First Sunday in Advent Service
The Holy Gospel - St. Matthew 21:1-9
Now when [Jesus and his disciples] drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, ‘The Lord needs them,’ and he will send them at once.” This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet, saying, “Say to the daughter of Zion ‘Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
We begin a new Church Year today, on this First Sunday in Advent. It’s a whole new year in which your king comes to you. It's a new beginning, a new opportunity for you to consider what all of this is. You come into this place with its uniqueness. It looks different from the other places you go. It sounds different; not changing with the times so much as preserving a timelessness that connects it to people like you who did this throughout the history of this world.
“Who did this,” we say. Well, some of them are in our text, aren’t they?
They have come to receive the Lord Who has come to them.
They have come praising His Name.
They have made a clear path for Him.
They have come recognizing that He brings God’s grace to them.
They are in need of what He brings.
They shout the things that people shout who recognize their guilt before God, and who believe His promise to send one Who will rescue them from the punishment their guilt deserves. That’s what “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” - is.
It speaks of the promise [God] made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah of a righteous Branch to spring up for David. Our Old Testament lesson talks about this. God would be sending the one called: ‘The LORD our Righteousness.’ Our righteousness - in other words, the one who removes our sin from us, and presents us before God as those who are sinless and fit for His eternal kingdom. The prophet Zechariah had talked about this one as well (9:9), describing Him as righteous and having salvation…humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey (just as we see Jesus in our text). He is the one Zechariah was talking about; He is the righteous one, the one having salvation, the one, humble.
That He comes humble is important. What if we needed to wonder about God’s intentions toward us? What if we had to say to ourselves, “I don’t know how God feels about me. I don’t know how He intends to treat me.” How could we sleep at night, knowing ourselves, and knowing what Moses writes about God’s knowledge in Psalm 90:
For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
8 You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
What if God’s Anointed One were coming to us in God’s anger, in wrath, with it in mind to bring us to account for our sins? Wouldn’t this be a dour gathering to be a part of on Sunday mornings, then? How could there be any joy on our faces as we greet one another, or in our voices as we sing in this sanctuary, or in our prayers? It would be sheer terror. Every one of us has the secret sins that Moses mentions in that Psalm.
One of the sins is our tendency not always to be so eager to meet the Lord like those did on Palm Sunday. We aren’t eager to pray to Him, for instance, when we have been entangled in some sin (Isn’t it true?), whether it’s thinking or speaking ill of some other person, or being ungrateful for whatever situation we find ourselves in, or some other thing. We haven’t always wanted to encounter the Lord when we have been interested in doing contrary to His will. We are deserving only of God’s anger, of His just punishment.
But Jesus is the King that comes to you, humble. In fact He humbles Himself to purchase and win you from all sin, from death, and from the power of the devil; not with gold or silver, but with His holy precious blood, and with His innocent suffering and death - as Luther writes. He’s the One Who, though rich, becomes poor so that you through His poverty might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9). He comes to you, humble, in mercy, in love. He comes with forgiveness for you.
And when we think about the beginning of a new Church Year, it occurs to us also, through what means He comes. We aren’t among the crowd that gathered on the road in Jerusalem in the days of our text. We aren’t lining the street with palm branches so that our Lord’s path might be smooth and proper. We aren’t hearing the clip-clopping of the donkey’s hooves on the pavement as it carries our Lord. But we receive the same Lord for the same reason. And we receive Him in a place like this. He comes to you through Word, and through Baptism, and through Supper. Those are the Means through which He has determined to enable you to receive Him. He comes humble. He comes in mercy, drawing you to Himself through faith, and offering you full and free forgiveness for every sin. You need not ever wonder about God’s intentions toward you; He makes them plain in this text. He is the King Who comes to you, humble.
You are among the believers in God’s promise of salvation. You belong to a group of people that spans every generation in the history of this world. You come here to receive this Lord, praising His Name. Your heart is a clear path for Him, made so by the power of the Holy Spirit Who worked in your Baptism to give you faith, or in your hearing of God’s Word. He still does so. He fans your faith’s flame as you hear His Word even now, at this moment.
He nourishes your faith in the mystery of Holy Communion, enabling you to put your trust in Christ’s own words, This is My body given for you; This is My blood shed for you for the remission of sins. Joined with bread and wine, these are what He says they are because He is capable of all things, and He cannot lie. So there isn’t any doubt left in our perception of the Supper, just the comfort of knowing that Christ gives us His true body and blood for our good as we anticipate His Second Coming in glory. Behold, your king comes to you.
So, as this new year begins in the Church, think of yourself each week like those on Palm Sunday. You come to this unique place conscious of your guilt - eager to confess it before God, and to hear the absolution that is pronounced to you by God’s representative. God has forgiven your sins; that’s what your weary soul longs to hear. You come believing God’s promise of His mercy to be found in the One He has sent Who humbled Himself even to the point of death on a cross so that He might remove your sins and make you an inheritor of God’s kingdom. You come knowing that the Spirit is present in God’s Word that will be spoken, and sung, and preached so that hearing, you might have faith that perseveres unto eternal life. You come knowing that Christ is present for you here, also in the Supper to which He welcomes you to give you the heavenly food as a token of what you receive eternally in His kingdom.
Let us pray:
Lord God, heavenly Father, as we begin this new Church Year, draw us to You in faith and to one another in Christian fellowship. Let this be a year of growth for all of us. Protect us from temptations that threaten our souls. Move us to confess our sins here in sincerity, and comfort us with the proclamation that you have forgiven our sins in the blood of our Savior, Jesus. We pray in His Name. Amen.