CHOICES
A Palm Sunday Meditation
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about free will. About human
beings having the ability, the space, and the opportunity to
make choices. In that space, that freedom of will, it seems
to me that there are essentially two kinds of choices one ultimately
makes – we can either chose what is life-giving or we can chose
what is life-taking. Smoking, drinking, lying, hating are all
life taking choices. Loving, truth telling, forgiving, eating
properly are all life-giving choices.
Today’s story is a story that begins with hope and promise
and possibility with the charming picture of Jesus entering
the holy city on the back of a humble beast of burden. The story
turns, however, into despair, darkness and fear. And it is all
about choices.
It seems obvious enough that everyone in this story makes choices:
the crowd angry and crying out for relief, Pilot trying to find
a way through a complicated political mess, Judas succumbing
to his darkest self, Simon Peter lying over and over. Everyone
makes choices in this story and the amazing thing is, none of
them are life-giving, none of them except one – Jesus, the young
teacher from Nazareth, that rabble rouser, trouble maker, rule
breaker – only he makes a life-giving choice. And even he struggles.
If Jesus were telling his own story, I suspect the hardest
part to share, for him, might be the garden part. The garden
where he is alone, searching, searching his heart and pleading
with the heavens, “What,” he begs, “what am I to do? What is
the life-giving choice??”
He could have saved his own life. He could have taken back
all his teachings, renounced his truth telling, put out a disclaimer
on the miracles – he could have lied. But lying is never a life-giving
choice, never. Making a life-giving choice, for him, will mean
losing his life. Few, if any of us, will find ourselves in the
garden making such a choice, but we find ourselves daily making
choices that are in fact life-giving or life-taking. And there
will be times when making the life-giving choice will mean letting
go of something, may mean letting something die. Funny how upside-down
this feels, how paradoxical it seems – give up to get, let die
to live, embrace fear to know courage. And rather scary to think
of boiling the whole of life down into two essential notions:
either what I am about to say or do is life-giving or it is
life-taking.
Today is Palm Sunday and our way into the holiest of weeks.
With intention, let us mark and observe the choices we make.
With honesty, let us own those that take life away. With relief,
let us embrace those that give life. With gentleness and compassion,
let us learn to know the difference. Amen.
Trinity Episcopal Church