There are certain days in the year that professional preachers are not necessarily fond of preaching on, and I would have to say that April Fool’s Day is up at the top of the list! Let’s find out right now how many of you have already been the victim of an April Fool’s joke? And how many of you have been the perpetrator of an April Fool’s joke? And how many of you plan to be the perpetrator? Let me ask another question and see if anyone will answer: is there anyone here whose birthday is today?

Today is also, of course, Palm Sunday, the beginning of the most important week of celebration in the Christian calendar, Holy Week. Nearly a year ago when I started thinking about today’s sermon and I saw that Holy Week began on April Fool’s Day that fact in and of itself seemed like a bit of a cruel joke of the calendar. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s actually a rather poignant and telling coincidence. We’ll see.

Those of you with some history in the church know that today is the day we traditionally remember one particular scene from Jesus’ life, that amazing parade led by the Teacher from Nazareth as he makes a grand entrance into Jerusalem right at the beginning of the most important holiday of the Jewish people, Passover. When I was growing up I was fascinated by the scenes from movies of World War II that showed the liberating Allied armies marching into Paris and other European cities. Maybe some of you here were actually in those kinds of triumphant celebrations. If you can picture those old black-and-white newsreels from the mid 1940’s then you can get some sense of what it was like as Jesus rode the donkey into the crowds of people whose nation had been crushed time and again and who once again were chafing under the occupying power of yet another superior military force. Here you have an occupied nation celebrating the event that a thousand years earlier had led to the formation of that nation. And here you have a powerful new figure who shows promise of being the kind of person who can perhaps lead the people to become a free nation once again. And the people are excited, they are filled with hope, they are sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to see what might happen. The only difference in Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem and the Allied armies’ parades in Paris was this: in the latter case, the war had been won, and in the former, the nation of Israel was still an occupied country. So what were the people celebrating? Their celebration was not of an accomplished victory, but a celebration of an ages-old hope for victory that within the week would end in crushing defeat…or so it seemed.

Jesus came into Jerusalem and the people hailed him as their king, their hope, their savior. But they had been looking for that savior a long time. Seven centuries earlier, as the nation of Israel was being crushed by foreign armies, its men being killed, its women and children being deported, its cities burned, a lonely voice from a prophet named Isaiah proclaimed that one day, things would be different. In the middle of the collapse of the nation, Isaiah said that one day, a savior would come to set things right again. “Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy…. Break forth together into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the Lord has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem…. [A]ll the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.” Here came Jesus, whose very name meant, “God saves,” and the people had hope once again. But that hope slammed up against the reality of not just one but two opposing forces, the existing leaders of the occupied nation and the imperial might of the occupying nation, and a few days later Jesus’ broken body was hanging lifeless on a cross.

Who was the bigger fool: Jesus, for thinking that he could march into Jerusalem and just take over from the Jewish leaders and the Roman army, or the people, for thinking that maybe Jesus was the long-awaited Savior of the Nation? C. S. Lewis famously noted that Jesus could only have been one of three things: a lunatic, a liar, or the Lord. Maybe Jesus was the fool, the lunatic who dreamed of being the Savior. Maybe his followers were the fools and Jesus was the liar who convinced them of his power to save. In either case, the cross seemed to make fools of them all. But the cross was not the end of the story. Three days after the cross came the resurrection. And that’s why we know Jesus was neither a lunatic nor a liar, but the Lord. Had his life ended on the cross and we never heard from him again, well then, yes, we would have to call him either lunatic or liar, the Prince of Fools, for being a fool himself or for making fools of us all. But when he came out of the grave, then we knew that he was the Prince of Life, the Lord, the Savior.

Throughout this Lenten season we have been meeting Jesus. We have met Jesus the Teacher with divine authority, the Prophet of the Kingdom of God, the Holy One of God who nevertheless mingled with sinners, and the triumphant Son of Man who nevertheless was also the Suffering Servant of God. Today we meet Jesus the Savior. That’s a title for Jesus that we are so very familiar with, one we use all the time. And it’s one of the most important, because it summarizes so much of what Jesus was all about. And yet, we have to deal with the fact that Jesus was nothing like the kind of savior that the crowds in Jerusalem expected or wanted that day, and he was nothing like the kind of savior that anyone would much expect or want in any circumstance. What kind of savior does his saving by dying?

We’ve heard it a million times, but we can never hear it enough. Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine, and therefore the only person who ever lived who could take the sin of all humanity upon his shoulders and yet not be destroyed finally and forever by it. Just as the Hebrew slaves had been saved in ancient Egypt by using the blood of sacrificial lambs to mark their doorposts so the angel of God would spare their firstborn sons as it passed over their houses and found only Egyptian sons, so Jesus became the sacrifice for the sin of the world. He suffered the consequence of humanity’s sin in our place, so that you and I and all humanity would not be destroyed, but could have forgiveness and the possibility of new life. Only Jesus’ death could pay that penalty, and only Jesus’ resurrection could prove the validity of that payment. Clearly, Jesus’ life and death and resurrection was not just about restoring the power and glory of one tiny little nation in the ancient world. Jesus was about something so much bigger, so much deeper, so much longer. Jesus was all about restoring rightness between humanity and humanity’s God, a rightness that had been lost at the beginning of creation. Jesus was all about saving us from the hell of separation from God.

But do we really need a savior? Look around this room and most of us seem to be doing all right, don’t we? But look into our lives, into our hearts, into our relationships, and things will look different. Mark Twain said, “The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.” And he was on to something. Show me the most successful, most brilliant, most accomplished person in the world, and I’ll show you someone who is still far from perfect, someone who struggles with fear, anger, pride, loneliness, selfishness, and that’s just the beginning of the list. Show me the most successful, most brilliant, most accomplished society in the world, and I’ll show you a society filled with injustice, poverty, drug abuse, and that’s just the beginning of the list. And no matter how hard we try, we cannot fix ourselves. So we need a savior. Yesterday morning I awoke to the sound of my clock-radio playing a song by Kid Rock and Cheryl Crow called Picture. The very first words I heard were, “Lord, I wonder if I’ll ever change my ways.” God was speaking to me! No matter how hard we try, how long we live, how many times we start over, we can never get it totally right. We need someone to make it right between us and God, someone to save us from the hell we deserve and the death we must die. Only Jesus can do that.

So the only thing you and I can do is accept the salvation he offers, and then trust him to lead us through these lives that he gives us, and then thank him for the rest of our days. Over four centuries ago Samuel Crossman wrote a poem about the Savior that tries to grasp the amazing love of God in Christ, the love that saves us.

My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love for me;
Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be:

But who am I, that for my sake
My lord should take frail flesh and die?

He came from heaven’s throne salvation to bestow;
But they refused, and none the longed-for Christ would know:

This is my friend, my friend indeed,
Who at my need his life did spend.

Sometimes they crowd his way and his sweet praises sing,
Resounding all the day hosannas to their king:

Then “crucify” is all their breath,
And for his death they thirst and cry.

Why, what has my Lord done to cause this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run, and gave the blind their sight:

What injuries! Yet these are why
The Lord most high so cruelly dies.

With angry shouts they have my dear Lord done away;
A murderer they save, the Prince of Life they slay!

Yet willingly he bears the shame
That through his name all might be free.

Here might I stay and sing of him my soul adores;
Never was love, dear King, never was grief like yours!

This is my friend in whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.ⁱ

Amen.

ⁱ Samuel Crossman, The Young Man’s Meditations, or some few Sacred Poems upon Select Subjects and Scriptures, London, 1664.