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In Jesus, all of our ideas about glory, royalty, exclusivity, and honor get up-ended. People project all kinds of notions onto him, and he just proceeds with his work healing and preaching his message.

One minute (in last week’s text) he’s talking about how it's time for him to be “glorified” - when what he means is not exactly our ideal glory: death. As opposed to, say, winning military battles or wearing fancy priest robes. And the next minute (in this week’s Palm Sunday text) he’s playing the people’s game, riding into the city on an unbroke donkey. I can imagine him sortof shrugging like, “guess we’re doing this now.”

See, based on his actions here I don’t get the idea that he feels like he needs to be worshipped. He’s trailed by a crowd due to the fact that he’s just raised Lazarus from the dead* but he’s not letting it go to his head or calling attention to himself. He chooses the most lowly of pack animals. He seems happy with paltry palm fronds for offerings. His ego doesn’t require trumpets. He’s the most willing to get down and dirty with lonely and sick people in the streets and byways. I hear his main message as “God’s community is right here for you to join up with” and not “worship me I’m the king of the world.”

And I wonder how often we are getting this wrong: thinking Jesus needs to be put on a pedestal and worshipped rather than learned from and followed. I wonder how often we are that crowd, projecting our need for a loud and rowdy to-do onto Jesus, rather than plugging into the new way of being that he’s embodying and trying to help us wake up to.

God, we witness Christ in the scriptures
Embodying healing love,
Preaching the nearness of God,
Walking along the Path of Peace….

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In this week’s gospel text from John 12, Jesus shares the metaphor of the seed undergoing burial in the ground and death - death of its season of existence as a seed - so that it might become the “glorified” version of itself: the full grown wheat plant that bears fruit for nourishment. The “fruit” being more wheat seeds, and so the cycle continues. The wheat is continually undergoing transformation from one state of being to another: seed, sprout, seedling, mature plant, seed..

Jesus says that he must pass through this similar experience, which he then allows his physical body to undergo: the “seed” of his physical body, he says, must be buried so that it can be transformed into a more glorious state and make way for more cycles. He tells us that this is the nature of things on earth: change, transformation, cycles, rhythms. To resist this is to resist life, and he says as much in verse 25: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

We participate in eternity by our non-resistant participation in these divine rhythms. We become immortal by not resisting death. What a paradox, hey!

The Psalmist prays to be changed - to be cleansed, washed, purged, transformed, and to be made more fundamentally joyful (Psalm 51:7,8). They pray for their old patterns to die and be replaced: “Create in me a clean heart, and put a new and right spirit within me.”

Lent is our opportunity to create the intention of embracing the death that is naturally part of change and transformation. By embracing change, we embrace death, and by embracing death we embrace life.

God, we behold the cycles of nature,
Understanding that change is the constant -
The release of the old to make way for the new,
The acceptance of death to make way for new life….

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