On Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008, the three readings are Isaiah 50:4-9a, Philippians 2:5-11 and chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. Our focus will be Philippians 2:8, “And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”
While it is well known that Jesus is the personification of wisdom, it is not that well known how different is the wisdom of Jesus from that of the Palestinian world of His time on earth. For Judaism, which is a different religion than Old Testament Israel, a person was considered wise if he had the components of wisdom. These components included obedience to the Torah, following the ceremonial laws such as the Sabbath day, being wealthy and having a successful life.
Jesus turned the commonsense view of wisdom upside down. Not only was He known to have been conceived out of wedlock, but He had no place to lay His head, He broke many of the ceremonial laws of Judaism such as healing people on the Sabbath, He was not wealthy and He died the humiliating death of a criminal.
Yet it was about this Man that the Father said, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.” How so? Because the wisdom of God is the foolishness of men. The Father was pleased with the Son not because of His successes but because of His faithfulness to the mission for which He was sent. Certainly, His own hometown wanted to throw Him off a cliff and after feeding more than 5,000 He had to flee from them because they wanted to make Him a bread king. Bit these are failures in the eyes of man, not God, for He remained faithful to proclaiming law and Gospel.
Even His message was counter to the wisdom of that day. “Follow me and you will be persecuted” and “Blessed are those who have nothing to offer God for their salvation.” Jesus was turning the world of Judaism upside down which drove people to thank God that they were not like other sinners (Luke 18).
But by far the greatest concern about Jesus on the part of many religious leaders in His day who were theologians of self-glory was His tendency to forgive people who were not worthy of such forgiveness. In fact, apart from the Holy Spirit creating faith and a new spirit within an individual, the message of Jesus was foolishness, not wisdom.
Palm Sunday reminds us of the beginning of a week that would recreate the world as this carpenter from Nazareth was determined to enter Jerusalem for the purpose of being put to death for you. Even the disciples did not realize that His being obedient to the point of death on the cross had been promised in the Old Testament (Psalm 22) and would result in the iniquity of us all being laid upon Him (Isaiah 53). The wisdom of the Gospel trumps the wisdom of the Law indeed!
Name:Tom Baker