Upside Down yet Right Side Up: Holy Monday
by Rev. Lance Armstrong O’Donnell, Pastor
St. Philip Lutheran Church and School
Chicago, Illinois
Holy Monday
29 March, A.D. 2010
Isa 50.5-10; Heb 9.11-15; Jn 12.1-23
On this Holy Monday we return to Palm Sunday, but our reading from John 12 gives us a broader context. The crowds that gathered had heard about Lazarus being raised from the dead. It seems a bit of a circus atmosphere, as if many who are gathered are simply bystanders, gawkers like those who gather to witness someone’s suffering in an auto accident. They aren’t really interested in Jesus, in His teaching. They just want the fountain of youth.
But as Deitrich Bonfhoeffer reminded us in Cost of Discipleship, there is not not simply the well of living water. With the Water comes the Life. There is no life with Jesus apart from following Him, no discipleship without a cross. This is good and right and salutary. We have been “purified from dead works to serve the living God.”
Yes, there it is, always to be kept in mind, in faith: the living God. Jesus lives... He will die. That we know, but Lazarus was a foreshadowing. Death will not keep its hold on Him. For those who drink of the Living Water will never die, and He is the Living Water. In Him is life, and that life is the light of men: your Light, your Life.
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