Mar 29, 2024 |
WLSU, Save Me but Not Like That
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
WLSU, Save Me but Not Like That
Jesus goes to work, and he heals people. He helps people. He saves people. Then he heads to Jerusalem, the political, cultural, religious, social center of his people, and he goes there during Passover, when every one of these oppressed Israelites has Egypt and the Exodus and liberation on the brain. And he symbolizes for so many of them the possibility of deliverance – of salvation – not just from some abstract afterlife Hell, but from the things that are harming them here and now. Hosanna! Help us!
This is a promising moment. It quickly disintegrates. After several days of teaching and fierce verbal confrontations with religious leaders and cultural influencers, Jesus is arrested, put on trial, and publicly executed. Among those who advocated so strongly for his death were the people who had cried Hosanna the loudest. The week between Palm Sunday and Easter is the grotesque illustration of what happens when we don’t like how God wants to help us.
What Jesus does is he reminds each person that they need saving not just from some governing power or corrupt system – they also need saving from themselves, from their own ability to sabotage their lives, their own resistance to God’s love and justice, their own complicity in the things that push them further from God. And he’s not speaking to them from on high, from above the fray, from a place of privilege. Like all good prophets, he’s speaking to them as one of them.
As you may recall, it does not go well.
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