Palm Sunday
I am weak but Thou art strong.
Jesus, keep me from all wrong.
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.
Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– Traditional, from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1800s)
The more carefully I have studied the Gospel teachings of Jesus, the more obvious it has become to me that Jesus must have come not to start a new religion, but instead He came to abolish all religions and teach us to relate to God individually. And the fact that no other Gospels scholar ever seems to have seen this fact is astonishing to me now, when Jesus’s whole plan of action is so slap-your-forehead plain in His words. For example, He said things like, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6).
And Jesus despised religious traditions! He was forever saying things like, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). And, “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9). A careful and open-minded reader of the Gospels cannot avoid concluding that Jesus considers religions to be mere man-made constructs that only come between us and God. Religions do little to facilitate our relationship with God, but instead they just get in the way. It is nonsensical to imagine that Someone who talks this way is here to start just one more religion! No, indeed. By His very words, one of Jesus’s goals on earth can only have been to abolish religions altogether.
All the rest of Jesus’s teachings are profoundly spiritual, primarily individual, and centered on love and forgiveness. The question of how Jesus says that we should be living our spiritual lives is really another matter, and I have been fretting about that, to be frank, because I think He is calling us now to do two contradictory things at once. Somehow, we are to individually relate to God in community. Isn’t that what He is actually saying? We have been calling this conundrum “Future Church,” And the sweet, enigmatic Jesus of today seems to be able to wrap His mind around doing that just fine. But I cannot imagine how we are going to do it so easily.
Christian revivals have been enveloping many college campuses this spring, ever since early February. They are hitting mainly historically black colleges in recent weeks, sweeping across the southern states with an enigmatic and inexorable force that we can only watch and wonder about. This hasn’t happened in fifty years. But, why now?
Repeatedly in the Gospels, Jesus tells us to look to the young. He says that we will accept the kingdom of God with the open mind of a child, or we won’t be able to accept it at all. And I have trouble seeing that, since on the surface at least, Jesus’s words are so straightforward. I think that most people find their Bibles intimidating primarily because the book is so thick! So then, you simply buy a red-letter Bible. And if most of the printing in your Bible is not in red, then you know that you don’t need to read those parts of it. You don’t even need to read all the red, since the First Council of Nicaea added some things to the Gospels that Jesus never said. With practice, you can learn to spot and avoid all those suspect later additions. So then, once you have your red-letter Bible in hand, your spiritual life can be just you and Jesus. Just those four Gospels that you can read in one long evening while seated in a comfortable chair. And the best friend you have in all this world will gladly share your ever-richer spiritual life.
Today is Palm Sunday. Today we commemorate the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to celebrate the Passover and allow Himself to be arrested and crucified so He could die a very public death, and three days later He could rise from the dead – “Ta-DA!” – in order to prove to us that death is an illusion and human life is eternal. Of course, that is not the way that Christians understand Palm Sunday. But that is the way that Jesus described the purpose of His death and resurrection to me almost a year ago today. So now I consider Palm Sunday to be the perfect day for each of us to respond to a precious call from Jesus to begin a closer spiritual walk with Him.
And I cannot stress to you strongly enough the fact that when you are ready to get serious about growing spiritually, you will need to tidy up your mind. Most of us have a private part of our mind where we think all sorts of embarrassing thoughts and fantasies, and a public part of our mind where we are prepared to receive our most exalted guests. Indeed, we would not mind at all having God and Jesus see everything that is going on in the public part of our mind! I used to think that way as well, but please stop kidding yourself. God sees everything. Jesus sees everything. Your spirit guide sees every part of your mind, every shabby thing that you ever might think, so it really is time now to clean up your act in every conceivable way. You came into this lifetime to grow spiritually. And now, at last, it finally is time to pull out all the stops! To eliminate every bit of negativity from your life, you should:
Stop watching television. I did this twenty years ago, and it is incredible what a positive difference it has made! Now I get my news from news websites in a few quick doses, and my evening time is all my own.Restrict your movie-watching to benign oldies. I did see Avatar. The Downton Abbey series. Pride and Prejudice. But otherwise, I have not seen any movie or TV series that was made in at least the past twenty-five years.No videogames, either. I was never into videogames, but if you still are, then it is long past time for you to stop zapping things for the stupid fun of it.Cultivate only peaceful, happy, and loving thoughts. One of the things that watching television used to do to me was to fill my mind with negativity each night. Politics and the us-vs.-them of world geopolitics is all stressful, and it makes your spiritual growth almost impossible. What may be even worse, I think, is that it turns your mind into a kind of loaded gun full of negativity that you can aim at all the people and situations on the edges of your personal life. I can recall what it was like to listen to office and neighborhood gossip. But, never again.
Once your mind is a sufficiently tidy place that you can welcome God and Jesus into all of it, then simply do that. What I did was to imagine opening up the top of my head, and thereafter I have imagined that it has been wide open all the time. I call it living with an open prayerline, so every thought that I ever have is being actively shared. This is a kind of ultimate surrender that you may not feel prepared to do, but since I gave my life to God in April of 2009, and I have renewed that gift to God on every day since, it feels right to me now. And you quickly get used to this feeling that God is always in on your most private thoughts. You don’t even need to police your thoughts. They police themselves.
There is a profound joy to be found in at last getting down to doing the genuine spiritual work for which you were born. As I say, I first got serious about doing this only in 2009, when I had already reached retirement age, so I was a latecomer to this process. If you are younger than that, then you are at a wonderful advantage! Now you and God can get serious about your spiritual growth, and you can do it with a sense that this really can be your last necssary earth lifetime.
You might begin with the teachingsbyjesus.com thought for the day. We are circulating a month’s worth of thoughts by Jesus there now that are worth meditating upon. You might sit with that thought and consider it with Jesus. Perhaps open your Bible and read the red letters around it in context. And since today is the Sunday before Easter, you might especially reflect today on Jesus’s real reason for going to the cross for us, which had nothing to do with sin and redemption and everything to do with proving to us that our lives really are eternal. And He did it out of His pure love for people. As my Thomas so often tells me, there has never been anyone else ever born who has loved people the way his little brother loves people.
Death on a cross is a ghastly way to die. There have been theories that because Jesus was pure, because He was God, He didn’t suffer. Which is a nonsense idea! Jesus’s physical body went through the ordeal of crucifixion, the flogging and the nails and the hours of hanging on the cross in terrible pain through the slow ordeal of asphyxiation. And Jesus was well aware on Palm Sunday of what He was about to go through for His pure love of people. The Christian notion that Jesus was required by God to be a sin-sacrifice to God never made much sense, but we can forget all that now. As Jesus Himself explained to me, what He did for His pure love of people was all His own idea. God did not require it of Him. Instead, Jesus had never been able to convince His followers that our lives are eternal; and so, all unbeknownst to them, they were about to get a powerful demonstration. And Jesus was indeed born from the Godhead. He had been protected by invisible archangels all His life, but He was about to order them to allow Him to be arrested. We will talk more about His crucifixion and resurrection next week.
What would you be willing to do for the people you love most? For your mother? Or for your children? Would you be willing to go to the cross for them? Allow yourself to be publicly humiliated, crowned with thorns, flogged with multi-thonged, shard-tipped whips that cut pieces out of you with every blow, and then hung stark naked on a cross for hours until you can finally die? And men being crucified hang there with erections. They don’t depict those on the church crucifixes. It is no wonder that Jesus was in some distress in the Garden of Gethsemane as He awaited His arrest! But His love for people is such that He was steadfast in His determination to do this public demonstration.
My beloveds, this is yet another way to define love. Jesus had seen crucifixions, so He knew what was about to happen, but that was not His primary focus. What was most important to Him was that His doing this would be public enough, and it would be dramatic enough, that everyone would know at the end of it that He was really stone-cold dead. So then when He appeared again, alive, He thought that would be sufficient proof to His followers that they truly never would die. When He told me a year ago how He had planned it, not certain that it would work but determined to try it anyway, as He talked about it, and as I heard the quiet conviction in His voice, I am freshly amazed as I remember it now. Dying on a cross and then rising from the dead doesn’t seem to be something that you just decide to give your very best shot. But that was what Jesus did. He had experimented with reanimating dead animals successfully. He really thought that He could make this work. I do love listening to Jesus talk! He has a soft voice when He is speaking privately, and a bit of an accent that is unguessable. And He had very carefully thought this through. He was enjoying talking about it with me, and I cannot help smiling now, recalling hearing Jesus actually telling me how well He had planned His crucifixion and His resurrection. Who else on earth has such a memory?
But what strikes me now, and most of all, is what an amazing display of love this was! He didn’t have to do it at all. God never required or even asked it of Him, and in fact Jesus gave me the sense on that extraordinary night almost one year ago today that in escaping the protection of His archangels as He did, and dying in such an undignified way, He was defying the Godhead’s authority. But He loves people so much that He could not bear to leave those ignorant primitives and simply go home while they still were unable to believe what He had been telling them about eternal life. He had to find a way to prove it to them! And then, my dear ones, amazingly, Jesus even left that scorch on the Shroud of Turin as a gift to us that was going to make sense only when it was revealed to be a photographic negative almost two thousand years later. There truly is no greater love than the absolutely overwhelming love that Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Man, the eternally risen Christ has for people!
When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely o’er.
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.
Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– Traditional, from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1800s)
The post Palm Sunday appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
