Palm Sunday: A God Who Keeps His Promises

Recently, I was — well, probably despite my best interests — on Instagram, and I was watching a reel. The author of that reel was a young woman, a mother, and she said, in Armenian, we don’t say, “It’s time for a time out.” We say — which translates to — in Armenian, we don’t say time out; we say, “Wait until your dad comes home and see what happens.” Okay? Well, I don’t know if any of you guys had experiences with those moments. I remember growing up, and one time, my mom used that line on me. And so I was waiting, waiting for my dad to come home, because I knew I was going to be in trouble. My dad got home — and both of my parents worked, so I’m not sure why one was home and not the other — but my dad got home, and he was tired, and he’d worked all day, as I recall as a child. And I was upstairs and I was listening because I wanted to know what they were going to do, right? What’s he going to do when he finds out what I did? So I’m waiting and I hear my dad — he hears my mom explain what I did, and his response to her was, “Okay, what do you want me to do about it? You know, I’m exhausted. I’ve been — I’m not going to do this all night long.” He basically didn’t want to deal with it, which, you know, as a father, I get. Sometimes it’s just a little bit hard to step into that role. So they’re going back and forth. And of course, what my mom says is, “You have to do something because I said you were going to. And if you don’t do something, then he’s not going to believe me the next time that I say you’re going to do something.” So whether or not you want to, you have to go up there and do something. I remember this event very well because it was very much like, okay, we’ve got to go through the motions here. And I’m like, well, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do, let’s just get this over with. Anyway, my mom was right. If you don’t follow through, then of course there’s always going to be this gap of trust. Is this person’s word their bond? Are they going to follow through with something if they say they’re going to follow through with it? Now, in a parent-child relationship, I’ve given you one very clear example. Of course, this happens in all of our relationships and definitely in our married lives as well. We make obligations to one another, and life is often challenging, and we fall short of what it is that we hope that we can accomplish as spouses, as parents, as partners, as children even as we grow older. In any event, life is very hard, but we have to strive to do what we can to live up to the promises that we’ve made. But what we find today in the example of Palm Sunday, as we’re all gathered together in this sanctuary, commemorating and reenacting this joyful and awesome event that took place in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, is an act of the fulfillment of God’s promise. And if we were part of, for example, the experience that we had on the Fast and Pray app, or if we were participatory throughout Great Lent this year, and we were, for example, learning the lessons on each given Sunday, what we got from that, I hope, at the end of the day, is our God is a God who fulfills His promises. It’s time and time again, and from generation to generation, what He’s showing us is: I said I would do this, and I did it. I said I would do this, and I did it. We have a multi-millennia long trust-building process that has been initiated by our Creator, which has shown us time and time again that He has done what He said that He would do. And the event known as Palm Sunday is a perfect example of that. We began today by reading from the prophecy of Zechariah. In the prophecy of Zechariah, it’s made very clear what would happen when the Messiah is revealed. And if you read that prophecy, it, to a T, explains the events of Palm Sunday. That prophecy was made 500 years before the life of Jesus Christ. And when we read about what happened on Palm Sunday, we realize every event that took place — from Christ entering into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey, to the healing of the blind, to the calling of the Savior — all of these events were foretold before they took place. And so Christ, once again, exemplifies a God who keeps His promises. And that isn’t exclusive to the Gospel. That applies to our daily lives. We continue to experience a God who keeps His promises. Now, it is not good or healthy for us as Christians to test our God by setting up scenarios where we expect things from Him and we wait for Him to fulfill them, because then we’re asking God to fulfill the promises that we have made for Him. But what we ask of God is that we are able to experience the fulfillment of the promises that He has made for us. And the fulfillment of one of those promises is experienced right now as we gather together in this holy church, because God has promised to us the body of Jesus Christ, the coming of the Holy Spirit through Pentecost following resurrection. He promised us this. He promised us a community of faith that would remain one and would be bound together in their belief of Jesus Christ and the trust that they put in Him, that He would fulfill the promises that He made to us. Now, when Christ entered into the holy city of Jerusalem, what did the people proclaim? They said, “Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” What does that word mean — Hosanna? What does Hosanna mean? The word Hosanna in the Hebrew — don’t blame me for bad pronunciation, I never claimed I had good Hebrew pronunciation — Hoshnaya means “deliver us.” It’s a proclamation asking for somebody to save them. Hosanna, Hosanna. It’s not a name. It’s a request. We know that you can save us. Save us, the people were saying to Jesus Christ as He entered into the holy city of Jerusalem. Hosanna, Hosanna. Save us, save us. They waited for the Messiah for generations, and there He was before them. And there was Jesus Christ. But was His name Jesus? I spoke about this during Christmas, right? It’s always a shock. Was His name Jesus? Were they calling Him Jesus during His life? We have to remember this: that Jesus is the altered pronunciation of His name over time. Of course, in other languages we call Him, for example, in Armenian by a different name, but the name that the Gospel tells us He was given by the angel Gabriel was Yeshua. Yeshua, or the equivalent of the word Joshua. But Yeshua has the same root as the word Hoshnaya, which is Yeshua. And they both mean “save.” Jesus’ name means “He who saves.” And when He entered into the city of Jerusalem, they said, “Save us, save us,” and they were fated to call upon their Savior by the name that He was given by His Father in heaven. All of these things, they come to fruition in time. So today, as we celebrate Palm Sunday, we have to put our faith and our trust in a God who always keeps His promises, because in the fullness of time, they are perfect and will be kept. He is our Savior, just as He was the Savior of those who proclaimed, “Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.