THE KING OF LOSERS

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week, the last week of Lent, which began on Ash Wednesday over a month ago.

Jesus was welcomed into the city with accolades and praises. For Jesus things wound down pretty quickly after that, turning his parade of victory into what may be seen as a series of failures that wound up parading him right back outside of the city, up a small hill to the place of capital execution, called Golgotha. There, at the top of a wooden scaffold that held his body, a sign was tacked that read, “This is the king of the Jews,” written in three different languages, according to John’s Gospel, evidently so no one in the city could miss the irony.

Just as his title King of the Jews was nailed on his cross together with his frailed body only one of his disciples was brave enough to stand among the crowd to watch him die. All the rest went into hiding all afraid of being identified with him and thus be implicated. A criminal dying on another cross that same hour hurled insults at him. Soldiers mocked, "If you're king of the Jews save yourself." Three hours from high noon He died. He died because nothing in our lives is well. We're a bunch of losers! We're sick!

In this way, as his story becomes our story, we have less need and desire to deceive ourselves into thinking all’s well when really, all’s not well. And we learn that what we can not do for ourselves, God did on our behalf - he overcame our failure already and all we need do is let out a last gasping sigh of relief and live into the truth of it. The weight of failure lifted from us, releasing us into a new freedom.

As Paul will eventually write once he comes ‘round to the truth of it for himself, once he finds the awful weight of failure lifted from his life: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart’” [1 Cor.1:18-19].the

One of the reasons we know Jesus swallowed up all the failure in his story is what happened to the failed disciples afterwards. They found resurrection. From out of their failure, a great, great hope sprang forth.

Here’s the ultimate irony: turns out that the man on the cross is a true king after all. He reigns in the kingdom of humility where up is down and down is up, where first is last and last is first, and where weakness and failure become transmuted into the very power of God.

Jesus is God’s cure for what ails us.

I invite everyone in Metro Manila to come to GCF's Service of the Tenebrae on Good Friday at 1PM.

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Readings:

1. Stephen Bauman, A Cavalcade of Failure, CCNYC, 040107

2. J. Sidlow Baxter, The Master Theme of the Bible, Tyndale House 1980

3. Max Lucado, Grace for the Moment, Zondervan 1999