Week 2 of the Lenten Journey

 As Jesus and his disciples made their way to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration, Jesus was repeatedly telling his disciples what would happen to him there: “for he was teaching [this word in the original Greek means “repeatedly, over and over”] his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again’” (Mark 9:31). Of course, what he was saying would happen was not what they were expecting to happen. Consequently, they could not grasp what he was teaching. “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him” (Mark 9:32).

Our Lenten journey invites us to see ourselves in the story of Jesus and his disciples. It calls us to recognize and acknowledge how we today—like those first disciples—struggle to understand and accept many of the things Jesus taught. It reminds us of the LORD’s word through the unidentified prophet of the exile, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). The vast difference between God’s ways and our ways as humans explains why we struggle to understand, much less embrace, many of the things Jesus taught. If we are to move beyond our struggle to understand what Jesus taught—yea, beyond our resistance to it, we have to learn to think with a different mind.

The apostle Paul spoke of this different way of thinking as “the renewing of the mind” (Romans 12:2) and as “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). Such thinking is Spirit-guided thinking—"and we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:13, emphasis added). It is thinking shaped by the character of God and the ways of God, what Paul called “the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 1:10) or the heart of God.

As we walk the Lenten journey, we seek to position ourselves for the Spirit to teach us the mind of Christ, moving us beyond the ways the world trained us to think. We invite the Spirit to move us beyond our struggle to understand what Jesus taught and our resistance to it.

“Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth” (Psalm 86:11).

Ash Wednesday, 2025

 After his experience on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus—the gospel of Luke tells us—“set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). His attention and focus were on Jerusalem and on what he knew he would experience there: betrayal, arrest, trial in which he would be condemned to death, crucifixion, death, and resurrection (Mark 8:31; 9:30-31; 10:32-34). During that six-weeks journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus sought to prepare his disciples for what he—and they—would experience there, but they were unable to grasp, much less accept, what he teaching them.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty-day liturgical season of Lent. The Lenten season is patterned after Jesus’s journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. Just as Jesus’s journey ended in Jerusalem, so our Lenten journey will end in Jerusalem, ushering us into Holy Week with Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Silent Saturday. There the traditional somber mood of the Lenten season will give way to the joy of the resurrection on Easter Sunday.

During the Lenten season, we, like Jesus, set our faces toward Jerusalem. We embrace this forty-day journey as a spiritual discipline, using it to focus on growing in our discipleship as the followers of Jesus. We recognize that we, like those first disciples, struggle to grasp, much less embrace, the ways of God he taught—such as dying to the egocentric identity we constructed using the values and ways of the world (“deny themselves,” Mark 8:34), living as insurrectionists against the ways of the world (“take up their cross,” Mark 8:34), embracing a teachable spirit that seeks to learn and live out of a Spirit-shaped way of thinking (“follow me,” Mark 8:34), embracing a servant spirit as the measure of true greatness (Mark 9:33-37), rejecting the world’s hierarchal power-over ways of domination (Mark 10:35-40) as we follow Jesus’s pattern of using power to serve (Mark 10:41-45).

Those first disciples struggled to grasp, much less embrace, what Jesus taught because they were stuck in the way the world had trained them to think and live—“the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod,” (Mark 8:15). The spiritual discipline of the Lenten journey invites us to recognize our own resistance to the ways of God Jesus taught. It invites us to recognize how our thinking—like that of those first disciples—has been shaped by the ways of the world. The Lenten journey invites us to embrace a teachable spirit—a willingness to learn and live the ways of God Jesus taught.

And so, another Lenten journey begins.