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Good morning bus riders!
Today is Palm Sunday … AND … it is Passion Sunday … ALL rolled into one Sunday!
Now, if this were a church, you would all be waiting for me to arrive out here (not under the bus stop roof), where I would hand each of you a blade from a palm tree branch. Then after a Gospel reading, we would all recite a Psalm, while walking around the bus stop containment, before sitting down … like you are now.
That is the Palm Sunday part.
Then, while under the bus stop, I would hand out scripts, with each of you pledging to read certain parts aloud … after the obligatory Old Testament reading, singing another Psalm, and an Epistle reading.
The Gospel reading for today is chapters twenty-two and twenty-three of Luke … or over one hundred verses. That usually takes an hour, rather than ten minutes.
That is called the “Passion Play,” because everyone plays a role. It is church entertainment, where everyone get to be part of an act. The word “Passion” means “Pain” and “Suffering.” So, that is the “Passion Sunday” part of today. The "Suffering" of more words being read aloud, than at any other time in the church calendar!
Certainly, to speed things up, no priest will ever say anything of significance afterwards. So, the rush is on to get to the cracker and wine part of the service.
That makes today be a sad day.
It is sad because Jesus was arrested before he could finish celebrating the Seder meal. He was then falsely accused of crimes, only to be tried before two rulers and found innocent.
But … the leaders of a religion made damn sure that Jesus hung on a cross till dead.
Then, those leaders shouted insults at Jesus while he was near death on a Roman crucifix.
Then Jesus' dead body was allowed to be taken down, prepared for temporary burial; and, that body was placed in a loaner tomb.
The sad thing is not that Jesus died … because he had to die, so his soul could fill the souls of countless others. That is why Jesus told his disciple three time that he would rise form death. So, we all know next Sunday tells that part of the story. Hooray! Jesus is risen!
The sad thing is Jesus had to die today without anyone teaching the truth of that written. The sad thing is how any church silently shouts insults at dead Jesus, by not preaching in great depth why so much is said and so little (nothing) explained.
There is so much to say … so much … so few willing … knowing … to tell the truth.
Two Sundays back … on the fourth Sunday in Lent this Year …the Old Testament reading was from the book of Joshua. There, we found that first Passover in the Promised Land meant “manna ceased." We read how the people then “ate the produce of the land” … that first year.
As true Israelites on the first Passover remembrance, after crossing the Jordan, it took a year before some of the older children became adults. At that point in time, everyone kind of just assumed they too would then be true Israelites. They assumed that was in the bloodline, so it just naturally meant all were Israelites by the grace of God.
The problem was they weren’t.
After forty years of graduating children, each year expected those newbies to be true Israelites as adults … who weren’t, everything was going so wrong that some of those still alive from the crossover Passover finally began crying out to Yahweh … “Help us!”
Then a judge would be sent to bring everybody back to the realization that being a true Israelite meant individual work towards that goal. Thus began a regular forty year cycle – up and down – where the bloodline only brought about a natural human tendency to be lazy and good for nothing. Each soul had to find some manna to feed to itself.
You see, the manna ceased coming from the sky because the true Israelites were then the true vine, which would pass the manna on to their fruit – their children. So, manna came from the true Israelites in oral and written forms … not the sky.
Their souls needed to be fed spiritual food daily … as much as they could consume and digest in one day. Just as a body of flesh needs multiple meals of physical food each day (to remain healthy and growing in strength), so too does the spirit within the flesh need more than a quick 'energy drink' or 'power bar' of Scripture each day, to become and remain a true Israelite – a name that means Who Retains God.
Now, in Exodus Yahweh told Moses to tell the people to expect the manna from the sky. The manna would make them become true Israelites (along with a few poisonous snake bites and other maladies that befell the wayward … as 'wake up' calls). Manna was then the baby food required to form true Israelite souls.
Once a true Israelite, the manna became solid food – divine Scripture.
The true Israelites were expected to feed the truth of Scripture to their children, so they would memorize Scripture, know the truth of its meaning, and then teach all that to their children.
When Yahweh told Moses to tell the people about the manna, He said to restrict them as to how much they could gather per day. Yahweh said to Moses that restriction was to see who would break His rule.
Of course, with it being human nature to be lazy about one’s religion – the forty years on, followed by forty years off (repeat) cycle – some of the people gathered more than the limit, breaking Yahweh’s rule. They gathered more than they could possibly consume and digest, before the sun came up the next day.
Taking too much meant the manna filled with maggots and began to stink.
Too much meant waste, which did no one any good.
When you realize that written Scripture has replaced the manna from heaven, as divine words with deeper meaning than an English translation service can ever grasp, reading more than can be explained in one Sunday is waste, which does no one any good.
The amount of gathered manna today: two Psalms to sing and understand; one Old Testament reading, with one Epistle to read and understand; as well as a Gospel reading from Luke that tells of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey colt that needs explanation … to have all that heaped up and served alongside almost two full chapters of Luke that must be understood …
talk about biting off more than you can chew … today is that.
I took the two chapters of Luke and divided them into the equivalent of seventeen omers of manna, which means just the Scripture from Luke … not including the Palm Sunday Gospel reading from Luke 19 (thirteen verses) … not including the two Psalms sung … not including the Old Testament and Epistle readings … just Luke 22 and Luke 23 alone … should take more than two weeks to consume and digest properly.
That means daily servings of only one helping each day. Everything offered up today could be eaten in a week, if three helpings were consumed and digested each day … making a soul be well maintained and healthy.
Some religions ring the spiritual dinner bell three times a day, calling it a call to prayer.
Christianity isn't one of those religions. Christians like the sickly slim look of false piety.
It took me eleven days, just to go verse by verse and discern the truth written in the Word found in over one hundred verses from Luke's Gospel. I went well beyond the simpleton understanding that comes from standardized translations in English.
Paraphrases and greeting card Biblical quotes are like a diet of Twinkies and Cheetos … empty calories and possibly cancerous if done too often.
Now, anyone who has seen a production of Jesus Christ Superstar or Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (or any other presentation of the Passion Play, including being an actor in a church on Passion Sunday) knows this story. If one professes to be Christian, then one knows this story.
Raise your hand if you know this story.
<Look for all hands raised.>
Well, let me tell you that I too knew the production of the Passion Play; and, I found out truths over the eleven days I read, pondered and wrote, that I had never realized before. I was amazed and astounded.
I was spiritually exhausted after doing so much, so ‘quickly,’ but I was also spiritually rewarded for doing that. I am so glad I did it.
You see, nothing about the Passion of Jesus … or any of Sunday’s lessons … are about feeling sad for poor Jesus. Everything written, thus everything scheduled for reading, is about us.
EVERYTHING!
So, if it is about us gathering a hundred pounds of Scripture, expected to stuff that into five pound bags … then guess what?
We become the ones screaming, “Crucify him!” … simply because we do not want to spend more than a few minutes a week, when we relax and let the warm breeze of some priest breathing nonsense past our heads … calling that being religious.
The children that Moses led out into the wilderness had nothing more to do than survive and learn their religion. They had to work to do both.
Manna was to be gathered DAILY … not just one day a week. Going to work daily meant gathering spiritual food was a built-in survival tool. Yahweh sent manna because the people complained about having been taken away from enslaved activities, only to complain about how good it was being enslaved.
Without manna, they slaved for death (and had a little fun). With manna they slaved for everlasting life (and still had a little fun). Manna was the difference between life and death. Fun (as always) is an imaginary trick of the brain.
Manna was to be consumed and digested over many hours DAILY … not just for one hour per week.
When in Joshua we read that the Israelites ate the produce of the land for a year, they listened to the elders speak spiritual food to them. They understood what they spent time memorizing.
After that, they began to eat less and less spiritual food, little by little, until after forty years they were screaming out for Yahweh to save them … from themselves!
I listen to the ‘news’ on the television daily, sometimes for hours; and, I am praying for Yahweh to save us from ourselves …
But I don’t think there are any true Christians these days who really want to be saved from the evils they have wrapped their souls so tightly within.
We have become a divided people … in two nations … Northern and Southern … both breaking all the Laws, to suit our selfish wants and desire … because no one takes the time to consume and digest spiritual food.
We prefer bumper stickers for our cars and dashboard icons with bobble heads that make it appear that we are what we put little effort into actually being. We love the metals and jewels that the crosses we wear around our necks are made of, more than we ever considered carrying our own cross to the place where Heads roll, when bodies are sacrificed to Yahweh.
Christians take great pride … a deadly sin … in being ignorant of the truth. They take great delights in the entertainment of religion … singing religious songs in English, sending memes of English Scriptural quotes to our social media friends, and watching Hollywood’s (produced by Jews) versions of our religious foundations, for us to gladly pay to watch.
All the while the world around us is burning away. History repeats; and, captivity in a foreign land seems to be inevitably prophesied … even if this land becomes so foreign that it is already no longer as it used to be.
Be careful what you wish for. You get what you pay for.
A world with eroded religious values always leads to a world that is enslaved to evil ways.
Since I have no palm leaves and no scripts to hand out, let me just offer you some nuggets of what can be found written in two chapters of Luke’s Gospel, relative to the Passion Play.
I refer you to the plethora of writings on my website for the other readings set aside for today. As for Luke's chapter nineteen verses, look at what I wrote about Bethphage.
Did you know that word means "House of Unripe Figs"? I want you to ask yourself, "When was the last time I ever saw any tree that only produced unripe fruit?" All fruit is unripe before it ripens, falls, and becomes seed … naturally. Think about that; because no priest will ever tell you squat about Bethphage.
As for the Luke twenty-two and twenty-three verses, let those with ears hear: (There is no need to respond to any rhetorical questions.)
There are two Passover Seder meals each year. Did you know “the last supper” is a reference to the second Seder meal?
The breaking of the bread is a Seder ritual for the children … like a hide and seek game … where the father breaks the middle matzah (of three in a stack on a plate) and places the largest half in a bag, which is then hidden. The child that finds the hidden bread wins a prize. Can you see the breaking of the bread as symbolic of English translations (the smaller half), with the truth (the larger half) being hidden, symbolizing the need to seek the truth, in order to find it?
The Seder meal includes four ceremonial cups of wine. Each adult gets his or her own cup of wine. Every Jewish ceremonial meal has two cups of wine served. The Passover Seder has four, with two cups (the ones Luke wrote of) being cups of wine specific to remembrance to the Passover freedom. Did you known those four cups of wine are ceremoniously drank over hours, not seconds (as fast as it seems when those words of scripture can be read fast together)?
Did you realize that Jesus saying he would not drink from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes means when Jesus is reborn within his “kingdom,” in the soul of a saint? Can you see the metaphor of the blood of Christ filling the fruit, flowing through his vine?
Did you know that Jesus telling his disciples, who argued about who was the greatest … symbolic of organized religion … says religious leaders “lord over them” and “those in authority over them are called benefactors”? Did you know Jesus calling that system “Gentile” means he referred to Judaism as heathen? Can you see the same inference to any religion that serves more scriptural manna than can be kept from turning to maggots and stink is equally Gentile?
Did you know that when Jesus said Peter would deny him three times he did not call him Peter? He called him “Simon,” twice, a name that means “He Who Hears.” That was his human name, not his spiritual name; so, Jesus was pointing out how those who Hear themselves as all-important will just as quickly deny knowing Jesus as did Simon?
Did you realize that when Jesus reminded the disciples that they had been sent out without a purse or sandals (in internship ministry), he was referring to them shortly being sent out in full-time ministry without Judas (the purse) or Jesus (the sandals)?
Did you know that the reason Jesus found his disciples all asleep was due to the Passover Seder meal being designed to drink as much wine as you can, while trying to stay awake and alert as long as possible? Did you know that the Seder meals are when most Jewish children get drunk for the first time in their lives … sneaking wine from the drunken adults’ cups? Did you know the reason they are given that test against drunkenness is to see how allowing yourself to be caught up in the world (drunk on wine) makes it impossible to stay awake (metaphor for eternal life) and not fall asleep (metaphor for death), without God's help?
Did you know that the blindfold placed over Jesus was so his strikers did not have to see him looking at their souls, with his alert and piercing eyes? Did you know that Jesus’ prayer was to stay awake for the entire time he knew he would be tried, punished and executed? Did you know Yahweh sent him the angel that made Jesus stay awake and alert as he asked?
Did you know Pilate judged Jesus as having done nothing worthy of punishment … twice?
Did you know that Herod Antipas – whose judgment is only read in Luke – found no reason to find Jesus guilty of a crime worthy of punishment? Did you know that putting a purple robe on Jesus was Herod’s way of ordaining Jesus as the King of the Jerusalem Jews, making a king in Jerusalem be Pilate’s area of responsibility?
Did you know Pilate and Herod Antipas became “associates” (not friends) because both would be influenced by others to do their sinful bidding, so their own personal desire not to harm a holy man would be overturned to please the others? Did you know the “association” they shared would be having prophets murdered. Both Jesus and John the Baptist were divine souls at birth; so, did you know that is why Herod saw an "association" with Pilate, because Herod had heard Jesus was the resurrection of John?
Did you know the Temple Jews held a private meeting with Pilate (written of only in Luke) that had the Pharisees and scribes screaming at Pilate to “Crucify him,” or they would lead a revolt that promised to have Pilate disposed by the Emperor?
Did you know that private discussion was then reenacted … like a Passion Play … before Jewish pilgrims in public, with Pharisees seeded among them, prompting them to choose Barabbas, and also shout, “Crucify (Jesus)!”?
Did you know that Pilate ordered Jesus to be flogged, simply because he wanted to place him so close to death prior to crucifixion that he would soon die afterwards … just so the Jewish Temple leaders would not get much satisfaction from shouting insults as Jesus? Did you know Pilate did not want Jesus hanging in suffering for days, because that would make the chief priests and their cohorts happy?
Did you know that Simon the Cyrene was someone who had been touched by Jesus prior and was led by Yahweh to be in the right place, at the right time, to pay back Jesus, which he gladly did?
Did you know that when Jesus spoke to the women, he was so close to death that he could not physically carry on a conversation. Instead, he spiritually spoke to them; and, when he referred to the “Daughters of Jerusalem” that was telling all who married their souls to the religion of Judaism (not a divine marriage of souls to Yahweh) that religion specifically would become dead and buried?
Did you know the reason the place of crucifixion was called "Golgotha" – "the place of the Head, Skull" – was because those whose Big Brains thought they could break the law and get away with it would find those "Big Brains" coming to a most horrific end?
Did you know crucifixion is a way of suffocating a human being to death, which takes many days to accomplish? Did you know the difficulty wasting what breath one can take in means trying to hold a conversation be impossible? Did you realize the conversations held between the condemned were actually between their souls, which had already left their dying bodies, spiritually lingering until death, able to speak ‘soul-to-soul’? Did you know Luke wrote about it by being spiritually present to hear that conversation, well after the fact?
Did you know that when Jesus died, the other two who were crucified were still alive and left on their crosses?
Did you know Jesus was crucified and died on a Wednesday, at three o’clock in the afternoon; so, he hung dead on that cross – while the other two were still barely living – for two days, before his body was taken down on Friday?
Did you know three days dead would mean Jesus resurrected on a Sabbath – the Lord’s Day?
Did you know that Joseph was spiritually transformed when Jesus died, so his soul led Joseph (a name meaning “Increaser”) to act as he did?
Did you know “Arimathea” is not a place, but a divinely elevated statement of “Superiority,” which was a statement about the rulers who had power in a “city of Judea,” which was Jerusalem, where Joseph was a “council member” – one of the Sanhedrin?
Did you know Joseph did not agree with the cries to “Crucify him!” but had remained silent?
Did you know Joseph was taken “away from Superiority” when his soul married Yahweh and Yahweh became Joseph’s spiritual “husband,” whose Spirit made it possible for Joseph to be deemed “righteous”?
Did you know that the “fine linen” used by Joseph to “wrap” Jesus’ body is was of such “fine” fabric that when Jesus was risen, he took the time to fold that “fine linen” and leave it laying on a stone slab, so Joseph could take it back, while the outer wrapping was left on the floor of the tomb?
Did you know the use of “women” is necessary for all readers to identify with, as a soul alone in a body of flesh is of feminine essence (the flesh), which needs to marry Yahweh (the masculine Father)? Did you realize that to be a “woman” means to have accepted a role of subservience, so oneself becomes “Prepared” to marry Yahweh and receive His Son in resurrection?
If you knew any of this, then you were led by your own interests to understand the truth; and, that self-involvement let Yahweh know to drop your soul hints to where the truth lay.
You certainly were not taught that by an ‘all-you-can-eat” server of soon to be maggots and stink, coming from wasted Scripture.
The sad thing about Passion Sunday is there is more delight created in watching Jesus die again, just like he was killed the past year's Passion Sunday (different Gospel). The sad thing is always wanting to kill Jesus and never kill self to become Jesus reborn.
The sad part is those who claim to be Christian, either as priests or flocks, become the criminal who was hung to the left hand. That always reflects upon a soul in flesh that is headed to death (a mortal, without Salvation assured), which still takes time to insult Jesus.
It is an insult to Yahweh and to Jesus to waste Scripture by not seeing oneself in the story … everywhere other than as Jesus.
To be Jesus in the story, one needs to be like Joseph and the women away from Galilee … and the pilgrims who would return to their lands spiritually changed – men and women, including Simon the Cyrene – as wives of Yahweh, pregnant with His Son in their souls.
That is the only way to become “righteous,” and “righteous” is the only way to roll away the stone seal, of a promised death in the flesh, so one’s soul can rise to eternal life.
I imagine the bus will arrive soon; so, I will leave you now with your thoughts.
Next Sunday is Easter. I imagine many of you will be allowed a day off from Sunday work. I will be here, for whoever draws the short straw of servitude and will not be given the opportunity to go to a church service.
Until then. Please take care of your souls.
Amen
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