Matthew was a scribe...and it shows. (Matthew 21:1-11; 27:11-54)

Let’s be honest: Life is complex. Inside us, there are conflicting desires and demands. There are few easy answers, even fewer perfectly clear choices. If you were an ethicist, you would ask when is individual conscience set aside for the good of society? Or how do we portion out public health care? Or when is comfort for one’s family sacrificed for the wellbeing of neighbor? But if you are not an ethicist, and you find yourself to be a struggling human being, you ask yourself, what do I do when my child breaks my heart? Or what do I do when I am scared to death that I will break someone else’s heart?

In a world that way too often is framed these days in absolutes, in terms of black or white, yes or no, with us or against us, we honest-with-ourselves human beings usually stumble along, not knowing quite what the answers should be. How to navigate life, which path to choose, is never quite so simple as the simplistic answers often offered by religious, secular humanist, or political authorities. If you do not believe me on that last one, look no further than at the other end of Capitol Avenue and compare what is happening there with what happens in real life.

Usually, instead of holding on to absolutes, we take what we have and deal with it in its complexity, even if the answers are not satisfying. We compromise. If you want an example, look no further than poor old Matthew, the writer of today’s gospel readings. He was doing his best to share the good news of resurrection brought about by the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and he had to do so in the context of the audience to whom he was writing. We think it was a religious audience, knowledgeable of Jewish history and scripture—an audience careful to get it right, as religious audiences are so often—and he was trying to breathe new life into old religious texts. He saw Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as a way to interpret the prophet Zechariah from five hundred years earlier, when Zechariah talked about a king who would enter the city bringing peace.

But Matthew ran into a problem. He was conflicted. From his reading of the ancient texts, he could not determine whether Zechariah’s king coming into Jerusalem was riding a donkey or its offspring. Matthew so wanted to get it right, but he could not find an easy answer. Sound familiar in our own lives? So, Matthew did something, probably not unlike what most of us would do: He put Jesus on both a donkey and its offspring. Not a very pretty solution. Go back and read the lesson carefully and compare it with the other gospellers’ accounts. Yes, according to Matthew, Jesus sat on the back of two animals as he entered Jerusalem. No absolutes, no black or white. Its comparison to the other gospels not very convenient for anyone who propounds the theory of a seamless consistency in sacred scripture. But in the end, it was very much like what most of us ordinary human beings who must live with the gray would do. Sometimes the answer is, “I’m not certain.”

I thank God for the honesty in Matthew’s predicament. He was honest enough to say that he did not have a clear answer, and that he was willing to live with the messiness that complicated situations present, in anticipation—in hope—that something good and ultimately lifegiving would emerge. The reality he had to deal with ultimately became a witness to resurrection. Perhaps we can say that out of uncertainty can come new life.

Today we attempt to breathe new life into ancient religious texts. We do so because we ride through life simultaneously held up by many different supports, some of them ultimately incompatible. Some of them not offering a very pretty solution. You can make your own list; I know that I have mine, and that list causes me to stay awake at night. We never really answer a simple “yes” or “no” questions. I suppose that in the end we act like Jesus in front of Pilate, a Jesus who keeps saying, “you say so” when questioned on where he stands. And then when things get darkest, we ask why we have been forsaken by God, because, I think, we presume that God forsakes the unsure.

If you want to hear some small bit of good news on this day in which we plunge into the dark news of Holy Week, a week that did not the peace that I bet a lot of the followers of Jesus imagined when they welcomed him as Zechariah’s king, then the following is that good news: Never think that our inability to see clearly, or our lack of clear answers, or those feelings deep inside us of forsakenness are signs that we are not worthy. No, they are signs that we are living the same lives as Jesus and Matthew and the hundred generations of humans from then until the present. There is something holy in our struggle.

Life is complicated. Decisions are rarely clear cut. But if we learn anything today from what Matthew did, it is that stories of confusion and doubt and not knowing which option to take end up being our sacred stories. That is the new life that is breathed today into an ancient sacred text.

I cannot promise you clarity. I rarely see it in my own life. It can be discouraging. But you and I can wait for something new to happen; we can move beyond an entry into Jerusalem. We can anticipate what might be beyond darkness. We can look into the very tombs of our broken and confused lives for signs of new life. Holy Week asks of us exactly that. Amen.