Many years ago I lived on a sub-division in a town called Peterborough in the heart of England.  It’s an ordinary, garden-variety sub-division.  They started building it in the 1960s as a place to house Londoners during the post-war population boom; and it carried on expanding well into the 90s.  The town planners all those years ago did a pretty good job, so there are still a lot of mature trees, and open spaces of green dotted around the twisting lanes and winding cycle paths.  It’s home to around 20,000 people.  Now imagine, if you can, a three-bedroom, two level, brick house, in that sub-division.  It has a small back yard.  In that backyard there is a tree.  A few feet to the left there’s another house, and then another, and another.  At the foot of the back yard there a fence and then the backyard of another house.  But there’s no house to the right of the home you’re imagining, instead a road runs down that side of the property.  And it was down this road that I drove one afternoon. 

I could see this house in the distance, but even from a hundred yards I could tell that there something unusual taking place.  There was no smoke, no fallen branch that had crushed the garage, nothing like that.  What there was was a throng of around 50 people gathered around the fence at the side of the house.  Some of them had brought step ladders and were perched on the top.  Most of them had binoculars, many had cameras – the kind with long lenses and tripods.  I wondered what on earth could be happening inside the house.  Was there an armed siege?  Hardly, this was Peterborough – the closest this sub-division ever got to a juicy crime is when someone parked their Volvo across someone else’s drive.  Could it have been that a celebrity was visiting, maybe these photographers were paparazzi – perhaps someone who looked vaguely like Princess Diana had popped round for tea and the gossip had got around the town that it was really her.  You see Peterborough was not famous for its excitement.  On one of the main thoroughfares into the town there’s a large sign that says ‘Welcome to Peterborough – twinned with…’ and then there are the names of two similar towns in France and Germany.  Some wit has gone along to that sign and scrawled ‘twinned with the moon - there’s no atmosphere’. 

Now that posse of photographers and gawkers was there the next day, and the next.  In fact, they were there for two whole weeks, sitting in their folding chairs, some with rugs on their knees, sipping tea from flasks, eating sandwiches and keeping themselves cheerful, much as their grandparents had done during the blitz.  And staring.  So if it wasn’t a crime or a scandal or a celebrity why were those people standing hour after hour, spending whole days of their lives watching a house?  As it turned out it wasn’t the house they were watching.  They were watching the solitary tree that was in the backyard.  You see, unbeknown to me, a rare and special visitor had come to Peterborough – to that very tree.  A black-throated thrush.  I don’t know what a black-throated thrush looks like (I’m guessing it has a black throat), but apparently they live in Asia, and there have only ever been 29 recorded sightings in England.  Yet someone with a keen eye and a knowledge of birds had spotted one in this very tree and word had got out.  So every birdwatcher in England had descended on that unsuspecting house in Peterborough.  I’m sure the people who lived there were really pleased.

And it all started because someone looked.   Someone had taken to the time to stop what they were doing and look at a tree, and they saw something beautiful and extraordinary.  But they had to look.  When someone stops, and looks and sees something amazing the word gets out and a crowd forms.  That’s what happened on Palm Sunday.  For three years Jesus had travelled the Judean countryside, preaching, teaching, healing, befriending, and among other things turning water into wine, calming storms, feeding 5,000 people with a small boy’s brown-bag lunch, and even raising people from death.  And now he was coming to Jerusalem.  The capital city.  The place of power, wealth, and influence.  The City of David.  The town at the center of God’s plans for the human race since he had led his chosen people out of slavery in Egypt and planted them in this land of milk and honey.

They were there to look.  More than that, they were there to celebrate.  They had heard the stories, even seen the signs, and they knew that Jesus was the real deal.  Here was the long-expected saviour of Israel.  God’s Messiah, the anointed one who had been promised centuries earlier and who was now here to take his place on the throne of the heroic King David.  Ninety years of national humiliation was about to end as the occupying Roman forces were to be overthrown, and kicked out of God’s land.  That’s what the Messiah was going to do, wasn’t it?  It was obvious.  So the scene was set for the climax of history.  The triumphant entry of the King of Kings, on a donkey just as Zechariah had prophesied in the Old Testament.  He enters the city, the crowd goes wild, they cut branches off trees, throw their coats on the ground … but then things take and unexpected turn.  You see, during the next four days instead of supporting the Jewish nation and their leaders, Jesus openly attacks them.  On Monday he goes into the Temple and instead of worshipping, like a good Messiah ought to do, he trashes the place.  Rather than speaking up for his fellow-countrymen he drives them out of their own Temple.  On Tuesday, to the people’s horror, he encourages them to pay their taxes to the Roman Emperor.  The same taxes that paid for those soldiers who swaggered around the city, verbally and physically abusing them.  Surely he should be leading a rebellion against them?  And throughout the week he’s constantly crossing swords with the Pharisees, attacking them for their hypocrisy.  Public opinion was starting to shift.  The Gospel writers don’t tell us what happened on Wednesday of that week, but the plots to do away with this false messiah had begun.  And so on Thursday Judas agrees to betray him.  By then the streets of Jerusalem were littered with lost hopes and smashed dreams.  The failure of this so-called Messiah to deliver the political freedom they had expected must have been unbearable for many patriotic Israelites.  It’s as if the donkey which had brought Jesus into Jerusalem on Sunday slunk out of town on Thursday with the dissipated dreams of the nation on its back.

I’m not sure that Palm Sunday crowd did look.  Not REALLY look.  They saw Jesus, they saw that he fit the bill of what they had been expecting from the Messiah – all those signs he had performed, and all those wonderful things he had said for three years.  But did they really look beyond their preconceptions about what the Messiah should do?  Did they look past the gossip-mongers and the rumour-mill?  Did they look behind the appearance of that man on the donkey and see the heart of God beating, not just for the Jewish nation, but for the entire world?  Did they see a compassion that included every man and woman on the earth, and not just their own special bloodline?  Did they really look deep into the heart of their Messiah and catch a glimpse of a love so big it exploded their puny vision of God; a plan so gracious that in their national pride and personal self-righteousness they could not begin to grasp it; a purpose so mysterious that it involved the death of the anointed one?  Someone in Peterborough stood at their kitchen window and looked deeply and intently into a tree and saw a rare bird.  People in Jerusalem lined the streets and looked half-heartedly, superficially and saw what they wanted to see.  A messiah made in their own image.  A Christ who would do what they wanted.

And so I start to think of us.  Are we prepared to take the time and effort to search for the real Jesus, looking past our own thoughts and wishes about him?  Are we ready to look for the Christ of Holy Week?  Because he’s out there if we’re prepared to look.  He is the servant who stoops to wash our feet.  He is compassionate with the sick, he befriends children, he is merciful to those who have been rejected as outcasts and sinners.  He speaks words of comfort to the uncomfortable, gives rest to the weary and companionship to the lonely.  He never tramples on anyone’s dignity.  He is never patronizing to the marginalised, but sees the likeness of God in the disabled person, the foreigner, the child, the woman.  Does our Jesus match up to the real one, or does he have favourites?  Does he judge people differently according to their zip code, or ethnicity, or education, or bank balance?  Is he merciful only to those who deserve it, and loving only to the lovely?  Does he show compassion only to those who earn it?  Or is he the real Christ?  Look hard and you’ll spot him.  But of course, gentleness isn’t Jesus’ most obvious quality when you read the events of Holy Week.  Can we spot the Christ who was consumed with such a passion for God’s Kingdom that he overturned tables and lambasted hypocrites?  Friends, let us draw aside and look; because if we look we will find him.

It was easy to spot the Messiah on Sunday, but by Friday only a handful could identify him.  It’s easy to spot him when things are going well, when he’s looking after us, when our lives are going smoothly.  How much harder it is to see him when he’s not living up to our expectations.  What is our reaction when God doesn’t show up in the way we expect him to?  Or when he doesn’t answer our prayers in the way we think he should?   When we pray for healing, and it doesn’t happen?  When ask for God’s protection on a loved one and they still come to harm?  When we ask for God’s blessing on a marriage and it still ends in broken hearts and vows?   Sometimes we think we have the wrong Messiah.  We think, ‘This can’t be the real Jesus, can it?  If it is, why did he not do what I prayed for?’  And then we remember just where the Messiah went at the end of that Holy Week.  To a garden, to betrayal, to a cross.  We see that that joyful procession on Sunday was actually a funeral march.  And we see afresh that this Messiah, the true Messiah, lives in the place of suffering.  And if we look close enough we can see him there, in our own Gethsemanes and Golgothas. 

This morning, let us look.  Look deeply into the heart of the True Messiah.  And then refreshed with that vision of his passion and compassion let us go and find him in his world, in the place of suffering and need, as well as in the place of celebration.  Look in our own unremarkable town, in and around our humble homes, in the shadows of trees.  Draw aside and look with patience and wonder and behold the rare and the wonderful as he reveals himself to you as he truly is.  Not what he is rumoured to be, not as we would see him through our clouded vision and often dull hearts.  Rather let us look with our eyes clear and hearts open to the Christ of Holy Week.