Thoughts for the Day

Luke 19:37b-40 …the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen. “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord” “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!”  “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”

Today we enter Holy Week and a headlong rush towards the cross, from the pinnacle of popularity on Palm Sunday to the depths of Good Friday. So, three brief reflections on this passage describing Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem.  First, the disciples are praising God not without cause.  They have seen the evidence of Jesus’s miracles.  But they have also missed it!  Jesus has been preparing them for the fact that he going to his death (and resurrection) but there is no hint of their realising that here.  They sense that now is the time, but for what?  Second, “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest” is almost a reprise of the angels’ song at Jesus’s birth … except then it was “Peace on earth” which will not follow now.  In the next verses Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, foreseeing its destruction in 70 AD.  Third, Luke again picks up Jesus’s engagement with the Pharisees.  Still they recognise him as “teacher”, still they appreciate that what is happening is wrong unless he is the Messiah, but, unlike the crowd who see the evidence and misinterpret it, unlike even the paving stones (that’s a challenge!), still they cannot let the evidence lead them to know Jesus.  But Jesus knows his time has come.  And he knows where it is leading.