I happen to be thinking about this week. It is the pinnacle week of the Christian faith. Yet it has always been a bit of a puzzle to me. One day, Jesus enters Jerusalem on a carpet of palm fronds and shouts of adulation. A few days later His life is given away for the freedom of a murderous revolutionary zealot. What happened between Thursday morning and Friday morning? What caused the crowds who still followed that week to turn on Him and cast Him to His fate?
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He failed them. He didn't do what they wanted, what they expected, and in so doing....He failed them. So they rejected Him.
The crowds were still following on Thursday. After his arrest, there was still a crowd. I had missed this before, that there was a crowd still following him (although the disciples fled). It was in this crowd that Peter was challenged "After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, “Surely you are one of them; your accent gives you away." (Matt26:73) and he denied the Man and God he had followed and lived with for three years. There was obviously a crowd that followed to Pilate "“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him" (John 18:38) and it was a crowd that asked to make the choice of Barabbas or Christ.
They watched Him in the court of the Sanhedrin and religious leaders, and in the court of the Roman prelate. One represented the laws and rules that governed their daily lives and their faith in God, the other court representing the hated occupiers of the land. When they asked the Incarnate One who He was, if He was the Son of God, He answered in a familiar term of "I AM". And yet He did nothing. He did not call down legions of angels, the hosts of Heaven. He did not overturn the civil rule of Rome, or the religious law of the Pharisees. He said very little, and did less. Things would continue, it seemed.
So they turned on Him because He did not meet their expectations, did not answer their prayers, did not do what they so wanted Him to do. He let them down, and they turned on Him.
Yeah. I've so been there.
It happened when I lost my first job. After five years of Bible study groups in college and fellowship with believers, I found myself alone in my first job. No church, no study, no roommates. And when I lost that first job to a downsize, I got angry at God. We spoke almost not at all for years. The continued thorn in my flesh, which He did not relieve, didn't help. Through the marriage and the cold, impersonal, unfeeling church (the Bishop even said that to the Pastor after a visit), was of little help. When I did return to Him, during the slow painful dissolution of the marriage and the loss of all sense of where my life was going, I still came with expectations. And when the marriage ended, and
an important volunteer ministry did too....I walked away again.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Except I really didn't. It was the start of my wrestling with God, my Jacob time. Even now I'm struggling with God and my expectations. I want my foul depressive mood to be gone, my sense of always being an outsider to be banished. I want love in my life, for others and with someone. I want His presence to be palpable to me. I want....I expect....yeah. Just like the crowd. He doesn't deliver what I expect, what I desire, and I call for His life.
He gave it, though. Just like He did to the first crowd. He does accomplish His work. He did overturn Rome, and the Jewish religious establishment. He gave His life then, for them, for me.
I get it. And I don't. But I keep going forward.
And want more walks, to find more of Him as I walk.
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