Embracing Change: A Palm Sunday Reflection

In this heartfelt sermon, Daniel McInnes reflects on the significance of Palm Sunday and the journey through Great Lent. He challenges listeners to examine their spiritual growth and encourages them to embrace change as they prepare for the coming week. Through personal anecdotes and biblical insights, Daniel inspires a deeper connection with Christ and a commitment to living a life of humility and service.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen. Today we have a great feast, Palm Sunday. Christ comes into Jerusalem, prophesied by the prophets, long awaited. This is the time. This is the time when we see Christ's public ministry coming to its fruition. This is the week when everything will happen, when we finally see that salvation which was promised for so many hundreds and hundreds of years in the prophets. We finally see it coming to fruition this week, and today is the beginning of that. Jesus coming into the city is greeted by the people as king, but we also see a change coming soon after that.

This week, what I want to do is briefly reflect on where we've come from and then where we're going. We've just spent a number of weeks fasting through Great Lent, and at the very beginning of the fast, we had some images given to us. We had the image of the publican and the Pharisee, and right now it's good to look back on our experience over this fast and think about where am I? Have I become more like the publican, or have I become a little bit more like the Pharisee? How did I travel over these last 5 weeks? What was my attitude to other people? What was my attitude to the things of this world, my attitude to the things of God? All of those things. How did I travel when I went through the fast? You know, was I thinking, gee, I'm a great faster, I'm an amazing faster. I go to the shops, I go through the supermarket, I look at every label, I check if there's even the smallest amount of dairy. If I see it, I'm not having anything to do with it. I spend hours in the supermarket looking at those labels, but the whole time I'm saying the Jesus prayer, so it's all right. You know, I'm being spiritually fed.

Or, you know, I really need to pray, and I'm a great prayer, so, you know, I said to my wife, you know, all the housework and stuff that you usually ask me to do, sorry, I can't do that because I have to pray. And I could see by the look on her face that she actually knew how much of a sacrifice that was for me, and so I prayed for her that she would have the strength to be able to pick up that extra load, you know, so that I could pray. Yeah, I saw some poor people, had some money in my pocket, but, you know, I thought, you know, they'll probably just use it on drink, so I prayed for them, and I looked really concerned while I was doing it, and I'm pretty sure people around could see that I looked concerned. And we know that praying for people instead of giving them stuff is actually more important anyway, right?

If we've lived like that through the fast, we shouldn't expect to have much spiritual benefit from it. In fact, we probably should expect that there was some detriment from living the fast 5 weeks in that way. But I'm assuming that we didn't do that, at least we tried not to do that, right? So we try not to live like that when we're going through the fast, but we're human beings, and we have a great capacity for self-justification. We have a great capacity for doing whatever we want and then justifying it later by whatever. I took it to the extreme, but, you know, we can do that. But we need to be realistic and honest with ourselves, and that's what the fast is about. It's being realistic and honest with ourselves. It's not about being perfect. It's not about winning prizes or anything like that. It's about slowly but surely coming to know who we really are, who we really are right now. What are our weaknesses? What is it that God wants us to work on? Where do I really need to put my attention?

That's what that five weeks, that pressure cooker, is like. And you'll know if you've been living the last 5 weeks, you'll know that things come up. Things always come up during Lent, little things, big things. Something comes up, and it's a signpost saying this is where you should be putting your attention. This is something that you need to work on. Doesn't have to be big, can be small. But remember, if you're young, like you young guys who've just come into the church being baptized, you might be like 20 years old, you might have 50 or 60 years left to work on this. So, you know, it doesn't have to be big. It compounds. You're going to do this year after year after year, and year upon year upon year. If you pay attention, then your life will change. But it takes attention, it takes being honest, being attentive to yourself, and being honest, and then coming to Christ and bringing all those things and coming to be healed.

For many of us, when we come to the end of the fasting period, like now, sometimes we think, what's actually happened? We don't quite know. We don't really feel that different. We just might feel tired or whatever. Maybe we just failed a lot. Maybe we thought this Lent was just terrible. Everything I touched just turned to ashes. It was just, you know, just I tried, but everything just failed. But we should always remember that what we think at any one particular moment in time is probably not how things actually are.

And by way of an analogy, I was listening to a guy's podcast this week, and he's totally different topic. He's studying Japanese. He's been studying Japanese for 20 years, and he has a PhD in Japanese literature. Of course, he didn't start off that way. In his first year of university, he studied Japanese. At the end of the year, he decided he was going to try and read a novel by Natsume Soseki, who's a quite difficult Japanese novelist, well above any possible level he could possibly read. Anyway, he decided he was going to try and read it. He spent the summer trying to read this book. He got 80 pages in. He couldn't understand any of the Japanese kanji, the Japanese characters. He couldn't understand the words. He didn't know how the sentences were put together, so he didn't understand anything. He didn't know the storyline because every time he tried to get into the story, he had to go back and look something up and then forgot what was happening. So it was just an incredible summer of frustration for him. And at the end of it, he was like, you know, why, why, why did I do this? But he did persist for the entire summer, and so he did it, right? But he couldn't get through the whole book.

Now, the interesting thing is, and this is why I'm telling you, when he went back to university for the second year, what he found was that everything that he read was so much easier. He breezed through it. He breezed through it. Even in third year, he breezed through it because he put himself through that experience not knowing what was happening. He didn't know. He had no idea what was happening to him at the time. The results came later. The understanding of what had happened during that period of time while he was doing that and putting himself through that only came later. But now he has a PhD in Japanese literature. He took all of his graduate courses in Japanese. So, you know, that's where you start. It's compounding year by year by year, little by little, little by little. You don't know what's going on, but you can't judge based on the moment. You just have to keep going, even when you think, "What is all this? Why am I doing this?" Doesn't matter. Continue. Persist. God's watching. God's there. He's right beside you, just like St. Anthony when he was being attacked by the demons. And then when finally the light comes and he says, "Where were you?" You know, God comes and appears to him. "Where were you?" He says, "I was right here. I was watching the whole thing. I was watching to see how you would fight." You know, that has to be our attitude.

And now that we've come this far, we have one more week to go. So let's look ahead. We've got this far. However we've lived the fast these last five weeks, right now be honest with ourselves and say we have one more week to go. How are we going to live this week? How are we going to live this week? We have two images. The gospel reading today, half of it is the entry into Jerusalem. The other half is what happens before that, which is in Bethany. Now in Bethany, what happens is that Mary comes and pours precious ointment on Jesus's feet and then wipes his feet with her hair. So in great humility and abasement, she anoints his feet and wipes his feet with her hair. And Jesus sees this as preparation for his burial, and he praises her greatly. This is, you know, a great sacrifice on her part.

But then there's Judas. Judas steals. We're told that he steals. He doesn't care about the fact that she's, you know, anointing Jesus before the burial. What he cares about is that the perfume wasn't sold and then given into the money box so that he could take some of the money, right? The way that it's reported in the gospel, it's like it's kind of an open secret that he steals. Almost they kind of know this is who he is. But he's coming to the same day where we are right now, where the creator of all things, the king of creation, is coming to Jerusalem. And just prior to that, he is showing that he has no desire whatsoever to change at all. He's not going to change. He's a thief. He wants this. He wants to steal. He's not changing.

For us, in this coming week, we've hopefully, by the end of these five weeks, maybe seen some things about ourselves that we know we ought to change. And as we go through this week, let's change them. Let's make an attempt. It's only one week, but still we can make a start. We can make a start on doing the things that we know we ought to do in order to really change our lives for the better in Christ. But if we don't do that, we're just like Judas. We're just like Judas. We're saying, "I don't really care about all of this. You know, I don't care about the eternal life. I don't care about the kingdom of God. I don't care about any of those things. I want what I want now." But actually, all of those things that we could possibly ever get now will pass away. What we really want is what Christ is offering us and what we're going to come to in just one week's time at his Pascha.

So this week, even if we haven't lived the fast well, even if we've neglected everything, this week let's make an effort. Let's make an effort to come to Christ and say, "I will do what is required. I'll do what I need to do. I'll do what I know you've been showing me to do to come closer to you, to live my life better for you so that I can be a real benefit to everybody else around me and the world." In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.