I had a cool idea this week. Most Easters I really don’t observe anything up until Easter Sunday. Sometimes I pause and reflect on Good Friday, but that’s about it. Karen has been to some Maundy Thursday and Ash Wednesday and Good Friday observances, but I honestly haven’t. I have done the occasional (and way too traditional) sunrise observance of Easter Sunday, but that’s just too freakin’ early, and, to be honest, even God doesn’t want to put up with me at 6 a.m. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m really not into ritual or religious observances of the holiday (imagine that), but, since I recognize it as (arguably) the most important holiday to my faith, I thought I would spend some time doing some sort of spiritual excersize this week.
So what I came up with is this: I’m going to walk through Holy Week as recorded in the Scripture, and meditate on what Jesus did that day, and on just that day. I’m going to post my reflections on here, so, if this isn’t your thing, you might want to ignore the next 5 or 6 posts. This is an experiment for me (I tried it once about three years ago, but I was learning too much theology to be able to focus on God), so this week I’m doing it for real.
(Of course, I’m posting this one a day late, so just pretend that it was posted yesterday, okay?)
This Sunday is called Palm Sunday because of the palms that the people of Jerusalem waived and saluted Christ with and threw on the ground for Him to ride upon as He entered the city that observance of the Sabbath day. I’ve read this account literally a thousand times. What hit me as I read it this year, though, is really different.
At the beginning of Luke’s account (I arbitrarily chose Luke to read this week, because his is the most detailed of the Synoptic Gospels), Jesus tells some of His disciples to go into the nearby village (Belphage or Bethany? It doesn’t really indicate), and that they would find a colt waiting for them. Their instructions were to untie it and bring it back for Him to ride on, and, if anyone asked them, they were to just tell that person that it was for “The Lord,” and they would then be permitted to take it. So, as Scripture records, the men do just that, and indeed they are stopped, and they tell the owners just that when they are stopped, and the owners are suddenly cool with these strangers walking off with their colt.
Honestly, I find that more difficult to get my brain around than the whole crucifixion/divinity thing. And I paused to wonder why that is. Why, if I believe countless other miraculous accounts that are recorded in Scripture, do I have difficulty believing that? How is it that I can believe the wildly out-there miraculous things, but I have trouble with the miracles of in-between intensity?
Perhaps that’s the issue of having “faith like a child.” Madeleine L’Engle refers to this frequently. She states in Walking On Water that, as a child, she used to be able to float down a certain set of stairs at her grandmother’s beach house. After she had lived away for a while, she returned, to find that she no longer had that ability. She had forgotten that she didn’t know it “couldn’t” be done.
Children are so much more open minded than we are, especially after we’ve had a few years for our culture to crush our dreams and passions and attempt to conform us to its industrial machine. What would it look like if we held onto our belief while still growing in intellect and in faith? What would our culture look like? What would our art look like? What would our lives look like?
I guess the more important question is, how do we get back to that? I have to believe that it is possible.