The greatest Shame of Palm Sunday is that they celebrated Christ as though He came to save them from their political and temporal problems. Entirely unaware that part of His plan would involve martyrdom at the hands of a state that would soon turn against them. With minds on legal liberty, they thought the man who could raise the dead would raise an army of temporal warriors, rather than a host of angels to wage war with the interior life of man, whose default disposition due to sin was hell. To wage this war against the gates of hell, rather than Roman Oppressors, was a concept and truth lost on many of His followers. Rather than saving them from their crosses he commanded them to carry them as the only path, a narrow path, to evade the real enemy to whom they were enslaved.
It is the emancipation of the soul that Christ seeks, and often in the suffering of the flesh and spirit. But with minds preoccupied outside of the internal matters of the heart, who could find such a cross as an answer to prayers, as a victory rather than tragedy, as something to sing a hymn of praise, as Jesus did before entering the Garden? It seems that the woman who broke the jar of perfume over Christ got it, that in his brokenness like wheat crushed to make bread, like a grape crushed by the cruel hand of an enemy to make wine, she imitated what He was to do. And her devotion permeated a sweet odor drawing souls to the cross rather than to flee it.
But we can be like the disciple who discarded his linen garment (symbol of baptism) and deny our adoption, failing to imitate the Son of God. Or we can pick up our cross with joy, and follow Him. This decisive choice has nothing in between, and it is laid before us. What you choose, not in theory but daily living will communicate this decisive, definitive choice. It is not some fundamental, vague, option. It is to permeate small and big choices. In every moral choice you make, where gravity exists, you are for or against the cross.
