JESUS, THE CROSS, THE WRATH OF GOD, AND THE GREAT EXCHANGE

Hours before Jesus uttered, “It is finished,” and gave his life on Calvary, the Gospels record him asking his Father in heaven to, “let this cup pass” from him. Jesus knew what was coming – the betrayal, injustice, false accusations, mockery, beating, torture, and ultimately execution.

He asked for deliverance but followed that request with, “Not my will but yours be done.”

The cup Jesus referred to there certainly referred the hours to come, but that cup referred to something cosmic as well. Psalm 75 says,

“but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another. 8 For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.”

Get that picture. Picture a cup in the hand of God. In the imagery, that cup contains a wine that represents God’s judgment and wrath for all the sin of the world – including yours and mine. The psalmist promises here that God is going to pour that wine down on the wicked of the earth (that’s you and me again) – down to the dregs (until there is absolutely no more wrath).

That is terrible news for me. God is just and good. Just like an earthly judge, it is RIGHT for him punish sin, so God will not unjustly leave the cup full; it must be poured out.

This cup, which should overwhelm us with dread, this is the cup Jesus is thinking about in the garden: “Father, let this cup from me.”

Jesus, as we remember on this Good Friday, provided a third option for the cup of God’s wrath. That wine cup could be left full – making God unjust. It could be poured out on us. Those were the options — but Jesus.

Jesus, in taking our stripes, accusations, and embarrassment…

Jesus, in dragging our cross up the hill called Golgotha….

Jesus, in taking the wrath intended for us, grabbed that cup from the Father’s hand and gulped it down on our behalf. He absorbed the wrath of God for us, his people.

The wrath of God is awful news, but the mercy and love of God, through Christ, is what makes this Friday, for the redeemed, truly good.

“21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” – 2 Corinthians 5:21

Palm Sunday Reflection -- Jesus and his Mysterious Kingdom

PALM SUNDAY

COVID-19 can cancel a lot, but it can’t cancel Holy Week.

Tomorrow, the world’s Christ-followers start an entire week of remembering the final week of Jesus’s earthly ministry, and it begins with Palm Sunday.

FROM CORONATION TO EXECUTION

If you came to read the story of Jesus with no background information from childhood and our surrounding culture, Palm Sunday seems like the logical climax to his story. He had spent three years displaying his absolute authority over sickness, nature, demons, the religious authorities, and even death.

So, it would not surprise the reader to see Jesus being lauded as the rescuer and liberator of his people as he rides into Jerusalem. Indeed, that image is exact one a person would expect — a king coming to take his throne. The imagery is clearly kingly — riding in, atop a beast, a royal procession with the accompanying adulation and celebration.

However, we all actually do have that background information. We know how the week ends. In a matter of days, Jesus goes from hearing people praising him as “Hosanna” and “Son of David” to hearing some of those same voices shout, “crucify him!”

The beginning of the week looked like a sure coronation, but the end of the week was an execution.

If we look at the week deeper, though, we find that the coronation Palm Sunday promised did emphatically take place. It just happened in a way that surprises us all.

CONSIDER THE KINGLY ELEMENTS

It isn’t just the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem that indicates Jesus was heading for enthronement.

Jesus gets to Jerusalem and goes straight to where a king would be installed — the temple.

New kings also come with feasts, and Jesus instituted his own feast in the Lord’s Supper that week.

This sounds disorienting, but during his trial and crucifixion, he is pronounced as king (by a soldier declaring it in mockery)

Jesus is given a crown and robe.

These are all the trappings of a king being led to the moment where he finally takes a seat on his throne. Of course, the way we read it, though, Jesus isn’t enthroned. Instead of being lifted up on a throne, he is lifted up on a cross.

Consider what happens when he is on the cross, though. Among many other highlights, Matthew records in his Gospel that at Jesus’s death, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51).

The curtain that separated God and man for millennia was torn open, inaugurating a new reality of the access humankind now has to God, through Christ.

It was from the cross that Jesus did his royal work — absorbing the wrath of God for sin and re-establishing an Edenic reality of God dwelling with his people.

Reflecting on this, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this:

 ”A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom. For while the kingdoms of this world are built by force, the kingdom of God is founded on grace. In his crown of thorn and purple robe, we see him adorned as a king. In his crucifixion, Jesus takes his rightful throne on the earth.”

Palm Sunday hinted at Jesus being enthroned as king, and he was. It just happened in a more cosmic and glorious way than we could have ever imagined. He wasn’t installed as a king of just an earthly kingdom with its own borders, laws and customs.

On the cross, he was enthroned rightfully as the King of All Creation for all of time.

The people on Palm Sunday we’re crying out to be saved from an earthly oppression. Jesus delivered an even better liberation: liberation from sin and ultimately death.

Final Thought

We are often like those folks at Palm Sunday. We cry out for rescue, and we think our desired version of events is the exact rescue we need. All the while, God is rescuing us — but doing it in a better way than we could have imagined ourselves.