Via Dolorosa—The Way of Sorrows Palm Sunday: If Only You Had Known What Would Bring You Peace

By Stanley Mast

Sixth Sunday: Palm Sunday

The Via Dolorosa: If Only You Had Known What Would Bring You Peace

Scripture

Text: Luke 19:41–44
Old Testament Lesson: Psalm 24
New Testament Lesson: Ephesians 2:11–18

Sermon

When Jesus wept over Jerusalem on the Sunday before his death, his tears sprang from the deep longing he felt for the welfare of the Holy City. “If you had only known what would bring you peace,” he sobbed.

In this message, we explored the various reasons “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” lacking contentment and peace. Chief among those reasons is what Patrick Morley calls “cultural Christianity,” which he defines as “seeking the God we want instead of the God who is.” We showed how that was exactly the problem with the crowd on Palm Sunday. They wanted a miracle-working Messiah.

Jesus wept over their misplaced and misguided “Hosannas,” knowing that they would soon say, “We do not want this man to be our king” (Luke 19:14). The way of peace was hidden from these people, because they were not willing to come to the Christ. We talked about the two reasons for such unwillingness—an arrogant certainty about their own ideas of God’s way and a fear that Jesus might cost them their place in the world.

We concluded with a call to stop seeking the God we want and seek the God who is—the donkey king, the crucified Savior. Peace settles into our lives when we recognize the time of God’s coming to us—that is, when we recognize that it is God in Christ visiting us in those times when God seems most absent.

Congregational Prayer

The theme of this prayer was peace of all sorts. We interceded for our world, for our nation, and for those who have not come to Christ out of fear and pride.
Children’s Sermon

We compared the palm branches the children were holding with the olive branch, a symbol of peace, as a way of telling the children that Jesus came to bring peace to earth. As his followers, we must help by being peacemakers.