John lays the old story of David over the Passion like one transparency laid on another, so that you see the pattern. The parallels are deliberate. Absalom gathered Israel against its rightful king, stealing the hearts of the people. The chief priests and the Pharisees did the same — they turned the crowds against the One whom the Father had anointed. Absalom's rebellion was the rebellion of a son against his father. The Passion is the rebellion of the creature against the Creator, of the children of Israel against the God who had carried them out of Egypt in His arms.

You are here this afternoon because the Holy Spirit has not finished building. He still calls by the Gospel. He still places stones. The cornerstone holds. The building rises. The Church endures — not by your effort, not by any human strategy, not by the wisdom of her architects — but by the blood of the Lamb laid into the earth's foundation, and raised again on the third day.

God is Most High. His eyes look down. He sees what you are — the poverty, the squalor, the weight of it all. He sees it, and He does not look away. He comes down. He comes all the way down, down to the floor, down to the cross, down to this altar. The Most High becomes the Most Low so that the lowly might be raised to the Most High.

"No One to Help” Isaiah saw it before it happened. Many centuries before Calvary, he asked the question that hangs over everything you have heard this morning: "I looked, but there was no one to help, and I wondered that there was no one to uphold." Look through the Passion, and you will see that he was right. There was no one.

The righteous Man is inconvenient. He reproaches their sins. His manner of life is unlike theirs. The very sight of Him is a burden. So they have made up their minds: He must go.

Jesus did not stumble into the Passion. He was not simply a good man who ran afoul of powerful enemies. He is the eternal Son of God who became flesh for the express purpose of offering that flesh to be broken. The Zechariah cento your ears received this morning is a mosaic of prophetic fragments, and together they tell the whole story of the week before it unfolds: the King riding in lowly; thirty pieces of silver weighed out; the shepherd struck; the sheep scattered; darkness at midday; living water flowing from the city. Zechariah saw it all. Isaiah saw it all. The thread running through every prophet points to this one Man, this one week, this one death.

This is what the church does when she reads the Passion over you. The Word does what it says. It puts you under the torn curtain, in the company of the saints who walked out of their graves, in the place of Barabbas. This is not a report on something that happened long ago to someone else. It is a delivery—to you, this morning, in this place.

Someone in every generation figures out that if you attach the word "tithe" to a percentage and then call non-compliance theft from God, you can get people to hand over money out of fear rather than love. The New Testament will not let that stand. Paul tells the Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver — which means the size of the gift matters far less than the heart behind it. You are not saved by your giving, and your giving is not stolen from God when it falls short of someone's formula. You were bought with a price. Give in response to that.

The cross is coming. You can feel it gathering through these weeks. Every story this season — the plotting, the stones, the thickening opposition — it is all converging on Jerusalem, converging on one man walking steadily toward it. No one takes His life from Him. He lays it down. For sheep who wander. For sheep who sleep in Gethsemane. For sheep who deny three times before the rooster finishes crowing. For you.

Thesis 21: A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls a thing what it actually is.

"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad" (John 8:56). Abraham saw it. Not dimly, not as a vague hope. He saw Christ's day. When? On Mount Moriah, when the old man bound his only son, his beloved Isaac, on the wood of the altar. When the knife was raised and the angel stayed his hand. When the ram appeared, caught in the thicket by its horns, and Abraham offered it up in place of his son. Abraham saw it and was glad because in that moment on the mountain, in that substitution, he saw the shape of what God would do. The beloved Son would carry the wood up the hill. The beloved Son would be laid upon the altar. But there would be no angel to stay the hand. The knife would fall. The Son of God would die in the place of sinners. The ram caught in the thorns would wear them as a crown.

Generosity is one of the clearest marks of a heart freed by the Gospel. But Christians sometimes wonder: am I actually helping, or am I making things worse? This week, we think carefully about mercy that restores, giving that honors the neighbor, and why the motive behind the gift matters as much as the gift itself.

The thing that changes everything is an empty tomb on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem. That tomb is empty. He is not there. He is risen. And because He is risen, the grave that holds Joyce Hofmann right now is temporary. Her baptism still holds. The name put on her in Skokie in 1931 still belongs to her. The resurrection that Jesus is — the life that Jesus is — she is in it.

There is mourning, and there is rejoicing. Both. All the way through Lent. Not mourning for six weeks and then a gasp of relief on Easter morning. Both. The question is where you are looking. Look at yourself, and you can only mourn. Look at Him — and rejoicing is already there underneath everything, because of what He is doing.

But Jesus does not operate by human arithmetic. He takes what is insufficient, and He gives thanks, and He distributes until everyone is full and there are twelve baskets left over. He does not run out. He will not run out. Not on that hillside, not at that Upper Table, not at this rail.

Isaiah saw debased silver and watered-down wine as signs of a people who had stopped caring for their neighbors. Inflation is an old problem with a name in Scripture—and Christians have something better than anxiety: an honest conscience, practical wisdom, and a peace that outlasts every economic cycle.

The heart surgeon cannot operate on himself. He will always stop before he gets deep enough. And so will you. When Jesus says the Pharisees have hollowed out the word of God, He is not only talking about them. He is describing what every man does when left to himself — and what you do. You adjust the terms. You find the exception. You construct the tradition that protects you from the full weight of what God actually says. And then you call it faithfulness.

Thesis 16: “The person who believes that he can obtain grace by doing what is in him adds sin to sin so that he becomes doubly guilty.”

Thesis 17: “Nor does speaking in this manner give cause for despair, but for arousing the desire to humble oneself and seek the grace of Christ.”

Thesis 18: “It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ.”

The house must not be empty. Christ must dwell there. He must sit on the throne. And He does this by His Word and Sacraments. He comes to you in Baptism and claims you as His own. He comes to you in Absolution and drives the accuser out with the declaration: “You are forgiven!” He comes to you in His Supper and feeds you with His own Body and Blood so that He dwells in you and you in Him. “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8). You are not an empty house. You are the dwelling place of the living God.

If you want to be great, you serve. If you want to be first, you become a slave. This is the exact reversal of every human ambition, every human calculation of worth and status and advancement. The church is the one place on earth where the logic of the world is turned upside down, where the last become first, where losing your life is the only way to save it, where dying is the way to live.