A sermon preached by Ronald Knox on Palm Sunday, 1934
Amen I say to you,
unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone;
but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. – John 12:24
Today, 1,900 years ago, it looked as if the fortunes of the
great Galilean Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, were at their height. It was the
time of the feast; a great multitude of people from Galilee had come up to
celebrate it, and these, plainly, were proud of their fellow countryman. At
home, where his family was known to many of them, they might criticize him and
laugh at his pretensions; but here in Judea it was a different thing; they were
not going to have their own Prophet laughed at by the Jews of Judea. That is
human nature. And then, just a day or two before Palm Sunday, an extraordinary
rumor went round Jerusalem itself. A man of Bethany, a well-known figure there,
had died and been buried; and when he had already been four days in the tomb,
Jesus of Nazareth had called to him and he had come out alive. Bethany was only
about two miles from Jerusalem; it was as if you heard that somebody had been
raised from the dead, say, at Harborne. Naturally,crowds of people came out
from Jerusalem to look at the man who had been buried and come to life again;
to question his sisters, and have their own assurance about the facts. And
these, convinced by what they saw and heard, were hardly less enthusiastic on
behalf of the Prophet than the Galileans themselves.
