"Zechariah saw it all. Isaiah saw it all!" Holy Monday 2026
30. March 2026
Holy Monday
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
"I gave My back to those who struck Me, and My cheeks to those who plucked out the beard; I did not hide My face from shame and spitting." (Isaiah 50:6)
Isaiah wrote those words six centuries before they happened. He wrote them as though he were already there, already watching, already reporting what he saw. The bruised back. The torn cheeks. The spit running down a face that did not turn away. He saw it all, and he recorded it, and then the world went on for six hundred years, and then it happened exactly as he said.
This is Holy Monday. The cross is still three days away. But the Passion has already begun, because it was always going to end here. Before the betrayal, before the arrest, before the trial — before any of it was set in motion by men — God had already spoken it through His prophets. The suffering of His Servant was not an accident, not a tragedy that overtook God's plan. It was the plan. "The Lord God has opened My ear; and I was not rebellious, nor did I turn away." (Isaiah 50:5) He knew. He came anyway. He set His face like flint toward Jerusalem, and He walked straight into what was waiting for Him.
That is the first thing Holy Week will not let you soften. 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.
Hear what the prophet says: "He is near who justifies Me; who will contend with Me? Let us stand together. Who is My adversary? Let him come near Me. Surely the Lord God will help Me; who is he who will condemn Me?" (Isaiah 50:8-9) Those are not the words of a victim. That is the confidence of the Son of God walking willingly into the court of sinners because He knows what the Father has promised and He trusts it absolutely. No one takes His life from Him. He lays it down.
Now hold that against what you heard in the Passion reading today.
They came for Him at night, with torches and weapons, as though He were a dangerous fugitive. He had been in the Temple teaching in broad daylight and no one had touched Him. "But the Scriptures must be fulfilled." (Mark 14:49) He says it plainly. This is not happening to Him. He is walking through it, through every false witness and every denial and every blow, because the Scriptures must be fulfilled and He came to fulfill them.
The disciples flee. Peter follows at a distance and then denies three times that he ever knew the man. The council condemns Him for telling the truth — that He is the Christ, the Son of the Blessed — and calls the truth blasphemy. Pilate knows He is innocent and hands Him over anyway. The crowd shouts for Barabbas, a murderer, and demands the blood of the One who never sinned. The soldiers put a purple robe on Him as a joke. They kneel before Him in mockery. They call Him King of the Jews while they strike Him on the head with a reed.
And He is the King of the Jews. That is the unbearable irony running through the whole Passion. Every mockery is accidentally true. The crown of thorns is still a crown. The title nailed to the cross is still His title. The soldiers who bow in contempt are doing precisely what every knee will one day do. They mean to humiliate Him. They are, without knowing it, enacting His enthronement.
"Crucify Him." The crowd shouts it twice when Pilate asks them to explain themselves. They have no answer to his question — what evil has He done? — so they simply shout louder. When you have no case, you raise your voice. When you cannot answer the charge, you silence the one making it.
The cross is what happens when the holiness of God meets the sin of the world in the same body. Jesus hangs there between two criminals, exactly where the prophet said He would be — "numbered with the transgressors" (Isaiah 53:12, cited in Mark 15:28) — and at the ninth hour He cries out the words of Psalm 22: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Mark 15:34) That cry is not the cry of a man losing His faith. It is the cry of a man bearing the full weight of what our faithlessness deserves. He is forsaken so that you will not be. He enters the darkness so that you can walk out of it. He is condemned so that the condemnation runs out before it reaches you.
The veil of the Temple tears in two from top to bottom. The barrier between the Holy of Holies and the rest of the world, the curtain that kept sinners out of God's presence, is torn — not by human hands, from the bottom up, but from top to bottom. God tears it. The way into His presence is open. It was opened by the blood of the One who gave His back to those who struck Him, who did not hide His face from shame and spitting, who set His face like flint because "He is near who justifies Me."
That justification is yours. Not because you earned it. Not because your repentance was thorough enough or your faith strong enough or your life clean enough. Isaiah asks the question at the end of the prophecy: "Who among you fears the LORD? Who obeys the voice of His Servant? Who walks in darkness and has no light?" (Isaiah 50:10) That is you. That is all of us — walking in darkness, stumbling, denying, fleeing like the disciples into the night. "Let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely upon his God." That is the only answer the prophet gives. Not try harder. Not do better. Trust. Rely. The name of the Lord is the name of the One who walked willingly into the Passion that Isaiah saw six centuries before it happened, because the Father had promised to help Him, and the Father's promises do not fail.
The Passion reading does not end with the cross. It ends with a tomb, a stone, a man named Joseph who had the courage to ask for the body of Jesus when everyone else had scattered. He wraps Him in linen and lays Him in a rock-hewn tomb. The stone rolls across the door, and it is finished.
But Zechariah saw past the stone. "It shall be one day which is known to the LORD — neither day nor night. But at evening time it shall happen that it will be light. And in that day it shall be that living waters shall flow from Jerusalem, and the LORD shall be King over all the earth." (Zechariah 14:7-9) The darkness is not the last word. The stone is not the last word. The Lord who opened the ear of His Servant, who helped Him, who justified Him — that Lord has spoken, and what He has spoken stands.
Come to the altar today knowing what it cost. The body broken, the blood poured out — these are not symbols of a distant event. This is the same offering, delivered to you now, because the Servant who set His face like flint did it for you, for the forgiveness of all that you have done and all that you have left undone. He did not hide His face from your shame. He bore it. The price is paid. The veil is torn. The living waters flow.
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin
