Explore the Bible: More Than a Prophet?

• The Explore the Bible lesson for March 26 focuses on Matthew 21:1-11.

Driving down a street in the neighborhood that has only been our home for two years, I noticed a house I’d never seen before. It wasn’t new. It obviously had been there for decades. It finally occurred to me that its presence was not new. It was my way of seeing things that had changed.

For some reason, every time I had passed that way before, I always looked right instead of left. For whatever reason that day, I chose to look left instead of right and, for the first time, I saw the house that had been there all along.

It’s true in our spiritual journeys, as well. There are many things we have yet to see because we were looking elsewhere. How many times have we walked right by what God was trying to show us because other things or issues had our attention?

Failure to recognize Christ

Since childhood, I’ve read this text and wondered how the people who were praising Jesus that day, laying branches in front of his path, would soon turn to murder him. Here was Jesus, the Son of God, the Messiah on a donkey’s back. Couldn’t they see the donkey as a demonstration of Jesus’ humility? Why was it that they couldn’t see past their own preconceived notions about who the Messiah might be and what that would mean for them?

Aren’t we all guilty of the same thing, however? We pray and pray to God for deliverance from this or that and fail to recognize when God finally answers our prayers. Too often, we’re looking for God’s answer through the prism of our preconceived notions, only to miss the way God comes humbly into our presence.

The challenge of this text in our modern context is to pay attention to how God’s ways of blessing are as ancient as the Bible and older. We can pray all we want. After that, we must leave how God answers that prayer to God and God alone.

For one thing, Jesus knew what entering Jerusalem would mean. By this time in his life, Jesus is fully aware of his identity and his purpose in this world. Jesus had come, not to be served, but as God himself serving the needs of lost humanity. As Luke records, Jesus said of himself, “‘The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost’” (Luke 19:10).

Faithful servant leader

The remarkable old hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness” comes to mind. Our salvation is based solely on the faithfulness of God to us, not our faithfulness to God. It was God who put his Son on that donkey’s back to come and serve our deepest needs.

If we are ever looking for a model of servant leadership, this is a great place to start. It boggles the mind and the heart to ponder the meaning of God, in Christ, kneeling to our level to speak our language, experience hunger and loneliness and rejection and, on the cross, to endure the suffering for sin that should have been ours. Jesus was God leaning into the strong winds of our human experience.

Invitation to suffer

The second thing we can take from this text is that Jesus was willing to show those who were willing to look deeper that loving always means suffering on some level. The people who greeted Jesus that day would soon become disillusioned when they discovered that their savior had not come to conquer the world but to bleed and die for it. They simply could not accept their long-awaited Messiah as the suffering one, only the victorious one.

Power always proves an addictive concept. We tend to think of winning as conquering. It’s still difficult, even through the eyes of faith, to see it as something else. Jesus was saying that, sometimes, when we pray for God to deliver us, we find God answering that prayer by inviting us to suffer.

The summer after my senior year in high school, my father lost his job. I was headed to college that fall, and my older sister already was in college. It was a horrible time to lose his job. Is there ever a good time to lose one’s job?

It frightened everyone, except my dad. When I heard the news, I went and found him in his bedroom, sitting in a chair and calmly changing his socks. There was no panic in his face or his voice.

I sat on the edge of his bed and listened as he explained to me that, for years, he’d been praying for a way out of his corporate job in which he felt trapped and into a way of fulfilling his vocational dream another way. As difficult as it was to lose his job, he told me he was certain it was God’s answer to his prayers.

In that one moment, my father taught me that if we want God’s deliverance, we must be prepared for suffering to lead the way because it often does. Jesus knew that seeking and saving the lost would come only through the sacrifice of his blood on the cross. To this day, decades later, when something tragic happens, I think of my father changing his socks and calmly listen for the voice of God.

That’s what Jesus was demonstrating to his disciples. He was a King on a donkey, fulfilling the centuries-old promise of God delivered through the prophets of old. It’s a powerful image and witness, for those willing to look beyond their preconceived notions about losing and winning and the price paid in order to do so.

Glen Schmucker is a hospice chaplain in Fort Worth.