Facing our want

 Luke 19:28-40

He knows. He knows where he is going. He knows whose he is. He knows that the illusion of power has been faced once before. It was as tempting now as it was then. Maybe this is what we need to examine this last week of Lent, Holy Week, the week which changes everything. 

Today we say the ancient hymn of emptying ourselves, but do we really realize what it means? To become the servant of all, even to death. To not care where we will be led, but to be led by the one who created us. It is hard to let go. In AA there is the saying Let go and let God. It is meant to remind one they are not in control, only God is. This is what we say today. 

Do we let go though? We try to manipulate, to change things to our own leading. To train things in the way we want them to go. Letting go requires us to stop, stop trying to make things in our own way. To start listening to the way God would lead us. Yet it requires the most surrender from us because we are fascinated with our own ways of control.

Why? Because we don't want things spinning out. We don't want to be left in want. We don't want to feel as though we aren't safe, aren't able to be the ones in charge, aren't able to live the way we want, and the biggest one of all is to feel as though we matter. Yet here comes Jesus today to start this week and just in this day we will go from this crowd who cheers, to a crowd which jeers. Because Jesus lets go of the power. It is not to be manipulated, it is not to control those who want power, it is not in taking the power away from others in which true power reigns. It is in surrender, in weakness, in death, in becoming nothing in which there is a strength of love so rich, it cannot be broken.

Jesus knows all this. So he comes on the hails and hosannas, the Pharisees try to silence, to control it knowing it will only end in disaster. Jesus' reply is you can't stop it, even the stones would cry out the hosannas ringing. So we walk this way with Jesus. Yet to truly walk this way we have to, must confront our ways of trying to control outcomes. We must wrestle with the ways we don't like to let go and let God. We must see where do we stand in the crowd? Among the safe, among the ones trying to silence, among the ones saving our own skin? 

Whenever we can intimately enter the story we find discovery, we find good news. The good news is many were in the same places we inhabit. The good news is some decided to do something with this discovery. The good news is we too can try to empty ourselves and follow Jesus. But this starts the road of painful self-discovery. Will you walk this way this week? Will you look deeply and see where you are in the story? Will you dare to see why try and make things the way you would like them to be made instead of handing them over to God? Will you come and follow the way of the cross, that leads to death and opens up so much more life?  Amen.