A Question in the Crowd: Who Is This?

Sermon: Palm Sunday

Matthew 21:1-11

According to the Gospel of Matthew, Palm Sunday was the first time Jesus ever appeared in the great, bustling city of Jerusalem. Jesus knew that His ministry would not be complete and His mission would not be successful unless and until He took His gospel message from the small towns of Galilee in the northern part of Israel and declared it in the great Temple in Jerusalem.

Jesus had spent three years preaching, teaching and healing throughout the small and sometimes remote towns of Capernaum, Nazareth and Bethsaida. Like a baseball player who wants to show his stuff in the Major Leagues or an entertainer who knows a career is not complete until you get to Broadway in New York or a film studio in Hollywood, Jesus knew that He had to take His message to the great city of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was where every new idea and every new philosophy had to end up sooner or later. If you were to study the trajectory of the New Testament, it begins in small towns such as Nazareth, Bethlehem, Capernaum and Bethsaida; but the road ahead always seems to be pointing to a more critical site in which the drama of the story could fully and finally unfold. There is absolutely no question about the fact that the key to the gospel being able to reach to the ends of the earth as commanded in Matthew 28 was that Jesus first take the gospel to Jerusalem.

Jesus had to go to Jerusalem for the same reason Paul knew he had to go to Athens, then Ephesus, then on to Rome. The gospel had to be declared in places that served as the crossroads of culture and ideas. The message had to be preached in places where the world always was coming and going so people who heard it could take the message with them wherever they went. Coming to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was not a casual occurrence; it was a strategic decision and a necessary first step in the process of global evangelization!

Things are not very different today when it comes to providing maximum exposure for any idea you might want to put forward. In Ohio, for example, if you had a message that you wanted to share with the widest possible audience, would you share it only in Coshocton, Chillicothe or Canton; or would you try to get to Cleveland or Columbus or Cincinnati where the traffic lanes are more crowded and the cultural exchanges are more frequent?

If you wanted to run an ad in a newspaper in the hope of reaching the widest possible audience, would you put in the local Shaker Heights Sun Press or run it in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that has national distribution? There is nothing wrong with small towns or small newspapers, but getting a message out is a simple matter of efficiency and impact. It is quite often the fact that the right word preached to the right people who are situated in just the right place at the right time can have a major impact.