It’s the start of Holy Week, almost the end of Lent.
And it’s the 219th anniversary of Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers spotting 2 Pallas, an asteroid. But that’s not what I’m talking about today.
Today’s Palm Sunday. That’s when we remember our Lord’s entering Jerusalem in the first century equivalent of a ticker tape parade.
Jesus was top of the charts, wildly popular.
Grass roots opinion, apparently, was that they finally had their messianic king.
Jesus looked like someone who’d finally end the Roman occupation.
The powers that be had the same idea, which scared them.
If this Jesus person, they figured, says ‘I’m the king,’ then we’ll be out of a job. After that, the Roman governor will send in troops and we’ll lose everything else.
So they arrested Jesus, tried and convicted him in a kangaroo court and pressured the Roman governor to enforce the death penalty.
Then after a really bad night, our Lord was nailed to a cross and died.
One Apostle committed suicide.
The rest were keeping a low profile.
Assuming that our Lord was the national hero folks had been expecting, that first Holy Week and Good Friday ended in a fiasco.
Two millennia later, we’re still celebrating. That sounds crazy, at best.
But it’s not.
A few days after his messy death, Jesus stopped being dead. And that’s another topic.
- “Something Wonderful”
(April 9, 2020) - “Jesus Didn’t Stay Dead”
(April 21, 2019) - “Good Friday”
(April 19, 2019) - “Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem”
(April 14, 2019) - “The Eighth Day: Two Millennia and Counting”
(April 16, 2017)
Thanx Brian. A week that changed the course of human history.
God bless.