The other day I took an assembly at a local primary school.
I had a couple of eggs that I painted with chocolate and wrapped them in some foil from a Cadbury Cream egg. I told them I had some chocolate eggs laid by a chocolate chicken. When I asked how many believed me, about half the children put up their hands. Now, that is what I call living in hope! If only chocolate chickens were real! If they weren't laid by chocolate chickens, what did they think would be inside the egg. Some said cream and when I asked what sort of cream someone said caramel.
They all gasped with surprise when I broke the chocolate egg and out came a real egg! It wasn't what they expected at all.
It was a nice introduction to Palm Sunday because the people who witnessed Jesus triumphant journey into Jerusalem didn't get what they expected either!
There were different groups of people all expecting different things to happen
- The Romans, who ruled over the Israelites, were not expecting Jesus to ride into town being hailed as a king!
- The religious leaders – they thought they were in charge. They were awaiting the coming of the Messiah but they had been waiting for over 400 years and when you have been waiting a long time for something, you don’t really expect it to happen…. today! They certainly didn’t believe it was Jesus!
- Some of the people of Jerusalem and
- The disciples believed Jesus was the Messiah sent by God to save them, but they expected the Messiah to be a powerful leader who would physically save them from their enemies and set them free from Roman rule.
The Religious leaders were getting increasingly worried and annoyed at Jesus popularity and so turned the people against him.
By the end of the week, all those expecting Jesus to rise up against the Romans were deeply disappointed. Things were not working out as they expected.
The Romans didn't expect Jesus to be killed, the religious leaders did! But the people of Jerusalem and the disciples didn't expect that to happen. And of course, in the end what did happen caught everyone by surprise because no one expected Jesus to come alive again!
God is indeed a God of surprises! So where does that leave us?
We have the benefit of history to tell us the story. What we know from the past helps us grow in our faith because we have the experience and testimonies of others who have gone before us to encourage and inspire us.
But what about the future?
We are heading towards something that mankind has never experienced before - and that is Jesus' return. That puts us in a very similar position to those first believers who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. They knew and understood about as much of Jesus' first coming as we do about his second coming! Like them, we can refer to the prophecies written down in the scriptures about future events which are yet to be fulfilled. No matter how confident we may feel about the future return of Christ, as we wait expectantly, we can only imagine, with our limited knowledge and understanding, how events will eventually pan out.
What we can learn from this Easter story, is that while God may appear to be full of surprises, he is always faithful to us. His ways are higher than our ways and beyond our understanding. When we look at the extent of the universe and see how vast it is and think how little we know about that – we can’t expect to know all there is to know about our creator. But one thing we can learn from history and from the Easter story is that God is faithful to us…always. Bible stories like this can give us the confidence to be prepared for the unexpected and encourage us to stay faithful to God, even when things appear to be going wrong, because sure as eggs, (if you will excuse the Easter pun) when Jesus' comes again we will be in for a few surprises and we don’t want to be caught out.
Note: I got the idea for the school assembly from:
http://assemblyideas.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/easter-or-palm-sunday-assembly-ideas-using-a-chocolate-egg/
