It’s funny. Growing up, I was taught not to say, “Man, that was lucky.” I learned that luck isn’t something that happened in a world where God calls the shots, having hung the stars and spun the planets into motion.

Luck assumes chance is lurking at the edge of the existential forest. But many people in my young life believed that God has a plan, that everything happens the way it happens because God wants it that way. That was why we were supposed to be comforted when something bad happened. It’s all in God’s plan.

It wasn’t bad luck that your uncle Eddie stepped in front of a bus. It was all a part of God’s grand design.

It wasn’t by chance that you woke up the day of your prom with a zit the size of a small Volkswagen on your nose. God was busy shaping the world according to some master blueprint to which you had no access—at least in a “big picture” kind of way—one where, apparently, you having a massive pimple on prom night is a part of the through line of the plot.

That boss at work? The one who studied leadership at the Hitler School for Business Executives? Yeah, that’s God too.

(Well, I mean, that’s not God—in the sense that your boss is free to act like an unreconstituted jerk. God’s hand is in it in putting you together with your mentor in suffering. Pairing you with a Ph.D. in pettiness, self-importance, and passive-aggressive management skills allows God to test you. Or it could be God working to make you more patient. Or it could be God looking to discipline you for cheating your way through high school calculus. Whatever it is, rest assured, God’s got a reason.)

I don’t think it was my parents. But I learned somewhere that luck isn’t something Christians believe in.

Christians don’t get lucky. They’re blessed.

Blessed. See, now that sounds way better, doesn’t it? So much more intentional. God’s got it under control.

Plus, being “blessed” sounds more positive. Whereas luck and chance can be good or bad—blessing sounds like you’ve hit the jackpot, right?

(Except, of course, Christians don’t hit literal “jackpots”; that would imply games of chance, which Christians don’t do. But don’t worry. Even ministers understand you getting a piece of the Powerball. I mean, let’s not get too ecclesiastically nit-picky.)

No. Blessing sounds good, doesn’t it? Nice family. New job. Voted most likely not to ruin Twitter by your Harvard MBA class. Blessed.

Has it ever occurred to you that blessing doesn’t seem to work in the opposite direction?

“Sorry to hear about your brother, Kevin. What, is this his third stretch at Eddyville for armed robbery?”

“Well, we consider ourselves blessed.”

Our weird relationship to blessing makes this Sunday—heck, all of Holy Week—so odd in the church's life. Think about what happens in our Gospel this morning.

Just before our text, Jesus, who’s got his ear to the political ground, has just predicted his death for the third time. Jesus has an exchange with the mother of James and John—who demonstrates a shocking inability to grasp what Jesus is all about by asking Jesus if her boys can be vice-president and Secretary of State in his new administration. Afterward, Jesus heals two blind men.

Now, the healing of the blind men is what we call in literature irony: Jesus heals two blind men amid a bunch of folks who demonstrate their continued blindness by failing to understand what he’s all about. This irony becomes more important as we move to the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

David Henson suggests that what we call the “triumphal entry” was political theater, or perhaps, better, “theater of the absurd.” According to Henson, in entering Jerusalem as a conquering general on the back of a colt, Jesus staged the first #Resistance demonstration.

“Wait, what? How do you figure that?”