Time for a Necessary Ending

Now the Passover and the Festival of Unleavened Bread were only two days away, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were scheming to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him.
                                                                                    -Mark 14:1-2
 
This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, the Sunday that we celebrate Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem as he prepares for the last week of his earthly life.  The author of Mark is particularly interested in this week of Jesus’s life. Approximately a third of the whole of his biography of Jesus is about this one, monumentally important week.
 
Part of what makes it so monumentally important is that Jesus is fully aware that his time to die has come. As author Henry Cloud points out, there are “necessary endings” in this life. Jesus has come to Jerusalem to embrace his.
 
It’s natural to resist this, of course. Jesus himself struggles to the very end, pleading for the Father to come up with any other option that might achieve the desired outcome that they both desire. 
 
But part of what makes Jesus so special is his willingness to walk faithfully in light of the call of God his Father and their mutual desire to rescue the world from the dominion of darkness.  To accomplish this will require the greatest sacrifice. A necessary ending.
 
Today in our own lives, there might be some necessary endings that we need to act on. There is only one Messiah, and we are not him (Merry Christmas to those of you who struggle with Messiah complexes!). But we are invited to walk faithfully down the same path and carry the same cross Jesus carried.
 
That might mean it’s time for a necessary ending to a dark habit you’ve been hiding. It might be time for a necessary ending to your doubt and unbelief, to embrace or re-embrace a life of faith. It might be time for a necessary ending to running from Jesus and a call or a burden he’s placed on your heart that you keep hoping will go away.
 
Life is full of necessary endings. We, especially as Americans, have a hard time letting go.  We’re better at acquisition and hoarding than we are at necessary endings.
 
Jesus, in his last week, willingly embraced his necessary ending.  The result was the salvation of the world. That’s why we sing his praises on Sunday mornings. That’s why we follow him into necessary endings in our own lives.
 
What necessary ending have you been resisting? Take some time to think through some things that might need to go in order to follow Jesus this week.
 

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