Was Jesus blessed as he faced his passion and death? At the end of this week’s Gospel scene, as he utters his lament over the recalcitrance of Jerusalem, he says, in effect, “You’ve made your bed.” His words are “See, your house is left to you,” referring to the temple which is the center of religious life – but perhaps not the center of God-Life. And if that remark were not troubling enough, he adds this:
And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’
He means, we assume, his triumphal entry into the city on the back of a donkey, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday. On that day, they all called him blessed – and he was. But blessing was to take a funny turn in a very short time.
What does it mean to be blessed? We tend to think of it as having good things happen to us, swimming in a sweet spot. What if it only means, “Living in the Life of God?” Which can sometimes feel good, and sometimes be hard and challenging, and sometimes put you face to face with death, as Jesus found that week.
You know I’ve been big on the phrase “Expect blessing,” since I sensed God remind me of it during a cat crisis last summer. And I do believe God wants us to expect blessing, and I do believe we experience it more when we do than when we don’t. But I also believe – and need to keep saying – that we never get to dictate what that blessing looks like or in what part of our life it may land. It doesn’t always come in the areas we’re worried about; sometimes it comes in a side door and helps us to move through the hard stuff.
I read a beautiful and difficult op-ed on this subject this week, its author a professor at Duke Divinity School who wrote a book on the American prosperity gospel entitled “Blessed” – and then found herself diagnosed with stage four cancer. She points out the ubiquity of the “#blessed” hashtag in social media, as a way for people to both delight in their good fortune and (sort of) give God the credit for it.
Maybe we should think more carefully about when we say we’re blessed. Can we start to see blessing in its less obvious disguises? To recognize times when we feel stagnant as “cocoon” or “seed” times, in which all kinds of growth may be happening unseen? Can we seek blessing in bad news and in loss, not in a Pollyanna “always look on the sunny side of life” way, but inviting God to show God’s face in our pain and sorrow, and not only in our joy and fruitfulness?
All kinds of people that day shouted to Jesus that he was blessed - and had Twitter been invented, #blessed would have been trending like mad. And Jesus was blessed. They just didn’t have a clue what that was going to look like.
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