TRULY, THIS WAS THE SON OF GOD | Palm / Passion Sunday | 29.03.2026 | Matthew 26:1–27:66 | Paul Bieber |

TRULY, THIS WAS THE SON OF GOD

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

“Truly, this was the Son of God,” says the centurion who commanded the execution party. But how can he say that? He probably didn’t witness the betrayal and abandonment of Jesus, but he did see him scourged, struck, spat upon and nailed to the cross; he heard Jesus’ cry of dereliction and watched him die. Somehow, out of all this comes his confession of who Jesus is.

It would be far easier to understand if that confession of Jesus’ divine Sonship came a little earlier in today’s Liturgy. Palm Sunday — Passion Sunday is a day of contrasts, of glory and insult, apparent victory that doesn’t last and apparent defeat . . . that waits until next Sunday for vindication. God’s faithful servant comes in the name of the Lord and humbles himself, obedient to the will of the One who sent him.

In this Liturgy we descend with Jesus from the triumphal procession punctuated with “hosanna,” the cry of petition and praise, to the loneliness and anguish of Gethsemane, as Jesus wrestles with his destiny—for our sake. After singing psalms with his disciples, Jesus prays alone, as on so many previous nights. Peter, James, and John are close by, as at the Transfiguration. But on this night they witness not glory but anguish—to the extent to which they can stay awake.

The disciples have been summoned to watch with Jesus as he experiences the loneliness and anguish of the human condition. In Jesus’ prayer, the whole drama of our redemption is made present. In the face of the power of death, of the whole flood of evil, Jesus offers himself completely in radical acceptance of the Father’s will. The Son’s whole being is expressed in his “not my will, but yours.” In coming to this attunement with the divine will, Jesus’ human will is fulfilled, not taken away. His obedience unto death becomes the conquest of death itself.

We, too, come to places in our experience when we are crushed under the difficulties of life. Whether we are wrestling with our own destinies or placed in a position where all we can do is watch another’s anguish, we find that our own resources are woefully insufficient. Or what we have done or left undone is huge part of the problem. At Gethsemane, Jesus takes all of this on himself. It is at this point in Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew that he inserts the chorale which includes the words, “Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.” Our rejection of the gospel—even though we may not have meant to do that—brought Jesus to the cross, to die our death.

The cross is the most radical expression of God’s unconditional love. Jesus offers himself despite all rejection, taking our “no” upon himself and drawing it into his “yes.” Despite betrayal, rejection, and all the human cruelty he endures—or because of all these things—Jesus brings the world’s anguished cry at God’s absence before the heart of God himself in his cry of abandonment. He identifies himself with all who suffer in the darkness of God’s silence. He takes their cry, their anguish, all their helplessness (all our helplessness) upon himself and in doing so transforms it.

What would it mean for us to let the same mind be in us? Brought figuratively on this day to the foot of the cross we are asked whether we believe that his dying transforms our living. How can we know what his dying means? He has left us his Testament. In this we see the center of Christianity; we, too, can identify the one who dies this way as the Son of God.

Not only the Son’s enfleshment, but his incarnate obedience identifies him. In his self-giving, his sacrifice, he draws us to himself and wipes away our disobedience with his love even to death. Communion with him in his Supper draws us into the perfect worship he offers. Receiving him, our broken lives have new value as he draws our brokenness and insufficiency into his living sacrifice through the power of his holiness.

We enter into the mysteries of this great and holy week as people transformed by Gethsemane, the cross, and the upper room. Taken up into Jesus’ obedience as we hear once again the story of his passion, we who once were dead now live because of the mystery of his cross and rising. We participate in that mystery when we come to his table, empowered by the Spirit to live out in Jesus Christ the gospel we had rejected. Truly, the One we encounter at the cross and the holy table is the Son of God.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Paul Bieber, STS
E-Mail: paul.bieber@sbcglobal.net
Retired Lutheran Pastor
San Diego, California, USA