will take your daughters to be perfumers, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. The king will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive groves, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. He will take the tenth of your flocks: and you shall be his servants. And many more. We know from the history books, that Samuel presented the future wrongdoings of the future kings very mildly, telling them just the tip of the iceberg. The people did not heed Moses, did not heed Samuel, thus Saul became the very first king of Israel. Of course a very bad one, just a cruel and mindless warlord. When Jesus was born, the blood thirsty Herod was the King in Judea by the grace of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Herod went so far that he caused to be killed, executed, poisoned, assassinated anyone in his way to the throne,including his own sons and his family members. On the day of the actual Palm Sunday, some thirty years later, Emperor Tiberius directly ruled Judea as a Roman province through his envoy, the proconsul governor Pontius Pilate. The collaborating and impostor priesthood, the well-to-do and Hellenized, renegade aristocracy did not want to change the status quo maintained by the Roman law and order imposed by the Roman legions on Judea "at gun point ". They did not want change, not even for Heaven’s sake. Jesus processional march into Jerusalem was a real claim of the throne, yet different from all the other claim, because it was claimed on behalf of God, who was rejected as king a millennium before, but who had never abdicated and had never abandoned Israel. The crowd acknowledged that the claim of Jesus is different by singing the 118 PSALM, that "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. From the house of the Lord we bless you." Jesus still demands from the whole world to acknowledge the kingship of God by praying that thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as well, as it is in Heaven. Also the original message of the Gospel was so simple, that you people must repent and turn to God, because the Kingdom of God is near. May the recurring High Holiday of the Palm Sunday remind us that we have to take side at this time and to choose between the evil forces of this world and the Messiah King, who keeps coming in the name of the Lord God Almighty, to establish the Kingdom not only in Heaven but on Earth as well, by the Holy Spirit, AMEN. https://korakowa.blogspot.com/p/sunday-sermons.html
