Food for thought...

...for Palm Sunday.

"As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you."

--Luke 19:41-44

How often do we miss the "time of God's coming" to us because it doesn't look like we thought it would. The very people who were singing about the coming King on Palm Sunday would, in the span of a few short days, cry "Crucify Him". Why? Because Jesus didn't look like what they expected. I like God as long as He cooperates with what I have planned for Him. The trouble is that He has other ideas. He knows that I haven't got a clue what will bring me "peace". Death and humiliation as the pathway to glory? How can that be? Mocked and abused as a sign of surrender to and approval by God? Impossible.

Yet not. One of my favorite quotes of all time, usually mentioned in a sermon every year at Christmas time, is what I'd like to leave with you for this Palm Sunday.

“If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and re-create the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.”

-- Frederick Buechner

I have a sneaking suspicion that most of the time our lives feel more like the road to Golgotha on Good Friday than the road to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. But that's okay. Because just where Jesus seems most helpless is He most strong...and just where we least expect Him He comes most fully.

Hosanna. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. No matter "how" He chooses to come!