Glen Avon Presbyterian Church

“HISTORIC CHOICES”

Rev. Lon Weaver

Passion Week—the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday—is one of crucial choices on the part of God and human beings. Judas had a choice between continuing to follow Jesus and betraying him to the religious insiders. Peter had a choice between standing up as a disciple of Jesus and rejecting any association with him. The crowd had two choices. First, there was the decision between maintaining their vision of a Messiah as a victorious warrior king and the truth and necessity of a humble suffering servant Jesus was destined to become. Second, there was the choice between freeing Barabbas from punishment and preserving Jesus from crucifixion. In short, when looking at human choices, Passion Week was a week about the complicity of humankind in evil.

Thankfully, God would not surrender our fate to human choices. At the micro-level, we see the choice of Jesus to accept the path that he determines is the divine will: accepting arrest, torture, and execution. At the macro-level, we see in Christ's steps the decision of God to give graphic expression to the understanding that the way to heal human sin would be graphic, costly, and excruciatingly personal: a being fully God (therefore, all-powerful) and fully human (therefore, fully embedded in historical reality) would have to embody the ugly brutality of sin. Finally, we see the breathtakingly overwhelming power of God's decisive love: so strong that sinful brutality lacked potency to answer it, and so all-encompassing that all of creation was touched by it.

Thus, the grand story of Holy Week and its culmination on Easter morning calls us forth to life and love. Speaking of his sheep, Jesus declared,

“‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’” (John 10:10)

Describing the essence of God, John wrote,

“God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.” (I John 4:9)

We're called to embrace and nurture those forces within ourselves and creation that manifest good and creative and healing and life-giving existence. We're sent to bear love in the face of contemptible apathy and willful hatred. This is the joy and challenge of being resurrection people. May God inspire us with joy and grant us courage to embrace the resurrection challenge.

Amen!