Sermon Illustrations For Passion Sunday (2017)
Illustration
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Who’s got your back? I am a fan of The Andy Griffith Show. In one of the later episodes Opie rescues a younger boy, Mike, from a bully. Opie comes up when Mike is being accosted by the bully. He steps in and asks, “What’s going on here?” Of course, the younger boy is intimidated. He replies, “Nothing, Opie.” “Good,” Opie answers, “keep it that way.” Opie tells the younger bully that he is going to continue to check on Mike. The bully is put in his place and Mike has a new hero. Opie had Mike’s back. He was there to help when things got tough.
This passage of Isaiah is a part of the Servant Songs, and is one that addresses both Israel and prophetically speaks of Jesus. Verses four through nine describe the true Servant of God, Jesus Christ, as he endures suffering. These words are familiar to us when read in connection to the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. One of the things that stands out is in verse seven: “The Lord God helps me.” When things got intense and terrible for Jesus, he turned to his Father. To whom do we turn when things get hard for us? Who do we count on to have our backs? May we find and trust in the one in whom the Lord’s Servant trusted.
Bill T.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Americans are tired, burned out. A 2013 survey by Staples Advantage found that 53% of us say we are burned out. Donald Trump was right about when he observed that “without passion you don’t have energy, and without energy you have nothing.” Our lesson proclaims that Christ, God’s Suffering Servant, has come to sustain us weary ones. Megachurch Baptist pastor Charles Stanley nicely explains how this can happen: “We can be tired, weary, and emotionally distraught, but after spending time alone with God, we find that he injects into our bodies energy, power, and strength.”
Palm Sunday also offers insight into why and how Christ gives us this kind of energy. In the suffering of God’s Servant giving life, in the testimony given to Jesus by the crowd waiving palms, we see God working in surprising ways. That is his style, Martin Luther once noted: “For what is good for us is hidden, and that so deeply that it is under its opposite.... And universal our every assertion of anything good is hidden under the denial of it, so that faith may have its place in God, who is a negative essence and goodness and wisdom and righteousness” (Luther’s Works, Vol. 25, pp. 382-383).
God is a God of surprise. And as 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”
Mark E.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
In 2011, a number of countries began to restrict the freedom of human rights organizations. Some of these countries were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Zimbabwe. These countries considered those who were engaged in a social struggle subject to a criminal offense. The ACT Alliance, with a membership of 111 denominations in 140 countries, spoke out against these restrictions. Suvi Virkkunen, a spokesman for the ACT, said: “This is about local people working for human rights and their survival. Governments must stop seeing civil society as a threat.”
Application: The message of Palm/Passion Sunday is that we are to speak out for the welfare of all people.
Ron L.
Philippians 2:5-11
We worship God through Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It can seem complicated, but it is really simple. Our Creator imbued us with a hunger for faithfulness, created us in God’s own image, and then, to assure that we would understand how to live a righteous life, provided an example in the person of Jesus the Christ. It is through Jesus, and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, the Advocate that Jesus promised, that we understand how to move into intimate relationship with God. Jesus, a part of the Trinity, revealed to us in human form, allows us to understand the joy and the sacrifice of being children of God. We are not God. We are children of God, and while we approach God as part of the family, Jesus reminds us not “to get too big for our britches,” (as my Nanny used to say). Jesus didn’t. Jesus led us, through the images of his life and ministry, and leads us to be the children of God we are called to be, seeking the will of God for our life, and moving into intimacy with God and each other as we surrender to our faith and its demands on our life.
Bonnie B.
Philippians 2:5-11
The apostle Paul is trying to explain something biblical -- the whole idea of the suffering servant found in Isaiah -- without being able to refer to the Bible. Philippi is an ancient city on a major roadway, the east/west road known as the Via Ignatia. It was also a Roman colony, inhabited by people from across the empire, but it didn’t have ten male Jews, the minimum required for a quorum necessary for worship. Normally when Paul came to a city, his modus operandi was to go first to the local synagogue and discuss (argue?) the scriptures with others just as familiar as he with the Hebrew scriptures. They had a basis for conversation. In Philippi Paul went to the river, hoping to find some believers. He found several women, who even if they were Jews would not have counted as part of the quorum. Some of them might have been Jewish. Others, like many God-fearers in the Roman empire, were individuals interested in the idea of one God as found in the Hebrew scriptures, but who were unable to become part of God’s people either because they were women unconnected to a man, or were male but did not want to be circumcised.
Paul wants to tell the Christians in Philippi, with whom he had truly connected, about what it meant for Jesus to become the anointed one of God not by conquering nations but through obedience to God, including the humiliation of the cross. So he uses the image of the drink offering that is poured out on the altar, and shows how Jesus was emptied and then refilled.
Sometimes in discussions with non-believers who may be interested in our church, we insist on describing the sacrifice of Jesus with obscure church language that comes from a translation of the scriptures four centuries ago, language we no longer use in ordinary speech, language that does not speak to people who may not have grown up in our church tradition. Paul’s example in this regard is telling, and worth influencing our telling of the story.
At the heart of this passage is the identification of Jesus with slavery. He voluntarily took on the yoke of a slave. In the ancient world slavery was an economic situation. You were born into slavery, you were captured in war and made a slave, or you became a slave because of your debts. This is in contrast to American slavery, which was race-based, on the damnable falsehood that some humans are naturally inferior to others. Regardless, however, slavery was a horrifying situation, subjecting the individual not only to unpaid labor but to humiliation, sexual abuse, physical torture, and death. This is the extent to which Jesus was willing to go for us.
Frank R.
Philippians 2:5-11
What a lesson in humility! We sure didn’t see that in the election last fall, or even in the elected and appointed people in government today.
It is even hard for a pastor to show humility when he is being honored by his people and the people in the community when he wears his clerical collar. We expect to be given special privilege at the hospital and even in the courthouse. It makes it hard to be humble. But if the Lord of life, Jesus Christ, can be humble -- what an example!
Even when Jesus paraded through the streets of Jerusalem on this Palm Sunday he rode a simple donkey and not a royal stallion. When he healed someone, he even told them not to tell others what a miracle he had performed. He even went to the cross without calling the angels from heaven to come and save him! A cross was the most shameful kind of death in his day, but he endured it for us.
Think how much power it would have given him if he had obeyed Satan. But he preferred to obey his Father in heaven. By this obedience he saved all the people on earth from that day on. His humble obedience saved us. That is why we are in church today.
Jesus was equal with God, but made himself nothing!
The people I served in Nepal were winning their fellow Nepali by even submitting to torture in prison. Their humility was winning their guards!
Even Billy Graham was very humble when I met him at a meeting in New York. He had been offered enough money to build a pavilion for him at a World’s Fair back in the 1960s, but he told the church people at that meeting that he did not want to equate himself with the other Christian churches in our country. We urged him to build that pavilion, and we would even advertise his pavilion in ours.
Even some of our presidents have shown humility!
Can we all show that kind of humility?
Bob O.
Matthew 27:11-54
Art aficionados and historians know that a self-portrait by the Renaissance genius Michelangelo has been discovered in his final painting, “The Crucifixion of Saint Peter” in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. The person in the upper left-hand corner of the painting appears to bear resemblance to the painter himself. Though there is much discussion in the art world about this painting and its style, the reason for why he did a self-portrait in it is not completely known. This is Michelangelo’s last painting, and perhaps he viewed himself as a part of the crowd that witnessed Peter’s death. Reading about this made me think a bit about Jesus’ crucifixion. If I could depict it, I would paint myself among the crowd that day.
I am responsible for the events that took place in Matthew 27. The cross that Jesus and Simon carry is my cross. I’m like Barabbas. I am guilty, but the innocent one is condemned instead of me. I get to go free. Jesus hung on my cross for six hours. He endured physical pain beyond description, and spiritually dealt with even worse. It was my sin that caused his Father to look away. It was my sin that required atonement. My hands are on the hammer that drove the nails. As the scene unfolds in a graphic and gripping way in this chapter, I cannot help but see myself in it. What about you? In the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Bill T.
Matthew 27:11-54
Insights by several of America’s founders nicely describe the reactions of the crowd and of Israel’s political leaders when encountering Jesus. Benjamin Franklin taught that men are driven by “ambition and avarice” (Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, p. 52). And James Madison well explains why no one stood up for Jesus, but went along with the crowd and the majority: “...the strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires firmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is associated” (The Federalist Papers, pp. 314-315). To these insights John Calvin adds: “Let us therefore remember that our strength is so far from being sufficient to resist powerful attacks that it will give way when there is the mere shadow of a battle” (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. XCII/1, p. 261).
What makes a difference? What will it take to break out of theses dynamics? Martin Luther sees in the passion a witness to Christ’s “tremendous love” (Complete Sermons, Vol. 5, p. 372). American singer Ben Harper explains how this love can change American society: “It will make a weak man mighty. It will make a mighty man fall. It will fill your heart and hands or leave you with nothing at all. It’s the eyes for the blind and legs for the lame. It is the love for hate and pride for shame. That’s the power of the gospel.”
Mark E.
Matthew 27:11-54
Sherwood Schwartz was a renowned writer and producer who created the television programs Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Those shows did what sitcoms are supposed to do, and that is to make people laugh. But Schwartz had an additional agenda with Gilligan’s Island. This sitcom represented the confidence that people had in the United States during the Cold War. The program showed that a group of Americans could be dropped down anywhere on the planet and survive by creating a rule of law. Gilligan was the perfect example of democracy, since he made no claims to superiority. The Professor represented American wisdom. The millionaire, Mr. Howell, showed American success. The Skipper demonstrated military authority and might.
Application: As Jesus was on trial, and we are often going to on trial both as individuals and as a nation, we need to demonstrate that we can prevail.
Ron L.
Who’s got your back? I am a fan of The Andy Griffith Show. In one of the later episodes Opie rescues a younger boy, Mike, from a bully. Opie comes up when Mike is being accosted by the bully. He steps in and asks, “What’s going on here?” Of course, the younger boy is intimidated. He replies, “Nothing, Opie.” “Good,” Opie answers, “keep it that way.” Opie tells the younger bully that he is going to continue to check on Mike. The bully is put in his place and Mike has a new hero. Opie had Mike’s back. He was there to help when things got tough.
This passage of Isaiah is a part of the Servant Songs, and is one that addresses both Israel and prophetically speaks of Jesus. Verses four through nine describe the true Servant of God, Jesus Christ, as he endures suffering. These words are familiar to us when read in connection to the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. One of the things that stands out is in verse seven: “The Lord God helps me.” When things got intense and terrible for Jesus, he turned to his Father. To whom do we turn when things get hard for us? Who do we count on to have our backs? May we find and trust in the one in whom the Lord’s Servant trusted.
Bill T.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Americans are tired, burned out. A 2013 survey by Staples Advantage found that 53% of us say we are burned out. Donald Trump was right about when he observed that “without passion you don’t have energy, and without energy you have nothing.” Our lesson proclaims that Christ, God’s Suffering Servant, has come to sustain us weary ones. Megachurch Baptist pastor Charles Stanley nicely explains how this can happen: “We can be tired, weary, and emotionally distraught, but after spending time alone with God, we find that he injects into our bodies energy, power, and strength.”
Palm Sunday also offers insight into why and how Christ gives us this kind of energy. In the suffering of God’s Servant giving life, in the testimony given to Jesus by the crowd waiving palms, we see God working in surprising ways. That is his style, Martin Luther once noted: “For what is good for us is hidden, and that so deeply that it is under its opposite.... And universal our every assertion of anything good is hidden under the denial of it, so that faith may have its place in God, who is a negative essence and goodness and wisdom and righteousness” (Luther’s Works, Vol. 25, pp. 382-383).
God is a God of surprise. And as 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.”
Mark E.
Isaiah 50:4-9a
In 2011, a number of countries began to restrict the freedom of human rights organizations. Some of these countries were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Zimbabwe. These countries considered those who were engaged in a social struggle subject to a criminal offense. The ACT Alliance, with a membership of 111 denominations in 140 countries, spoke out against these restrictions. Suvi Virkkunen, a spokesman for the ACT, said: “This is about local people working for human rights and their survival. Governments must stop seeing civil society as a threat.”
Application: The message of Palm/Passion Sunday is that we are to speak out for the welfare of all people.
Ron L.
Philippians 2:5-11
We worship God through Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It can seem complicated, but it is really simple. Our Creator imbued us with a hunger for faithfulness, created us in God’s own image, and then, to assure that we would understand how to live a righteous life, provided an example in the person of Jesus the Christ. It is through Jesus, and strengthened by the Holy Spirit, the Advocate that Jesus promised, that we understand how to move into intimate relationship with God. Jesus, a part of the Trinity, revealed to us in human form, allows us to understand the joy and the sacrifice of being children of God. We are not God. We are children of God, and while we approach God as part of the family, Jesus reminds us not “to get too big for our britches,” (as my Nanny used to say). Jesus didn’t. Jesus led us, through the images of his life and ministry, and leads us to be the children of God we are called to be, seeking the will of God for our life, and moving into intimacy with God and each other as we surrender to our faith and its demands on our life.
Bonnie B.
Philippians 2:5-11
The apostle Paul is trying to explain something biblical -- the whole idea of the suffering servant found in Isaiah -- without being able to refer to the Bible. Philippi is an ancient city on a major roadway, the east/west road known as the Via Ignatia. It was also a Roman colony, inhabited by people from across the empire, but it didn’t have ten male Jews, the minimum required for a quorum necessary for worship. Normally when Paul came to a city, his modus operandi was to go first to the local synagogue and discuss (argue?) the scriptures with others just as familiar as he with the Hebrew scriptures. They had a basis for conversation. In Philippi Paul went to the river, hoping to find some believers. He found several women, who even if they were Jews would not have counted as part of the quorum. Some of them might have been Jewish. Others, like many God-fearers in the Roman empire, were individuals interested in the idea of one God as found in the Hebrew scriptures, but who were unable to become part of God’s people either because they were women unconnected to a man, or were male but did not want to be circumcised.
Paul wants to tell the Christians in Philippi, with whom he had truly connected, about what it meant for Jesus to become the anointed one of God not by conquering nations but through obedience to God, including the humiliation of the cross. So he uses the image of the drink offering that is poured out on the altar, and shows how Jesus was emptied and then refilled.
Sometimes in discussions with non-believers who may be interested in our church, we insist on describing the sacrifice of Jesus with obscure church language that comes from a translation of the scriptures four centuries ago, language we no longer use in ordinary speech, language that does not speak to people who may not have grown up in our church tradition. Paul’s example in this regard is telling, and worth influencing our telling of the story.
At the heart of this passage is the identification of Jesus with slavery. He voluntarily took on the yoke of a slave. In the ancient world slavery was an economic situation. You were born into slavery, you were captured in war and made a slave, or you became a slave because of your debts. This is in contrast to American slavery, which was race-based, on the damnable falsehood that some humans are naturally inferior to others. Regardless, however, slavery was a horrifying situation, subjecting the individual not only to unpaid labor but to humiliation, sexual abuse, physical torture, and death. This is the extent to which Jesus was willing to go for us.
Frank R.
Philippians 2:5-11
What a lesson in humility! We sure didn’t see that in the election last fall, or even in the elected and appointed people in government today.
It is even hard for a pastor to show humility when he is being honored by his people and the people in the community when he wears his clerical collar. We expect to be given special privilege at the hospital and even in the courthouse. It makes it hard to be humble. But if the Lord of life, Jesus Christ, can be humble -- what an example!
Even when Jesus paraded through the streets of Jerusalem on this Palm Sunday he rode a simple donkey and not a royal stallion. When he healed someone, he even told them not to tell others what a miracle he had performed. He even went to the cross without calling the angels from heaven to come and save him! A cross was the most shameful kind of death in his day, but he endured it for us.
Think how much power it would have given him if he had obeyed Satan. But he preferred to obey his Father in heaven. By this obedience he saved all the people on earth from that day on. His humble obedience saved us. That is why we are in church today.
Jesus was equal with God, but made himself nothing!
The people I served in Nepal were winning their fellow Nepali by even submitting to torture in prison. Their humility was winning their guards!
Even Billy Graham was very humble when I met him at a meeting in New York. He had been offered enough money to build a pavilion for him at a World’s Fair back in the 1960s, but he told the church people at that meeting that he did not want to equate himself with the other Christian churches in our country. We urged him to build that pavilion, and we would even advertise his pavilion in ours.
Even some of our presidents have shown humility!
Can we all show that kind of humility?
Bob O.
Matthew 27:11-54
Art aficionados and historians know that a self-portrait by the Renaissance genius Michelangelo has been discovered in his final painting, “The Crucifixion of Saint Peter” in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. The person in the upper left-hand corner of the painting appears to bear resemblance to the painter himself. Though there is much discussion in the art world about this painting and its style, the reason for why he did a self-portrait in it is not completely known. This is Michelangelo’s last painting, and perhaps he viewed himself as a part of the crowd that witnessed Peter’s death. Reading about this made me think a bit about Jesus’ crucifixion. If I could depict it, I would paint myself among the crowd that day.
I am responsible for the events that took place in Matthew 27. The cross that Jesus and Simon carry is my cross. I’m like Barabbas. I am guilty, but the innocent one is condemned instead of me. I get to go free. Jesus hung on my cross for six hours. He endured physical pain beyond description, and spiritually dealt with even worse. It was my sin that caused his Father to look away. It was my sin that required atonement. My hands are on the hammer that drove the nails. As the scene unfolds in a graphic and gripping way in this chapter, I cannot help but see myself in it. What about you? In the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Bill T.
Matthew 27:11-54
Insights by several of America’s founders nicely describe the reactions of the crowd and of Israel’s political leaders when encountering Jesus. Benjamin Franklin taught that men are driven by “ambition and avarice” (Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, p. 52). And James Madison well explains why no one stood up for Jesus, but went along with the crowd and the majority: “...the strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion. The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires firmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is associated” (The Federalist Papers, pp. 314-315). To these insights John Calvin adds: “Let us therefore remember that our strength is so far from being sufficient to resist powerful attacks that it will give way when there is the mere shadow of a battle” (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. XCII/1, p. 261).
What makes a difference? What will it take to break out of theses dynamics? Martin Luther sees in the passion a witness to Christ’s “tremendous love” (Complete Sermons, Vol. 5, p. 372). American singer Ben Harper explains how this love can change American society: “It will make a weak man mighty. It will make a mighty man fall. It will fill your heart and hands or leave you with nothing at all. It’s the eyes for the blind and legs for the lame. It is the love for hate and pride for shame. That’s the power of the gospel.”
Mark E.
Matthew 27:11-54
Sherwood Schwartz was a renowned writer and producer who created the television programs Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Those shows did what sitcoms are supposed to do, and that is to make people laugh. But Schwartz had an additional agenda with Gilligan’s Island. This sitcom represented the confidence that people had in the United States during the Cold War. The program showed that a group of Americans could be dropped down anywhere on the planet and survive by creating a rule of law. Gilligan was the perfect example of democracy, since he made no claims to superiority. The Professor represented American wisdom. The millionaire, Mr. Howell, showed American success. The Skipper demonstrated military authority and might.
Application: As Jesus was on trial, and we are often going to on trial both as individuals and as a nation, we need to demonstrate that we can prevail.
Ron L.
