Nobody writes songs about the middle of a story. The beginning has momentum and the ending has resolution, but the middle is just where you keep singing because there’s no other option. Ash Wednesday was two weeks ago. Easter is still on the other side of a cross we haven’t reached yet, and the weeks ahead are going to ask something of us.
The early church called the weeks before Easter “scrutinies,” which sounds severe until you understand what they meant. Not interrogation—more like before you take on something serious, let’s make sure you know what you’re carrying. The season was never primarily about guilt. It was about making room for what God was already doing.
Four Stories of Transparency
March 8, we’re at Jacob’s well in Samaria at noon. A woman comes to draw water alone in the middle of the day. She has learned to arrange her life around other people. Jesus tells her everything she’s ever done. She doesn’t run. She leaves her water jar and goes back to the city: “Come and see a man who told me everything I’ve ever done.” The thing she had been hiding became the thing she proclaimed.
March 15, a man born blind gets healed and immediately becomes everyone else’s problem. The neighbors can’t agree on whether it’s really him. The Pharisees can’t agree on whether Jesus can be trusted. His own parents won’t answer a direct question. Everyone is managing their exposure—except the man who was blind, who keeps saying the only thing he knows: “I was blind. Now I see.” Certainty can make you blind.
March 22, Bethany. Lazarus is four days dead. When Jesus arrives, Martha says, “Lord, if you had been here.” Mary says the exact same thing—not quite accusation, not quite prayer, but that in-between place where most of us live. Jesus doesn’t correct the theology. He weeps. Then he calls Lazarus out and tells the bystanders to unbind him. Resurrection is not tidy. Someone has to unwrap the grave clothes. But the sealed place opens.
Palm Sunday, March 29, two processions enter Jerusalem. Jesus on a borrowed colt, welcomed by a crowd that will largely disappear by Thursday. The Roman governor arrives from the other direction with cavalry and soldiers in the standard Passover show of force. The city holds both at once.
An Invitation to Bring Someone
Bring someone along to worship this month. Not as a strategy, but because the people in your life who are somewhere between the well and the tomb might be readier than you think.
We’re readying ourselves for guests. The Welcome Center has been enhanced with devotional materials, church information, visitor bags, and Sunday bulletins—arranged to say to anyone who walks in: we expected you. Notice this month the spoken and unspoken ways we say, “Welcome to Yates.”
The Light Wins
When we walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem, we don’t get to choose a different destination. The collision arrives at Golgotha. It won’t look like victory when it happens. Good Friday never does. But this story ends differently than every other story about what happens when darkness and light collide.
The light wins.
Grace and Peace,