Palm Sunday (A) Let God’s Love Transform Us
Palm Sunday (A) Let God’s Love Transform Us
It is our high privilege to claim the freedom God gives through the cross, vital that we understand its meaning, and imperative that we share this powerful good news with our world.
I have determined to make this sermon as simple and direct as I know how, with the hope that you will all be able to repeat the gist of it at the next opportunity. Ever since God created us with free will (the ability to obey or defy His plan for our lives), it has been our nature to defy Him.
Every parent knows that if our children are allowed to behave in a defiant manner, undisciplined, we will lose the necessary authority to love them in the direction of worthwhile choices. Pity the child who defines his parents and is allowed to get away with it. Why? Because……. No teacher can teach in chaos…. no police officer can enforce the law in anarchy…. No government can survive if its citizens are allowed to flout authority. If we do not learn early on the respect the rules of society, if we are not disciplined when we don’t; then if we are not already in trouble we are headed in that direction. Every time anyone chooses to deny the dignity and rights of others the more everyone’s freedom narrows.
Example) Now, because of hijackers, we must all be treated as potential hijackers and pay the price for that treatment every time we fly.
Because it is our nature as human beings to be defiant, every one of us is responsible for narrowing someone’s freedom. A narrowing that progresses from a lack of trust to fear, to hostility, to rejection. The end of our defiant nature then is separation… or as St. Paul puts it, “the wages of sin is death.”
As I have already pointed out, defiance cannot be allowed by anyone in a position of authority who hopes to maintain respect for the law and freedom for those in their charge. God, who is the ultimate authority, anticipated the necessity for respecting the law when He told Adam and Eve that eating the forbidden fruit would bring death. As Eve said to the serpent: “If we eat of the fruit we will surely die.” We all know that in their defiant, sinful nature, they ate it anyway and through the centuries we have all joined them in stealing our bite of disobedience.
We deserve to die (and many have), but thanks be to Jesus Christ and His sacrificial death on the cross, it is no longer necessary. Jesus Christ, in our place, took upon Himself the sinful nature of man and died the death we deserved.
The meaning of the cross is that God meant what He said to Adam and Eve. He told them that disobedience would bring death. The Israelites as we know worked out an elaborate system of sacrifices…the blood of animals flowed like water…. all to appease the God they had disobeyed, but any release from their guilt was temporary.
Then God sent Jesus His son, who though He had the same desires and temptations as the rest of us, chose obedience instead of defiance. In His person there was contained God’s plan for the entire human race – past present and future.
When Jesus dies on the cross, He died the death we all deserved, and satisfied the sentence of “death for disobedience” for all times and all people to come.
The other meaning of the cross is its power to transform our hearts. By His dying so we could live, Jesus has demonstrated how much He valued each one of us. It happens that as we allow that message of love to penetrate our selfish hearts, we are transformed.
No number of rules and punishments can change hearts like love. The cross tells us of God’s love for you, and wonders of wonders, for me. God’s love transforms us.
One of the most important opportunities of our vocation as Christians is to meditate on that message – to roll it around in our minds, to look at it from every possible angle. As we meditate on this message, I pray that we will let the love of God flow into us. I pray that we let God’s love transform us.
Open the door of your heart and let Him in.
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