Lent Reading: John 12:12-16

What does it take to understand the Christian faith? You don’t have to be clever. If you have ever read the Bible, you know it is mostly not a complex, esoteric text. You do need faith or to be seeking faith, because to really understand, we need God’s help.

This is seen our Lent reading. It is the week before Passover and Jesus enters Jerusalem, riding a donkey through a corridor of a celebrating crowd. They were making a path for Jesus, of cloaks and palm branches, and shouting,

““Hosanna!” “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Blessed is the king of Israel!”

The Church celebrates this Jesus’ Jerusalem entry as Palm Sunday.

The crowds were welcoming Jesus as their new King of Israel. Maybe they believed they were heralding the prophesied Messiah. Maybe they anticipated another king like Judas Maccabees. He defeated invaders, cleansed the temple and became king of Israel in 164BC. What we know now is they were on the right track, with the wrong ideas. Jesus was God’s true King, just not in the way they hoped.

John writes:

“At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.” (John 12:16)

Jesus had to be ‘glorified’ for the disciples to understand what it meant for him to be God’s true king. For insight to come, the disciples had to experience Jesus dragged into a corrupt court, charged for blasphemy, crucified as a criminal, Jesus’ burial, his resurrection to life, his ascension. Then, only then, did they realise and understand what was going on that first Palm Sunday.

Christian faith starts with seeing Jesus glorified through his death, resurrection and ascension. We start here when we explain Christian faith to seekers. That is why we pray God will help people see Jesus as he truly is.  Until we see this, we can’t understand.

In Him,

Jason

Photo by Hannah Fleming-Hlll on Unsplash