This week is Holy Week, so I invite you to join me in taking a break from looking at “everything Jesus commanded us”. Instead, we’ll reflect on events from “Passion Week” – the final week of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry.
Prayer
Before you read, I invite you to pray this prayer based on Psalm 119:104
Lord, grant me understanding from Your Word;
so that I may love Your way, and despise every wrong path.
Amen.
Briefly prepare your heart in silence, and ask the Holy Spirit to awaken your awareness to the voice of God, coming to you through His Word.
Reading
In our passage for today, Jesus is so matter-of-fact. He tells His disciples calmly and clearly,
‘As you know, the Passover is two days away – and the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified.’
Personally, I suspect this sense of calm resolve was mainly related to recent events at the top of a high mountain (in Matthew 17) in which Jesus had been ministered to by the strange appearances of Moses and Elijah, and by the voice of God the Father from a cloud. It was after His return from this mountaintop experience that Jesus began to speak more frequently about the fact that He would soon go to Jerusalem to lay down His life.
Jesus had done the hard work of coming to terms with the ultimate conclusion of His mission of self-sacrificial love, and now he was ready! He had locked in His course with absolute resolve, and His path of selfless love would soon find its ultimate expression – and its inevitable conclusion – on a Roman Cross.
By contrast to Jesus, the religious leaders we meet in this passage are set on a path of protecting their power and prestige at all costs. And we meet Judas Iscariot, who seems to have been hell-bent on pursuing some kind of military liberation. He was an “all-in” follower of Jesus, while he still believed that Jesus was a military, political messiah. But when Jesus made it absolutely clear that His Kingdom was not of this world and that it would come through His apparent defeat and death, Judas was out!
How absolutely tragic it is that Judas and the religious leaders missed out on receiving the eternally abundant life Jesus came to offer us. And let’s notice that they lost out on it precisely because they were trying to preserve their lives. They had chosen a self-centred path, pursuing political and religious power and prestige. They had missed the Path to Life. They had missed the Messiah.
There are strong echoes here of Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for My sake will find it.”
Contemplation
What path have you chosen most consistently this year so far? The path of self-centred pursuits, or Jesus’ path of selfless love?
Which path will you choose today?
I encourage you to pray this prayer, and mean it:
Lord Jesus, today I choose to follow You on the path of selfless love – the Path of True Life. Amen.
Dave's Diary 
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