Today’s Gospel reading comes from the Gospel of Mark, 11:1-10. And when Jesus and His disciples drew near to Jerusalem to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, "Go into the village opposite you, and immediately as you enter, you will find a colt tied on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, 'Why are you doing this?' say, 'The Lord has need of it and will send it back here immediately.'" And they went away and found a colt tied at the door, out in the open street, and they untied it. And those who stood there said to them, "What are you doing untying the colt?" And they told them what Jesus had said, and they let them go. And they brought the colt to Jesus, and threw their garments on it, and he sat upon it, and many spread their garments on the road and others spread palm branches, which they cut from the trees in the fields. And those who went before and those who followed cried out, "Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the kingdom of our Father David that is coming. Hosanna in the highest."

So what's the word or the phrase, the idea that jumps out at you? There's a couple I'll talk to you about today. The first one is that these people who are cheering Jesus on, these people who are laying down their garments and their palm branches, these are the same people who are standing along the way of the cross on Friday when Jesus is carrying His cross when Jesus is suffering. And the reality is, is that we need to learn to see ourselves in those people. We need to learn to see ourselves and our ability to be very courageous in living out our faith and also very cowardly in not living out our faith. There are times when we are bold, when we do step forward, and there are times when we sort of shrink away and to be mindful of that, to have awareness of that, not to look at these people and say, "Well, these people are horrible. They're cheering him on on Palm Sunday, and come Good Friday, they're standing on the roads and letting him be crucified." That's the first thing, but the thing I really want to hone in on today is the second last line, where it says the people surrounding Jesus cried out, "Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."

I think that we want to be blessed, right? We want our lives to be filled with blessings. We want God to bless us. We want His grace and blessings to flow abundantly on us and on the people around us and all the people we love and care about, and really, there's a formula here that I think it's easy to overlook, and what does it say? It says, "Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Now, if you reverse that, what do you discover? You discover that he who comes in the name of the Lord is blessed, okay? It's a cause-and-effect relationship between those two things. And so the question is, are we coming in the name of the Lord? When we show up into a room, when we show up into an organization, when we show up into a project, when we show up into a relationship, are we coming in the name of the Lord? Because blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, and if we come in the name of the Lord, we will be blessed. It is a cause-and-effect relationship. It's like a little-- it's like a little equation. It's beautiful, really, when you delve into it, and you start to think about it because I think we can all look at times in our lives when we realize, "Okay, I came in the name of the Lord, and there were great blessings surrounding that." And I think we can all look at our lives and say, "There were times when I came in the name of myself, and maybe things didn't go so well because blessed is he or she who comes in the name of the Lord." And so, as we go into our day-to-day, let's ask ourselves, "Am I coming in the name of the Lord, or am I coming in my own name?" Have a great day. Have an amazing day. Remember, don't just be yourself. Be the very best version of yourself, all that God created you to be.