Lenten Devotional - day 30

I’ve written you 30 letters now. We’ve been on quite a journey, and tomorrow we enter the last week of Lent, and Holy Week. These letters became a time of introspection and contemplation for me. To be fair, they’ve also been a time of focus on repentance and transformation.

However, I have always been struck by the raw emotions of Holy Week; and since in my mind I’m preparing for Palm Sunday, Holy Week is on my mind.

Tomorrow we will be shouting “Hosanna,” and waving palm branches, in some liturgical play that Christians have done for a long time. Most in that crowd were probably pilgrims who had heard something about Jesus. Some of them had met him. Some had stories of how he’d change them. But they all had hope in him… or the idea of him they had at least.
Messiah. King. Son of David. They hoped for a political hero, the establishment of an earthly kingdom. As I’ve written in these, no one understood who he was.

He let the people cheer him, and in effect signed his death warrant. March into Jerusalem as a king with a bunch of pilgrims cheering you on as such… well Rome didn’t take kindly to revolutionaries.

And, if that wasn’t enough, either that day or the next, Jesus marched himself into the temple and made a mess of the place, calling the religious leaders a bunch of robbers. It was like putting an exclamation point to the death warrant he signed for the empire.

And not one of those groups had any idea who he really was. He wasn’t the king they wanted, even if people still call him king. He wasn’t the revolutionary they were afraid of, even if empires are still afraid of him. He wasn’t the heretic they hated, even if most would still call him a heretic today.

We still aren’t sure who he is. We can cheer him one moment, and be shocked by him the next.

I’ve met a lot of Christian people who asked me, being a Presbyterian, if I believed in predestination. If I said yes many would ask when I was saved then. I always told them, “2000 years ago on a cross in Calvary.”

This wasn’t a satisfactory answer for those who believed I had to save myself through a faith statement. So sometimes I’ve been asked in response, “Okay that’s fair, but when did you accept Jesus?”

One time someone asked me that and I said without thinking before I said it, “I’m not sure I have, but I’m really glad he’s accepted me.” You would have thought I slapped his grandma. He wondered how I could be a pastor who hasn’t accepted Jesus.

During Holy Week I see what happens when people think they have Jesus figured out. They kill him. How much has our religion kept killing Jesus because they only take what they accept. When that man who was yelling at me for not accepting Jesus was done, I said, “I have to keep accepting Jesus because he keeps surprising me. The longer I go about walking with him, the more I learn, and I have to accept more.”

In the next eight days I’ll be doing many services. Some will be with praise and cheering, some with tears and sorrow. This is something that is always true of the Christ we follow. He embraces the fullness of life. The good and bad, and makes it holy.

But, the lesson to learn in any Lent, is that we have more to learn. More to learn of him, more to learn of ourselves, and more to learn of the world. We will never stop learning. We will never stop becoming. We must never stop accepting, and being humble enough to accept the One who will surprise us again and again. Because when we accept him, we embrace the world with love too.

Until later,
Garrett