March 22, 2026 Reflection

Throughout Lent we have been focusing on the way of the pilgrim. Those of you who watched the movie The Way, may remember that some of the Camino pilgrims actually had an argument about what was the proper way to do a pilgrimage: what was the correct mindset – could you just walk or did you need to have a profound purpose, the correct way to travel – did it have to be on foot or could one ride a bike, or a horse, the correct types of food and accommodation. The characters pretty much assume that a proper pilgrimage entails some kind of deprivation: uncomfortable lodgings, food that is inadequate in quantity and flavour, mindsets beset with repentance or self-recrimination – but when given an opportunity they hesitate for only one second before accepting Tom’s invitation to stay at an extraordinarily luxurious hotel, where they sink fully into warm baths, extravagant meals and clean, comfortable, sprawling beds. Which while funny, also illustrates our Way for today – the Free Way. The Way of Christ, the way of the pilgrim, is based on the freedom to choose. To choose how to walk the way, what paths to take, indeed, the freedom to choose even whether to follow the Way of Jesus at all.
In one of her sermons this season Carla referred to Psalm 37 in which the Psalmist promises that ‘though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong, for God holds us by the hand.” (Psalm 37:24) She reflected on the comfort of holding a small child’s hand or the comfort of being held. Warmth, assurance and steadfastness are found in that embrace. In saying yes to holding and being held along the Way of life. 

On the other hand, during our last week in Mexico we experienced what it looks like when one says an adamant ‘no’ to holding hands – anywhere. We were joined by two of our sons and their families, including three grandsons 7, 6 and 3 years old. And in the 3-year-old we experienced the other truth that sometimes our hands are rejected outright. Full on refusal from a 3-year-old determined that no one is holding his hand, no how, no time, no matter the traffic or the tide or the fast-moving crowd. He. Will. Go. His. Own. Way. Arms wrapped tightly around his little body. Hands firmly clenched against his sides, inaccessible. Exercising his embrace of the Free Way. God knows that feeling too – of rejection. Of helplessness when the loved ones choose their own path. God’s beloved taking God seriously about the freedom to choose or reject God’s way is not a new experience for God. 

Jonah flat out refused God’s call and sulked under a tree when God blessed people who Jonah thought were unworthy. The great prophets Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah all protested vigorously that they were inadequate to take God’s Way. Mary had some clarifying questions before agreeing to follow in the Way. And poor Peter, as we heard this morning, as much as he wanted to follow, just couldn’t. 

The Way of God, the Way of Christ, is free for anyone to choose to follow. And free for anyone to reject. The Bible and our lives of faith are pretty much all about the struggle over which way to go.

Our reading today is based on a chaotic 24 hours leading up to Jesus’ arrest and sentencing, and is filled with people making choices about what way to follow. It starts with religious and civic leaders choosing when to arrest Jesus. I hadn’t noticed before how carefully thought out their plan was. They “…were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; for they said, ‘Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.’” (Mark 14:2-3) They kind of remind me of politicians sometimes making major announcements during a weekend in the hopes that people won’t notice. 

As the authorities were making their plans Jesus was having dinner at Simon’s place. Eating at Simon’s was a deliberate and counter-cultural choice on Jesus’ part. Simon was a leper; someone people avoided and certainly didn’t dine with. But in the Way of Jesus, all those social strictures were broken and dinner was underway when, into the dinner party came a woman, uninvited and rowdy. Her belief in the nature of Jesus freed her to choose another way to live. Freed her from social constraints and to act out of her belief that in Jesus, God was present at the table. Freed to choose, she chose to smash open a jar of expensive ointment and pour it all over Jesus. Dumping it all over him in a gesture reminiscent of either being prepared for coronation or death – or in Jesus’ case – both. 

This woman’s choice may have spurred Judas to make his fateful decision about how to live because immediately after the woman did that, he jumped up from the dinner table and went to the religious leaders to betray Jesus. He chose to turn Jesus in to the authorities. We’ll never know what provoked him to decide. It’s possible he thought he was helping. Jesus was putting the whole movement in danger by being so open in his Way of living the gospel. He was putting his followers and the movement and all Jews in danger by openly flaunting another way of leadership, another way of living the faith, another way of following the Way of God. 

After that tumultuous meal Jesus chooses to carry on anyway. Along with his friends he went to Gethsemane and there he ‘began to be distressed and agitated’ and to pray fervently. (Mark 14:33). He was well aware of the dangers entailed in following the Way. In his prayers he asked God if there was another option, another way to follow God, if God could remove the undertaking from him. When he found his companions sleeping rather than keeping watch with him, we hear his own anguish in his words to them: “…the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He left them and prayed some more and asked again that the task be removed from him, that the Way take another direction. And then, resolved, he chose what seemed to God’s path for him. But he chose it. We are never coerced along the Free Way. God offers call, not coercion. 

Once arrested and standing before the religious authorities Jesus had another choice. He could have denied his calling. He could have denied his belief in God’s Way. But he chose not to. In response to the question, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’ Jesus said “I am.” I am – the same words God used to identify God’s self when Moses confronted God in the burning bush. When Moses asked the name of the one speaking to him from the bush God responded: “I am. I will be who I will be.” Ultimately, I will be who I chose to be. The Way of Freedom: freedom to…and freedom from…
A day and night full of drama and complex choices. A final meal, surrounded by love and confrontations at the table, accompanied and yet alone in the garden, adored and scorned, arrested and interrogated, beloved and denied, abandoned. All before dawn on Friday. 

The gospel writer Mark had a very specific purpose in placing Jesus’ final time with the disciples at a Passover meal. Passover was and is a time of remembrance for the Jewish community; for recalling how a slaughtered lamb both protected them from death and offered them sustenance for their flight from Egypt. One night, during their time of slavery in Egypt, God instructed the Israelites to kill a lamb and smear its blood on their door frames. That way, when the angel of death moved through the town it would spare, pass over, the children of the Israelites, and take only the children of their captors. (I know, it’s gruesome, for another sermon. Then, having marked the doors, the Israelites quickly cooked the lamb, ate some of it and took the rest with them as they hustled out of town and into their forty years of flight into freedom.
For Jews the Passover meal is in memory of God’s act of liberating the Israelites from Egypt. For Christians that Passover meal with Jesus signals that he is the liberating lamb of God; he is the one whose blood protects God’s people on the Way to freedom and who sustains the people on their journey. Promising again freedom from what holds us captive: from fear, anxiety, loss, not-being-good-enough, meaninglessness. All the things we know so well.
At a meal reminding everyone at the table about the historical event of Passover, about protection from death and promise of plenty and liberation from whatever oppresses, Jesus shares bread and wine. And then he signals that he is that protection. His is the life given so that God’s people are spared from death. His is the blood that marks the people as protected by God. He is the food that sustains. Like the lamb his body will be broken and his blood poured out for the sake of God’s people. 

I have to clarify here that I don’t believe that this means that God wanted or needed Jesus to die for God’s kindom to come. God did not and does not desire sacrificial death to be at one with us. Jesus dies not for the sins of the world, but because of the sins of the world. There are countless stories about people who die having made the choice to follow in the Way of Jesus, in the Way of God’s righteousness for all God’s creation. Who die not for the sins of the world, not to redeem the world, but because of the sins of the world. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are shown once and for all that those deaths are not in vain, but that God’s goodness will prevail, always denying death the final word. 

Jesus was a physical, active, tangible person whose body would break and whose veins would leak out blood. Christianity is a physical, active, tangible religion; it is not just a belief system but an embodiment, an en-flesh-ment, of the message of Jesus Christ. An experience of being called and blessed and broken and poured out in love for others and creation. That’s how it is we live in the Way of Christ. That’s how it is we go to the cross with Jesus.
The Way, the Free Way, is a way of choosing every day to follow in Jesus’ Way, or not. Like the pilgrimage in the movie The Way, and like the 24 hours of our reading today, the Free Way is a busy and chaotic life of joy and heartbreak, of fulfilling and challenging relationships, of profound insights and of blundering along blindly, of difficult decisions about the right way forward, and then sometimes taking the wrong one anyway. The Way is always sacred and gritty and messy and real and, we never walk that Way alone. Whichever Way we go, God goes that way with us. For while God is free to choose also, God has promised to always choose to be by our side, no matter our path.

Thanks be to God, Amen