Passion Week Lessons
Every attempt at writing or creating video about the “lessons” in each day of this Passion Week has so far fallen flat. Neither I nor my products could escape the inner critic. I couldn’t push publish. So I’ll just summarize the “lessons” of Monday – Wednesday and give your Thursday’s as well.
To call these days between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, Passion Week is to emphasize the passion of Jesus — His suffering emerging from who He is and the love permeating all His relationships: with His Heavenly Father, with Himself, with people, and with the stuff of earth. Suffering extends to the depths of soul beyond the flesh and the nerve endings. Jesus was not detached; he was deliberately engaged. So, Jesus loves and His love is what He taught.
The lessons I have been drawn to in His teaching in this week show us the way of Jesus’ love.
May these lessons bear the fruit Jesus intends.
Monday — Impressed with the image of God.
Reading: Matthew 22:15-22
Our obligations to the crown and its coin do not exceed the greater obligation to the image before us in humanity — the image of God. “Give back to Ceasar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” What is God’s? What must be given to God? The body and the person meant to flourish there. The bodies of humanity and the communities taking root here. I’m sure the rest of our relationships will follow when our value for giving God what is God’s is moved to the top. The secret of giving and I suspect the secret of loving is to give ourselves first to God.
Tuesday — The greatest commandment
Reading: Matthew 22:34-40
An expert in the law tests Jesus with a question, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” I’m not sure which options for great commands the expert thought might compete for the top spot. But Jesus chooses the first and second commands and then says “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Here you go — let’s organize our lives around these beginning with our closest relationships (starting at “home”).
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”
Love God with your all.
Love people as yourself.
So much growth required!
So much grace necessary!
Wednesday — Humble service flowing from the inside out
Reading: Matthew 23:1-12
Jesus finds no fault with the Law and the Prophets nor with the teaching that might emerge from their teachers on how to live in relationship to God, to self, to people and to the stuff of earth. But Jesus does find fault with the teachers who do not practice what they preach. He says, “be careful to do everything they tell. But do not do what they do.” Jesus does find fault with teachers who do everything for people to see so as to garner honour and adoration.
Humility among the communities of Jesus is founded on allegiance to Him.
So in the communities of Jesus no one needs to be called “Rabbi;” we are all brothers and sisters and we have one Teacher.
No one needs to be called “Father” because we all have one Father and He is in heaven.
No one needs to be called Instructor because we all have one Instructor, The Messiah.
If anyone needs to be great — become a servant by humbling yourself.
Thursday — The urgency of loving now with integrity
Matthew 23:13-39, Chapters 24 -25
Jesus sees ahead and he sees into the hearts of people who claim the name of God. He knows what has been entrusted to us and he discerns our spiritual complacency and inertia.
Jesus is direct and then he moves to what I call the parables of disturbance. These parables are meant to disrupt our complacency and generate urgency for relationship with God and for responsive living in all our relationships.
Wisdom, stewardship and service flow out of our worship of God as participants in Jesus’ Kingdom.
Wisdom: The urgency of time. The Parable of the Ten Virgins.
“Therefore, keep watch, because you do not know the day or hour.” Matthew 25:3
Stewardship: The urgency of wealth. The Parable of the Bags of God
“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” Matthew 25:29
Service: The urgency of people. The Parable of the Sheep and The Goats.
“‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Matthew 25-45-46
Quotes
“A common usage of the word neighbour today locates the neighbor as one who lives “next door” or close by. A “next-door” neighbor is one with a special degree of intimacy, in this understanding, and there is something to that. But in this understanding my most important neighbour is overlooked: the one who lives with me—my family, or others taken in by us. They are the ones I am most intimately engaged with in my life. They are the ones who first and foremost I am to love as I love myself. If only this were done, nearly every problem in families would resolved, and the love would spread to others….
“As we go about these exercises it will become increasingly clear how necessary it is to practice a range of what we think of as standard disciplines for the spiritual life (silence, solitude, fasting, prayer, study, and so forth) in order to receive the compassion, grace, and growth required to live a life of neighborly love. We may never feel adequate to such a life, in view of the depth of need that surrounds us. But it is right and good to understand that we aren’t adequate to love as we should and could! Instead we are to stand with others in the fellowship of disciples of Jesus Christ and under the presence and resources of the kingdom of God.”
Dallas Willard, “How to Love Your Neighbor as Yourself,” Renewing the Christian Mind, p. 132, 133-4.
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“Freedom is a terrible gift, and the theory behind all dictatorships is that ‘the people’ do not want freedom. They want bread and circuses. They want workman’s compensation and fringe benefits and TV. Give up your free will, give up your freedom to make choices, listen to the expert, and you will have three cars in your garage, steak on the table, and you will no longer have to suffer the agony of choice.
Choice is an essential ingredient of fiction and drama. A protagonist must not simple be acted upon, he must act, by making a choice, a decision to do this rather than that. A series of mistaken choices through the centuries has brought us to a restricted way of life in which we have less freedom than we are meant to have, and so we have a sense of powerlessness and frustration which comes from our inability to change the many terrible things happening on the planet.”
Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. p. 103
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“The walk of Jesus as He lived among people was not an aimless walk. He was more or less constantly touching people, and they were conscious of that touch. Do we need to emphasize again that as Jesus’ followers, our walk, our lives should not be aimless? We who have been brought into union with the resurrected Christ should be so responsive to His touch on our lives that naturally and inevitably we will unconsciously seek to live the kind of life He lived. We will permit Him, more and more, to touch the lives of others through our touch with and on them. Also ‘others’ will be constantly enlarging, including family, friends, neighbors, church members, casual acquaintances, and total strangers.”
T. B. Maston, To Walk As He Walked, p. 129
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“When we decide that the weak are not only objects of our charity but also subjects who teach us needed wisdom, it makes new relationships possible. After all, people sense when the time you spend with them is a chore. They might smile and say thank you ‘onstage,’ but you can be sure that the poor will cuss a patronizing church like a sailor as soon as the members are out of earshot. When we enjoy the time we spend with others and honestly value their wisdom, we don’t gain only new knowledge. We gain something far more valuable: a friendship that wasn’t possible before…
The tactic of eternal investments involves learning to entrust our future to God, believing in an economics of providence. The tactic of economic friendship is similar, but it emphasizes this: God’s economy comes to us as a community of friendship. Though Jesus made it clear that miracles happen, it’s not God’s standard operating procedure to rain bread from heaven or provide money from a fish’s mouth. Instead, God invites us into the abundance of eternal life through economic relationships with other people.
Some of us might be slow to call this friendship. Friends, we think are people we connect with on a deep level—people who understand us and with whom we can share our most initiate thoughts. ‘You can’t have many true friends,’ we sometimes say, thinking about the time investment these special relationships require. I have a few intimate relationships like this, and I’m deeply grateful for them, but I don’t think these are the sort of people Jesus is talking about when he tells us to use money to make friends.
Economic friendship is a lot more like being a good neighbor.”
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, God’s Economy: Redefining the Health and Wealth Gospel, p. 146, 147-8.