The Way of Love
A Palm Sunday Meditation

The same crowd that shouted “Hosanna!” when Jesus entered Jerusalem at the beginning of the week shouted “Crucify Him!” by the end of the week.

You cannot let the fickle crowd of humanity tell you who you are, because the crowd is easily swayed by what you have to offer them. But the love of God is extended without partiality to the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor, the clean and the dirty — all who will open up their hearts to receive it.

When you open your heart to God, when you allow Him to become to only voice that can define who you are, that is when you begin the journey to becoming your true self, the you that was made in the image of God, free from the power of sin and death. And there is another crowd, the Great Cloud of Witnesses, who have walked this road before you, who are cheering you on as you step into who you really are, who you have always been.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has set you free from the voice of the crowd, so that you can listen to the voice of the Father and be introduced to your true self. All of creation is longing for the sons and daughters of God to discover and walk in who they already are, agents of love and life in a world bound by sin and death.

Though the crowd turned on Him, Jesus still made the journey to the cross for them. He died for each of us personally, those who would come and those who would let fear keep them away. At the root of all that keeps us from God we find fear, because to come to Him, to call Him Lord, requires us to give up our own lordship and control of our lives, so that we might walk in The Way of Love.

The Way of Love is the way that Jesus walked when He went to the cross for the crowd, for the serial killer, for the rapist, for the terrorist. It’s the way that we are invited to walk when we give up our rights and love those who will betray us. The Way of Love beckons us to extend grace and forgiveness to those who least deserve it, that we might become like our Father in Heaven. To walk in this way is to become your true self, to recapture the image of God that was lost at the fall of man but made available to us again through the resurrection and ascension of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

All of creation is longing for you to discover The Way of Love, which has been hidden from the wise and the highly educated who trust in what they know and comprehend, and has instead been revealed to those who can become the most like children. The counter-intuitive ways of the Kingdom don’t make sense to those who rely on logic, but nothing is too good to be true to those who possess faith like a child.

Welcome to Holy Week. Welcome to the dawn of The Way of Love.