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 — not as a warning, but the way a good conversation does. You have to actually be present for it.
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.
That’s what these Sundays are doing.
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 is sitting there when she arrives — a Jewish teacher at a Samaritan well, crossing lines polite society had spent generations drawing. He 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.” No theological system. No hedging. Just testimony. It turns out certainty can make you blind.
March 22, Bethany. Lazarus is four days dead. When Jesus arrives, Martha says, “Lord, if you had been here.” Then Mary says the exact same thing — not quite accusation, not quite prayer, but that in-between place where most of us live longer than we admit. Jesus doesn’t correct the theology. He weeps. Then he calls Lazarus out and tells the bystanders to unbind him.
Resurrection here 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 and does not yet understand what it means.
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. Rebecca Nance has created something worth noticing in the Welcome Center — devotional materials, church information, visitor bags, Sunday bulletins — arranged to say to anyone who walks in: we expected you. Pay attention this month to the spoken and unspoken ways we say, “Welcome to Yates.”
Here’s something else worth knowing: last fall an Experiencing God small group saw God at work here and decided to join what He was already doing. Out of that has grown a fellowship for young adult singles and college students, co-led by John and Beverly Garcia, Robin Hancock, and Jay Libutan — first Sundays for lunch and Bible study in the fellowship hall after worship and mid-month for a missions project or informal gathering. They begin March 1.
Of course, the church keeps being the church all month long. I mean that as a compliment. Here are a few more opportunities:
March 3, our youth open the gym and take on a service project. Teenagers learning that faith has a work ethic may not make the bulletin sound impressive, but it’s an essential ingredient for discipleship.
March 21, we clean the American Tobacco Trail — outside together, picking up what’s been left behind, caring for something that belongs to everyone.
March 28, our children celebrate at the Easter EGGstravaganza. Let them run. The earliest Christians understood that children at Easter were not a distraction from the mystery. They were one of its best arguments.
When we walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem, we don’t get to choose a different destination. The collision we’ve been building toward 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.