Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, April 13, 2025
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God does not need us to proclaim the good news, but it is God’s good pleasure to include us in what God is doing by working through us.
For millennia of Christian theologians, an essential aspect of what it meant for God to be God was for God to be impassible. This wasn’t about getting past God (though I’m certain God would be tough goalkeeper) but about things affecting God. Unlike you or me, God does not experience change or emotion, or so the thinking has gone. I’ve often wondered if any of these theologians read the Hebrew Bible, where God is reported to display a wide array of emotions. Of course they had and gave clever answers, but still, the impassibility of God has always seemed implausible. Jesus goes one step beyond impassibility in the entrance to Jerusalem when he sends his disciples to fetch a young donkey for him. “Tell them, ‘The Lord has need of it.’” What a thing, that God would need something! And a donkey at that.
More remarkable than what God needs here is what God doesn’t need: us. When the leaders tell Jesus to order his followers to be quiet, Jesus retorts, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” It is almost a throw-away line in the pageantry of Jesus’s entrance to Jerusalem. You’d be forgiven if you missed it. But in it Jesus makes an important point about what our calling to discipleship is and, just as importantly, what it’s not.
To be a disciple is a tall order. We are called to go and make disciples of all nations. Big deal, right? But these words remind us that we are not necessary to the work that God is doing. As Luther says in the Small Catechism, God’s kingdom comes without our prayer. God does not need us to bring it about. And so we arrive at the more interesting question: if God does not need us, why does God choose us? What is the reason to work through us if we are not necessary to the plan?
In short, though God could very well proclaim the good news through rocks, God chooses to work through us to in order to make us part of the story. The gift of being called to follow Jesus is not salvation, or rather, not merely salvation. The great gift is being a part of the story of God’s work to bring about a new creation. We are not benched, relegated to watch from the sidelines. We have been graced with the opportunity to be the ones through whom this good news is proclaimed and others welcomed into the story. We may not be necessary, but we are essential. God has chosen to weave our lives into the fabric of what God is doing. Let your hosannas be heard by all, for they will not forget God spoke to them through you.
