It’s hard to use the word love, even if you’re Jesus, at supper with your friends, the night before you’re going to die. There are so many ways to get love wrong.
Inexperience was the exact quality Jesus was seeking to do something that had never before been done, to create a very different kind of kingdom. A kingdom not of might or domination, but a kingdom of the heart. The colt that had never been ridden could offer that gift of inexperience and naivete, the ability to carry Jesus into the city to help him and us see it through new eyes.
As creation constantly gives itself away, as one life within it is laid down for the next, as rot becomes nourishment for fallen seeds, where they die to become something new, we see that the cross and resurrection were not strange exceptions to the way things are. You and I are, when we cling fearfully to our separate lives at all costs, even imagining life in Christ exempts or insulates us from loss and hurt and even death. It does not. But it does place our lives and our deaths in a larger story of love.
Maybe it would do us some good to take a hard look and unflinching listen to the words we wince to hear. We might stop making Scripture into our own image, for one thing, or buying into the image that others have imposed upon it. And that kind of deep engagement can lead us to hear it with new ears: “For God so loved the world,” this world, our world, the one right around you. You could see with new eyes the way the old age is passing away, you could see where creation groans and calls your name, beckoning you into the light.
In the end, if there is a clear and unambiguous roadmap for a just and godly life, it is not the scriptures of Christians and Jews. Because our scriptures refuse to let even our scriptures become an idol by modeling a beautiful inconsistency. One that won’t even let a Law written by the finger of God have the last word. One that provides space for a single Moabite widow to walk into it and say, “What about me?”