The sermon I preached on Sunday was not only fun to deliver, but also fun to prepare.  I wanted to be as accurate to the Bible as I could without reading it word for word.  All four of the gospels tell the story and while they are slightly different from each other (due to who the author was and his perspective) they all tell the same story.  But I always like to think about what it would be like to live back then and see the events for myself.  Many times I wish I could actually go to Israel and see the sights of myself.  I know like many times pictures do not do justice to seeing the city of Jerusalem from the mount of olives for myself.  I was going to try to include a visual to my sermon but I could not find a good picture or image that had Jerusalem with the temple instead of the ones with the Dome of the Rock from the present day.  So I had to use my imagination along with a lot of research to figure out what to include in my sermon and to give you a vision of what my character may have seen or heard clear back then.

  One event that I struggled whether to include or not was the scene in the temple with Jesus overturning the tables.  While Matthew and Luke’s story seem to suggest that it happened on Sunday, Mark’s gospel clearly states it happened the next day (along with the cursing of the fig tree which I alluded to in my sermon).  Matthew and Luke seem to condense the stories into one to keep their stories moving along (Most people think that the book of Mark was written first and the other two borrowed from his stories when they wrote their own versions). I left it out of the final draft because I felt that my sermon was long enough and also because the idea of peace tied many of my thoughts together.  Plus I seldom get to have a cliffhanger in my sermons.  But Palm Sunday’s story is just that.  It is a wait until the story is finished the next week to have a wonderful climax to the story.  So until next Sunday, may God bless.