Feast Day for Failures and Fools

Text: “5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).

An author by the name of Chad Bird writes about today:

This Sunday churches around the world... celebrate a time when God used not a wooden platform in a cathedral, not a boat in the Sea of Galilee, not a mountain top named Sinai, but a braying ass as his pulpit.

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem astride a donkey, he let us in on a secret. “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things of the world to shame the strong, the base things of the world and the despised, God has chosen, the things that are not, that he might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God,” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).  In other words, whatever the world deems most appropriate for divine work, God rejects and selects the exact opposite. 

The Lord hides himself under the most unlordly of things.

Do you want to find God? Then don’t go looking for him where you think God will be. Common sense won’t help you. Rational thinking will lead you astray. Following your heart will only get you farther from God. 

If you want to find God, he’s hiding in plain sight. Christ is in the very things that we would never select as a vessel befitting divinity.

Like an ass.

Like a woman who’d been married five times and was shacking up with a sixth, who was a member of a less-than-orthodox religious sect, yet whose testimony had a whole town coming out to Jesus (John 4).

Like a womanizing Hercules of a man whose life was a comedy of errors, whose eyes were gouged out, and who was reduced to a slave, yet who killed more enemies of God in his own death than he had in his life (Judges 16:30).

Like [an] old man with hair growing out of his ears, out-of-style pants, and coffee-stained teeth who stands in the pulpit to open his mouth and let Jesus speak.

Like tap water that fills your toilet[, your washing machine,] and cleanses the filth off your hands [at your sink], yet that our Lord mixes with his word to wash sinners into his kingdom.

Like that naked, bleeding, condemned man who hung impaled before the world, who is our glorious, loving, holy, forgiving God.

As we sing in the hymn, “And now let the weak say ‘I am strong,’ let the poor say ‘I am rich’ because of what the Lord has done for us.”

In His weakness and humility, He raises you from death to life; He provides a substitute to stand, in your place, under the shadow of death so that you may live forever; He promises you all the riches of heaven; He signs, seals, and delivers those promises in His own blood. He rescues you from the wisdom of the world— which is really the foolishness of sin and death— and gives you the mind of Christ; He makes you perfect.

Palm Sunday is the high feast day for asses and fools, failures and runts, for all people and things that lack religious appeal and scintillating sanctity, but which our crucified Lord chooses as his beloved vessels of grace. (Bird, Chad. “A High Feast Day for Failures and Fools.” www.ChadBird.Squarespace.com, March 17, 2016.)