Reading Matthew 14:22-33, where Jesus walks on the water.  Two words stuck out to me here:  first, in verse 27, Jesus tells the disciples not to be afraid when they see him walking on the water, but rather to ‘be of good cheer’.  The Greek word, tharseite, is also translated as ‘be of good courage’, and so the word really is connected with a kind of cheerfulness based in courage. 

I’ve been thinking about a lot lately about the importance of courage. I’ve been feeling God calling me to be more courageous, and, funnily enough, I saw a t-shirt recently which said ‘Fear Is Not A Virtue’. Being fearful is very discouraging, and does lead, in a way, to sadness – that is, not cheerfulness.  Courage, on the other hand, is connected to a kind of happy confidence, which I’ve noticed comes from understanding truth.  When you know that something is true, there comes a real kind of courage to speak that truth and live that truth.  And the kind of courage which Jesus is commanding his disciples to have is the kind of courage that comes from believing in God, believing in God’s words and in God’s power.

Sadly, we seem to live in ‘post-truth’ world where people live in alternate realities from one another, believing what is presented to them as long as it fits with the overall narrative they have chosen to believe.  This state of affairs blurs the good-faith search for truth by politicizing it, and therefore skews our attention outward toward judging other people who we think are ‘deceived’.  Perhaps in this post-truth world we can find a kind of courage, but it is a courage that is rooted in political polarization, and is therefore only a ‘shadow’ courage.  It is not the kind of courage that comes from knowing through the Holy Spirit that Jesus has all power in heaven and earth, and that through exercising faith in Him, we will be protected, strengthened, and empowered to bring to pass much righteousness.

So, Jesus encourages us to ‘be of good courage’.  This must mean that there is such a thing as a search for truth, and there such a thing as understanding truth, and also there is such a thing as acting in accordance with truth, to bring about good things.  We can be happy and courageous in that pursuit, knowing that Jesus is calling to us to join Him as He tries to lead us into all truth.

Second, Jesus gently chastises Peter for being ‘of little faith’, after Peter starts walking toward Jesus but then sees the stormy sea and starts to sink.  The Greek word for ‘little faith’ is oligopiste, which actually means something more like ‘limited faith’.  The prefix ‘oligo’ means ‘few’, and, being a political philosopher, the way I think of it is in relation to ‘oligarchy’, which means the rule of the few.  It has the connotation, therefore, of being limited in the sense of being closed off, not open to expansion.  So, back to oligopiste, it means little faith, yes, but it is the kind of faith that has fixed limits and therefore does not grow.  In this case, Peter’s faith failed him, because he wasn’t willing to nurture it past a certain point.

However, I think it is important to note that Peter’s faith was limited regarding his relationship with Jesus.  There is no indication that Peter doubted Jesus’s ability to walk on the water.  It is more that Peter doubted that he could walk on the water to Jesus – that is, he doubted that he could accomplish  what Jesus was encouraging him to do.  And this, I think, makes it all the more applicable to us.  We do not doubt Christ, but perhaps we doubt what we can do, even with Christ’s help.  Perhaps we doubt that Christ’s saving power can save us.  So, one lesson seems to be here that when we truly find faith in Christ, it is a faith which also empowers us, and gives us a humble, yet healthy self-confidence. 

And maybe we are back to where we started:  through faith, we can be of good courage, knowing that ‘we can accomplish all things through Him that strengthens us’.

Reading Matthew 12:43-45: Here the Savior gives an interesting, and somewhat obscure discussion of the casting out of evil spirits.  The idea here is that the casting out of an evil spirit may only be a temporary measure, depending on what the person does after the evil spirit is cast out.  The concept is discussed from the point of view of the evil spirit, rather than the person out of whom the evil spirit is cast:  ‘When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none.  Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.  Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.’ 

The key word here, I think is ‘empty’, which is scholazonta in Greek, also translated as ‘unoccupied’.  The way I read this scripture, we have a person who has rid themselves of an evil spirit in some way, and perhaps of some of those things that go along with evil spirits – deception, self-deception, a life of sin and a life of suffering because of sin, etc.  In this way, they have rid themselves of something bad – that is, they have succeeded, at least temporarily, of getting bad things out of their lives.  But, they have left their ‘house’ – that is, their soul, ‘empty’ or ‘unoccupied’. It has been cleaned out, yes, but it is also empty.  With the term ‘unoccupied’, we could argue that the soul is perhaps even idle.  That is, the person has not yet filled their soul with good things – they have not replaced bad things with good things. 

This seems to me to be a idea of central importance.  Human beings, by our nature, need purpose.  I think we do have a deep need to be engaged in something that we believe to be good.  If we neglect to bring good things into our lives, it is hard to sustain that kind of apathy and indifference – something, eventually, will need to take root in us.  An empty soul is easy to fill with negativity, vice, and false ideas.  On the other hand, if we are actively filling our cups, filling our lamps, filling our souls with truth and light, it is harder for evil influences to come into our lives.  Or, at least, we will have the spiritual and intellectual resources that we need to counter evil and withstand it when we are confronted with it.  I think this is one reason why it’s so important to immerse our children and youth in the scriptures, both at home and in church settings, like seminary, youth activities, youth conferences etc.  We need to show them how to fill their lamps – that is, how to live a life that encapsulates the regular filling of our lamps.  The take away is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not a passive affair on our part. It requires effort for goodness. Living the gospel is a matter of actively, and habitually, bringing good things into our lives, not just avoiding evil things.

Reading Luke 24:13-35: In this passage, we have the account of Cleopas and another disciple travelling on the road to Emmaus, where they talk with one another, trying to make sense of Jesus’s Crucifixion and Resurrection.  Jesus joins them on their journey, and joins in the conversation, although they do not know that it is Jesus until the end of the journey.  It is a beautiful story about the role that Jesus can play in our lives as we struggle with sadness, heartache, confusion, a crisis of faith, and trying to make sense of something that seems to make no sense. 

The journey starts out with Cleopas and his friend ‘communing together and reasoning together’ in verse 15.  As this was happening, Jesus ‘drew near’ – although they did not recognize Him – and went with them.  So in this verse, there is this idea that as we engage in pondering and deliberating, the activity of thinking about spiritual things, wresting with questions, pondering over things we don’t understand, and reaching out to other people about those things that are troubling us or the things we are grappling with, Jesus will draw near to us, and walk with us on our journey.

Then, in verse 17, Jesus says to them: ‘What manner of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?’  Here, it is almost as if Jesus is inviting them to participate in self-reflection now.  So they start out with this overwhelming sadness and confusion about the events they have experienced, and as they are reasoning about that, Jesus invites them to reflect on what they are doing, what they are saying, what they are feeling.  Cleopas responds to Jesus, ‘Don’t you know what has just happened here in Jerusalem?’  Jesus continues the questioning:  ‘What things?’  So again, is this a method of questioning meant to get us to turn inward, a method which is essential to pondering and deliberation, a method which helps us to ‘do our part’ in getting answers, as it were.

Their answer is one which describes the Crucifixion, but also is mixed with an account of a challenge to their testimony: ‘We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel’.  So, perhaps we could put their answer this way: ‘We are sad because we really believed Jesus was the Messiah, but since He died, we don’t really see how that can be so anymore.’  So in response to Jesus asking them why they are sad, asking them to pinpoint exactly what events are troubling them, they reveal that their reasonings and deliberations are centered around a kind of a faith crisis, in a way.  How are they going to continue on in their belief with this new event they have witnessed?

They continue with something like:  ‘the women disciples we know said that Jesus’s body was gone when they went to the sepulchre this morning, and they also saw angels.  But we haven’t seen any of those things, and we don’t know what is going on’.  So this seems to be a further step in the reasoning process:  discussion of the problem, admission of faith crisis in light of recent events, acknowledging different aspects to the crisis, not knowing who to believe.  Like all spiritual reasoning, it’s a mixture of thought and strong emotion here. The strong emotions are present because these are questions which matter.

Jesus then tells them they are ‘foolish’ and ‘slow of heart to believe all the things the prophets have spoken’. So the word ‘foolish’ is actually anoetos, which literally means, ‘without mind’ or ‘without understanding’. I’m assuming this is from the Greek nous, which means mind, or the part of the mind which understands something like first principles.  But the idea is that they are not thinking, they are not ‘reasoning through’ a matter, so they are being mindless about it.  This is slightly odd given that it seems like they are reasoning and deliberating together, but I guess what Jesus means is that they aren’t really doing it yet, they haven’t really figured out how to reason about spiritual things.  ‘Slow of heart’ means something similar – you are taking too long to figure these things out.

Then Jesus says, ‘Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?’  So, Christ is trying to get them to see these troubling events in a spiritual light, to help them view their faith crisis in a way that will instead strengthen their faith.  ‘And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself.’  So, with that initial perspective changing realization, that these events were for the good, He then engages in the mindful reasoning properly, through explaining the scriptures to them to help them make sense in a deeper way of what has just happened. 

I think it is very significant that Jesus reasons with them through being anchored in the scriptures.  It is consistent with Jesus’s other admonishments to study the scriptures, and also with His criticism of the Pharisees for not understanding the scriptures, and then imposing that lack of understanding on others, so that their spiritual progress was hindered as well.  I think if we try to ponder spiritually on things without being anchored in the scriptures, we will eventually wander down the wrong path, and ‘be lost’.

But, back to the larger story of the journey to Emmaus.  The process of spiritual enlightenment described here seems to me to be the process that I go through with the Holy Spirit: identifying a troubling event or issue, start to ponder on that thing, then start to ponder spiritually – that is, asking God to help me with the pondering, examine the pain of the troubling thing (there has been some kind of loss here), wonder what to do, who to believe, and so forth.  Once I have invited God to accompany me in my pondering, at some point the Holy Spirit gives me a revelation or an insight which changes my perspective and the way I view the problem.  Then, once that initial inspiration comes, there often proceeds a series of insights and revelations after that. 

But also please note:  there is no time frame specified here.  The process of pondering with God on your sadnesses, questions, and confusions is indeed a process, and it cannot be rushed.  But it can be made lighter, with reassurances from the Holy Spirit that we are indeed on the right path, even if we don’t have all the answers.  After all, there is supposed to be ‘joy in the journey’ on the road to Emmaus.

There are so many powerful lessons and images associated with Maundy Thursday.  On this day was the Last Supper, Jesus suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, and Peter’s denial of Jesus in the midst of the abuses of the chief priests and Herod.  Throughout all these poignant and somber events, there is a kind of pattern regarding the interactions between Jesus and his apostles.

First, during the Last Supper itself, from pondering especially on the account in John, I think it must have been a time where Jesus taught the apostles in a very moving way about how to love.  Of course, we get His ‘new commandment’, that ‘ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another’ (John 13:34-35).  But that commandment is given after Jesus washes the feet of the apostles, an act of profound service which perhaps might be a metaphor for Jesus’s willingness to go ‘below all things’.  And He tells them plainly that He is setting a ‘pattern’ for them:  ‘If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.’  And, just in case the apostles thought that they didn’t really have to do lowly acts of service in order to follow Jesus, He then points out the irony that they are not greater than Him – ‘the servant is not greater than his lord’.  And, just in case they had their doubts about the whole thing, He tells them that this lowering of oneself, this ‘losing’ of one’s life, is actually the way to be happy: ‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if you do them.’

Of course, Jesus had showed them how to serve throughout His ministry, but I think this act of service must have hit home in a special way, if we look at Peter’s reaction when Jesus comes to wash his feet:  ‘Thou shalt never wash my feet’.  The thing I find so touching about this whole evening and nighttime is the way in which Jesus continued to teach his apostles about love, and in particular Peter.  When Peter tells Jesus that he will never let Jesus wash his feet, Jesus responds that that would be awful indeed, since if Jesus does not wash Peter, ‘thou hast no part with me’.  When Peter insists that he will go with Jesus anywhere, and lay down his life for Jesus, Jesus gently responds with a warning about Peter’s weaknesses.  Peter tries to stay awake and ‘watch’ while Jesus prays and suffers unspeakable agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, but in his weakness he cannot do it, and falls asleep.  And finally, when Peter cuts off the ear of a servant of one of the chief priests when Judas comes to betray Jesus, Jesus tells Peter to put his sword away, and to essentially ‘let it be’ – that is, let Jesus’s suffering happen.

In all these cases, Peter has not understood something.  Either he has not understood himself – his limits, his weaknesses – or he has not understood how to let Jesus serve him.  To say it another way, maybe he has not understood the kind of service, the kind of ultimate sacrifice, that is at the core of Jesus’s mission.  An essential part of that service seems to be something like submission, or surrender, and Peter didn’t understand that submission – he wouldn’t submit to letting Jesus wash his feet, and he wouldn’t submit to Jesus giving Himself over to the chief priests.  At every turn he thinks he is loving and helping Jesus, and yet, he gets it wrong each time.  An integral part of loving Jesus is submitting ourselves to His sacrifice – letting Him cleanse and heal us.  Part of that is trusting in His will, part of that is coming to understand the significance of the Atonement, which are both life-long processes.

In Jesus’s teaching during this week, we get a description of the events of the last days, prior to His Second Coming, the ‘end’ of the world.  The word ‘end’ here is the Greek telos, which transforms the text for me.  Telos does indeed mean end, but it implies the idea of a ‘end state of a thing’, a thing reaching it’s potential – that is, going from a state of potentiality to actuality – and therefore ‘flourishing’ it what it is meant to be.  Telos therefore implies a growth process, and a final fulfillment of that process.  So, if we are interested in the telos, we are also interested in how we get there – that, is, we are interested in the end state to be achieved, and also the means by which we reach that end state. 

So, the ‘end’ of the world seems to imply that there is a final ‘end state’ – and a good final end state, by the way – which can only be achieved by a certain process.  And indeed, Jesus tells His disciples that when they witness the terrible events of the last days, they should not be troubled, but they should understand that ‘it is necessary for these things to happen’ … in order for the telos to be fulfilled. 

And the events will be terrible indeed.  There will be false Christs who will mislead many.  There will be wars, rumors of wars, and … well … just lots of rumors (conspiracy theories), lots of deception.  People will rise up against people; ‘people’ here comes from the Greek ethos, so it seems to imply troubled race relations.  And there will be famines, pestilences (pandemics), earthquakes.  There will be the persecution of those who have taken upon them the name of Christ.  And there will be problems within the body of Christ as well – many will fall away, be offended, and betray one another and hate one another.  The ‘love’ of many will run cold.  ‘Love’ here is agape, which is charity, the pure love of Christ.  Agape is the love that Heavenly Father has for Jesus, and it is the love that Jesus has for us.  And it is the love that we, as followers of Christ, are meant to learn and develop toward all of our fellow human beings.  This love will run cold in the last days.

So, one message here seems to be that it is necessary for bad things to happen in order for the ‘fulfillment’ of all things – some kind of completion of us as God’s children, and/or the world.  While the events are awful, and also surely coming to pass, I do find a kind of comfort in knowing that these bad things are for a greater purpose – or, at least, will be used for a greater purpose. 

But there is another message that needs to be articulated here.  As individual children of God, we too, have a telos.  We have an ‘end state’, one of ‘final flourishing’, and that is to become like Christ.  The way that we become like Christ is by developing agape – unconditional, Christlike love for our fellow human beings.  So there is a tension here.  In the last days, agape will run cold.  But, as followers of Christ, we must not let this happen to us.  We must not let our love for other people run cold.  The last days are going to be days of fighting, enmity, bad will and profound struggle, but somehow we must keep loving people in spite of this enmity.  We must fight against evil, but not against people. 

The Russian Christian existentialist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that we need to see people as ‘carriers of evil’, but not as evil in themselves, and this strikes me as exactly right.  He argued that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart.  How do we love people who are doing very bad things?  How do we love people who hate us?  We must understand that there is still good in them, just as we are trying to develop the good in us.  Solzhenitsyn only came to understand this himself in tremendously difficult circumstances, where profound enmity and hatred was showed toward him.  In this sense, perhaps it is in these conditions of the last days that we can gain a deeper understanding of God’s love, and how to develop it in ourselves.  Here’s to hoping.     

We get so many of Jesus’s teachings here during the first part of Holy Week.  From Thursday onwards, the main focus is on the events of the Passion – His betrayal, trial, scourging, sufferings, bearing His cross, leading up the Crucifixion itself.  But the time up to (and including) the Last Supper is a time of tremendous teaching.  We get Jesus’s declaration to ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’, and His explanation of the two great commandments.  We get the parables of the talents, the ten virgins, and the sheep and the goats.  We get Jesus’s description of the events and conditions leading to His second coming.  And we get Jesus’s condemnation of the hypocrisy of the apostate Pharisees – those who should be leading and nurturing God’s people to greater spiritual growth, but who are instead impeding them in their spiritual progress.

It’s impossible to write properly on all these themes in such a short space of time, but it might be useful to try to identify any overarching themes of Jesus’s teaching during this week.  One thing to note is that although Jesus thoroughly condemns the hypocrisy of the Pharisees – that is, those who are meant to teach and lead – He does not allow this to become an excuse for unrighteousness and hypocrisy in the ordinary person.  There are oppressive systems, absolutely.  And those oppressive systems are to be condemned, to be countered, to be rectified.  Yet, Jesus speaks to the individual in any system, and teaches them to focus on their own agency, their own relationship with God, no matter their particular circumstances.  I think this is one reason why I find the gospel of Jesus Christ to be so empowering.  Although our individual circumstances matter very much, ultimately Jesus points us away from victimhood.  In every interaction He had with individuals, He encouraged them to be righteous, no matter their status, position, occupation, gender, ethnicity, or nationality.

And there are lots of ways in which we, as individuals, can use our agency wrongly.  The three parables of the ten virgins, the talents, and the sheep and the goats – which are told together in Matthew 25 – seem to point toward the different uses of agency, and the ways in which we can go wrong in our spiritual growth and preparation.  I’m going to focus here on the first parable of the three. 

In the Parable of the Ten Virgins, we are told that this is a metaphor for the ‘kingdom of heaven’.  In the kingdom of heaven, some people are wise and some are foolish.  The word for wisdom here is based on the Greek word phronesis, which means ‘practical wisdom’.  This is important.  The wisdom to which Jesus is referring is not so much a contemplative wisdom, but a practical wisdom.  In ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotelianism, the person with practical wisdom is good at deliberation, which is the reasoning process used to decide how to act.  This is a particular kind of reasoning process, in that our actions incorporate both our reason and our passions.  So the idea here is that in order to be good at reasoning how to act, your passions have to also be good – that is, your passions have to be moderate, restrained, and also trained to love good things. 

So, the wise virgins are those that know how to deliberate well regarding their everyday actions.  These are people that love the good, and they let that love guide their reasoning process about how to act.  Since, in this Christian context, God is the ultimate good, we could say that the wise virgins love God with all their heart, might, mind and strength.  But in addition to this, they have learned how to reason well about how to let their love of God govern their actions.  We don’t understand these things all at once, and learning how to live the gospel well is a process and a journey.  So, these are people that don’t give up in their gospel journey.  They are intentional about it, learning as they go, and being strengthened as they continue trying to stay on the covenant path.  And, this seems to be why they have enough oil to last until the bridegroom comes. 

Those who are foolish, however, only take the oil that is already in their lamps.  They don’t take any more than that.  When they need more, it’s too late.  ‘Foolish’ here means something like ‘mentally dull’, so there really is a kind of thoughtlessness here, a kind of stupidity.  The foolish virgins don’t bring what they need, and the point is that they could have had what they needed, if they had only thought to bring more.  This is something that could have been avoided, and actually rather easily avoided.  And here is where we see a wrong use of agency.  The message here seems to be that you don’t have to be a bad person, filled with malice and hatred, to miss out on the blessings of eternal life.  There is no mention that the foolish virgins are particularly bad people, but they are very thoughtless, and this thoughtlessness impedes their daily practice of the gospel, to the point where one day they will lose their testimonies.  Indeed, it is because of their thoughtlessness that Jesus will say to them that He doesn’t know them. 

And maybe, in the end, it does point back to the first great commandment:  ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, might, mind and strength’.  Perhaps the foolish virgins do love God in a way, but in order to truly do this, you cannot be thoughtless about your love for God.  You have to let your love for God change you, shape you – and this is done through an interaction between your mind and your heart.  To have Jesus say ‘I never knew you’ is unspeakably devastating indeed, but surely the parable ends this way because we, in our thoughtlessness, have not come to know Him.

From the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke, we know that Jesus cleansed the temple near the beginning of Holy Week, soon after His triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  The accounts are simple, but all bear the same pattern.  First, Jesus cleanses the temple; second, he performs healings in the temple, and teaches in the temple; third, Pharisees are extremely unhappy about all of this.  Each phase has its own profound lessons.

To start with the cleansing itself.  Matthew 21:12 tells us that Jesus went into the ‘temple of God’, and ‘cast out all them that bought and sold in the temple’ and ‘overthrew the tables of the moneychangers’.  Without going into detail of the corruptions of Jewish worship, the essential idea here is that what should have been a holy and sacred place had turned into a place of financial extortion. It’s an example of people using what should be sacred for everyone as an opportunity to benefit themselves, personally.  So, it’s an act of de-sacralization – that is, desecration.  You are making what is holy into something that is no longer holy. 

And, there are two sides to this story:  there is Jesus standing up for the holy, for the right, for the good, demanding that the sacred remain sacred.  And, there is the warning, at least to my mind, that any one of us could get ‘caught up’ in this kind of de-sacralizing the sacred if we are not mindful and careful about the role of the sacred in our lives.  One thing I have come to understand more deeply over the past few years is the importance of self-reflection in Christianity.  It’s found in something like the phrase ‘Lord, is it I?’ Am I the one that’s wrong here?  Am I the one that needs to change?  Am I losing the sense of the sacred in my life?

‘My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it into a den of thieves’ is repeated in all three accounts.  I love the emphasis on a ‘house of prayer’.  The Greek word for house is oikos.  The temple is Heavenly Father’s oikos, and it is an oikos of prayer.  I have often thought about this.  What about my house, my oikos?  Is it a house of prayer?  Oikos can also mean just a ‘place of habitation’.   So, it’s this idea that the space where you live, what you inhabit, needs to be a space of prayer.  It is a house of communication, communication with the divine.  We need daily communication with the divine, and our homes is the place to get that communication.  Does that make them sacred?  It must.  So, intricately connected to the idea of making a space for prayer, is also the idea of maintaining the ‘sacred’ in our lives – that is, resisting the de-sacralization.

After the cleansing of the temple, we move to the next phase in the story:  Jesus then heals the lame and the blind.  The account in Matthew reads that Jesus did ‘wonderful’ things in the temple which made the children there shout ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ – so there are more Hosanna shouts on this day, the day after Palm Sunday.  And there is also mention of Jesus teaching in the temple after the cleansing, with people awed at what they are hearing.  So, after the cleansing, there is healing, there is enlightenment, there is joy.  And here is the lesson for us:  in order to have these kinds of blessings, we must go through a kind of cleansing – we must self-reflect, self-examine, humble ourselves, come to God in prayer, ask for forgiveness, and so forth.  And again, there are two sides here:  this cleansing is necessary to grasp these ‘good things’, these signs of flourishing; on the flip side, we can be confident that we will grasp these blessings and flourish in the gospel when we cleanse ourselves of the bad in our lives, our tendency to ignore the sacred, our hypocrisy, and so forth.

The third phase is of the story is the reaction of the Pharisees.  Jesus threatens their power and their position, and they want to destroy Him.  Instead of being happy at the miracles that Jesus is performing in the temple and the enlightenment that Jesus is imparting, they want to shut Him down.  Tragically, they want to stop other people from enjoying the blessings that come through observing and maintaining the sacred spaces in their lives.  The message continually throughout the New Testament is that we should expect there to be opposition, yes; but we are to ‘be of good cheer’, because Jesus has ‘overcome the world’.

Reading John 12: 12-20:  Palm Sunday is the day of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  He rides into the city on a donkey, and the crowds of people lay down palm leaves as He goes, shouting ‘Hosanna’, which means ‘save us now’, or ‘rescue’.  It’s a day of rejoicing and adoration, but also one of soberness, since the very city which welcomed Him on Sunday, would then reject and crucify Him on Friday.  With that mixture of adoration and sadness, it is the perfect beginning to Holy Week. 

But it is on the rejoicing and adoration that I want to focus today.  I woke up this morning being tremendously grateful that today marks the start of Holy Week.  I have been reminded this week of the importance of faith – and not in any mundane sense of the word.  Faith in God, faith in God’s protection, faith in God’s mercy, faith in God’s saving power.  Faith that God is real, and what that entails.  All these things are, of course, intricately connected.  I think I’ve been trying to fight too many battles on my own recently.  But I have felt God’s love in my life this week, and the message has been that God is all-powerful, and I need to put my trust in Him. 

As I pondered this morning over Jesus’s triumphal entry, the Holy Spirit peacefully but powerfully testified to me of the real triumph of Jesus, His triumph over sin and death.  And I am grateful for the change in rhythm that religious holidays bring into my life, allowing me to worship in a special and deliberate way.  It brings a kind of purpose to my mind, to follow the events of Holy Week, and focus in on this most sacred of events.  To focus on the sacred brings its own kind of sanctification.  Somehow, when we travel and weep with Jesus along the via dolorosa, the profound sadness is always ultimately swallowed up in a deep hope and an unspeakable joy.  But, that is the very promise of Easter!

Reading Luke 6:22:  Blessed are you when men shall hate you, and when they shall exclude (aphorisosin), and shall insult (oneidisosin), and cast out your name as evil because of the Son of Man.   So aphroisosin is to literally set a boundary around – so it evokes an image of drawing lines between people – setting apart.   So blessed are you when people ice you out, draw lines that you cannot cross, do not let you be a part of their company, decide you can no longer be in their lives in any meaningful way. To put the idea in a more contemporary context: blessed are you when people ‘cancel’ you because you are a disciple of Jesus. And oneidisosoin is to insult, but also to shame, to blame, to cast as someone at fault, a bad person.  This is also the verb used to describe what happened to Jesus on the cross – it is to show contempt for someone.  Blessed are you when you are seen as shameful, when people hold you in contempt – that is exactly what they did to the prophets, and exactly what they would do to Jesus.

I find it very hard to think of these things as blessings, and even harder to be ‘joyful’ when these things happen.  These things have happened to me, and they are very painful events, signs of relationship failure and dysfunction, and indeed, signs of a more general societal disintegration. What could Jesus mean by saying we should be happy when these things happen to us?

Is the answer in how we are supposed to respond?  We are supposed to love our enemies – love being a derivative of agape – the unconditional love that God has for us.  We are supposed to love our enemies in the way that God loves us.  We are supposed to do good – kalon – literally do fine and noble things – to those that hate us.  Indeed, this seems to be part of the karpon kalon – the good fruit we are supposed to bring forth or else the ax is at the root of our tree.  Being fruitful is doing good, and here we are, being commanded to do good to our enemies.  So even though we are supposed to ‘rejoice’ when we are set apart and hated and insulted , we are not supposed to do these things back at all to those who have set us apart and hated and insulted us. 

Indeed, we read in James 1:5 that we can ask God if we lack wisdom, and God will not respond with oneidisosin – He will not respond with contempt.  So God does not show contempt toward us for ‘asking questions’, and neither does He show contempt for us for our weaknesses, our failings, our lack of knowledge. So, neither should we show contempt toward others in their failings.  Also, Jesus, as the Son of God, will suffer this contempt. So in a sense it’s like a message of endurance, of bearing burdens, while not retailiating. 

But it’s worth emphasizing that there is an element of abuse that could be present in these kinds of situations. To be continually mocked, insulted, intentionally misunderstood and treated with contempt in a relationship is to be abused, and that can bring enormous hurt and trauma.  I definitely understand the ‘not retaliate’ bit. Just not quite sure what to do with the ‘rejoice’ in persecution bit.  Maybe it’s a way of Jesus telling us that we need to expect these things.  That indeed, oftentimes people simply do not like it when you are faithful in the gospel, and sometimes that includes people that should know better.  Or, maybe this is just Jesus talking about the first part of that process.  The first part is that when you sincerely try live the gospel in your life, and then someone attacks you or accuses you with something false and completely unfair.  Perhaps Jesus is saying that this will totally happen to you as a faithful Christian, so don’t be surprised when this happens.  But the next step is how do you respond, and the answer is:  to not do to them what they are doing to you.  So, no false accusations, no contempt, no reviling, no humiliation, no intimidation. This might require enormous faith, and I do think that the other side of this is that, when you refuse to ‘fight hate with hate’, you will need to rely on God’s power and protection.

Reading Luke 10:38-42: The story of Mary and Martha.  Jesus tells Martha that she is ‘careful and troubled’ over many things.  Martha seems to be doing all the serving, getting things ready for dinner, etc.  From what I can understand, she gets upset that Mary isn’t being more helpful.  Then Jesus tells her that she is ‘careful’ and ‘troubled’.  It turns out that ‘careful’ is the Greek merimna – the same word which Jesus uses in the Parable of the Sower to describe those for whom the gospel takes root and begins to grow, but is eventually choked out because of the ‘cares’ of the world.  It means to be anxious, to be worried, and to be ‘fractured’ because of this anxiety.  There is a sense in which you let your anxieties and worries get the better of you, which means that you are less able to grasp good things for your life. 

This seems to be Jesus’s counsel to Martha.  He gently tells her that Mary has ‘chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her’.  ‘Good’ here is the Greek agathos – the very thing in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy for which humans should strive in order to truly flourish and, for Aristotle at least, live lives of truly happiness and fulfillment.  So Mary has chosen ‘what is good’ by listening to Jesus.  And ‘choice’ here means to reason things out and make a deliberate, intentional choice – it is literally, ‘what follows from a reasoning process’.  I have a lot of sympathy for Martha, and there are many messages in this story.  But I think one take-away is that it is essential to intentionally choose to ‘grasp’ the gospel, or to aim to truly flourish in the gospel in your individual life.  It’s not that Martha is unfaithful, but perhaps she’s not being mindful about how her surroundings, or the circumstances of the moment, are impacting her spirituality. 

This lesson need not be confined to the act of taking ‘great care’ of temporal needs.  I think it can be applied to any situation in which we quite unintentionally block the light and truth and peace of the gospel from coming into our lives.  In this day and age, I think this story is crucial.  This current age is full of situations – daily situations, I would say – which can cause us great anxiety and great confusion.  The problem is that, so often wherever you look, other people are also experiencing this anxiety and confusion, which causes misunderstandings, contentions, and an inability to reach out and connect with one another.  There is so much destabilization.  When that anxiety, confusion, and destabilization takes over, the human tendency is to forget to ‘look to God and live’ – at the very time we should be remembering!  Jesus’s reminder here is that this ‘loss of intentionality’ in grasping the power of the gospel in our lives, because of things that distress us, can happen to any of us.   

This is why I tell my children that the gospel is the answer to any problem that we face – it should be your first resort, and your last resort.  To understand that requires intentionality; it requires a deliberate, reasoning process to choose gospel principles over the instincts of the natural man like fear, anger, blame, suspicion, doubt, meanness of spirit, lack of generosity, inability to forgive, etc.  It’s the idea that we need to act, rather than be acted upon:  active in living the gospel, not passive in letting the tendencies of the natural man take over us.