Palm Sunday - What Jesus Taught Us

Under most circumstances no one looks forward to dying--no one looks forward to suffering--no looks forward to being abandoned by one's friends.  Yet all this happened to Jesus in the week we now call "holy."  In the account we just heard from Matthew's gospel Jesus endured all these things and taught us by his example.

And what, you might ask, did he teach us?  In Matthew's view:

Jesus refused to be drawn into the politics of power being played out between the Roman authorities and the Jewish religious authorities.  He refused to be swayed by the crowd's desire for a Messiah who would overthrow the Romans.  He chose not to use his divine power to retaliate against the soldiers who mocked him, spit on him, hit him and finally crucified him. He understood he had come into our world for a purpose--to teach us how God wants us to live and to accept whatever the evil in the world would do to him because of what he taught.  He did this trusting in God's love to redeem the horror the world would do. For us it may not be the evil of the world we must accept, but the ravages of a disease.  It may be the loss of someone we love or the loss of something that gives us security, which we must accept, trusting in God's love.

Yet while trusting in God's redemptive love to surround us to strengthen us and to defeat evil in the end, like Jesus, we must open our fearful hearts to God.  We must name our fears and anxieties:  Why me?  Can't this happen some other way?  My God, why do I feel so forsaken?  Jesus cried out from the cross in desperate need for assurance that this pain he was enduring wasn't all there was.  His cry to God about being abandoned sounds much like our cries when we see no end to our suffering.  Jesus' cry and our cries are honest.  We make them hoping against hope that our suffering and our dying will not be the end.

Then Jesus breathed his last.  When one breathes a last breath one surrenders to whatever, in the end, one no longer can control.  Scholars tell us that Jesus died much more quickly than many who were crucified.  Perhaps that reveals an active choice on his part.  Active surrender does not mean that we have given up trusting.  It means, I think, that redemption of all that we have endured seems possible, even probable.

So we see a three-part movement in Jesus’ response to his passion:  trust in God's love, expression of his deepest agony, and final active surrender to what will be next.  Is this how we should respond to the pain--even the pain unto death--that we encounter in our lives?

There can be no more important task for this week we call "holy" than to consider our answer to these questions.  To live as a follower of Christ should we trust in God's love, but not fail to cry out our fears?  And then in the end, should we accept what cannot be avoided, all the while believing that God's love will redeem our pain and greet us as we emerge from our ordeal?  Ponder these questions this Holy Week . . . offer them in prayer to God.