In John's telling of the resurrection, every detail is a symbol. The tomb is fit for royalty. The setting is a garden — an echo of the very first place God walked with his people. And when Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener, she's wrong — but she's also right.

Pastor Steven walks us through the rich imagery John layers into this moment, all building toward one repeated question: Why are you weeping? It's the question the angels ask Mary, and then Jesus asks her, too. But unlike when we ask it — searching for information, trying to help — Jesus asks it as someone who has already changed the answer. He's standing in the overlap between our broken present and God's good future, and he's pulling that future into now.

It's an invitation to see something that changes the meaning of our tears.

Palm Sunday is one of the most confusing celebrations in the church calendar — and if you're not yet confused, Steven suggests you don't actually understand it yet. Between the triumphal entry and the cross lies a week of riddles, symbolic actions, and a weeping king heading toward suffering. Drawing on the historical echo of Judah Maccabee's military triumph 150 years earlier, Steven shows how Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey to announce something nobody expected: a kingdom flipped upside down, and a king who lays down his life for broken, messy people.

Art by Jozef Sedmak

Anger might be the most complicated monster of all — because unlike the others, it isn't always wrong. It's wired into us as a response to threat and injustice, and it can move in either direction: toward bitterness and rage, or toward something that looks a lot like peacemaking.

This week, as the series closes and Palm Sunday approaches, a question from the book of Jonah becomes the lens: Is it good for you to be angry? It's an invitation to slow down, get honest, and ask where our anger is actually headed — and whether we're willing to let it be aimed somewhere better.

Because at the cross, Jesus takes the hostility and brokenness of the world and channels it into the ultimate act of peace. That, pastor Steven suggests, is the pattern we're invited into.