The crowd once shouted Hosanna and spread their cloaks on the road, expecting a Messiah who would conquer Rome. What they received instead was a Saviour who rode a donkey and spoke of seeds dying in the ground. The cross was coming — not as a defeat, but as the supreme act of the dying-to-self that Jesus had been modeling from the beginning of His ministry. "If I be lifted up" — that lifting was on the cross, arms stretched wide, all of heaven's love poured out through the most broken, most surrendered human body that ever existed. And from that place of ultimate self-emptying, something extraordinary happens: He draws all men to Himself. Not from a throne of power, not from a platform of influence, but from a cross. The place of greatest sacrifice became the place of greatest drawing power.

This is the mystery at the heart of everything we have been reflecting on this week. When self is crucified and Christ is lifted, people are drawn. Not to us — to Him. The surrendered life, the life that has stopped defending itself and promoting itself and protecting itself, becomes strangely magnetic with the love of Jesus. This is why the stories of a Henry Martyn or a Takashi Nagai or a Francis Chan do not smell of defeat — they smell of something glorious. Because when the self gets out of the way, the fragrance of Christ fills the room. The One who calls us to die to self walked the road to the cross knowing exactly what awaited Him — and He went anyway. He went for us. He went as our example. And He invites us, even now, to come and die with Him — so that we might also live with Him.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, we stand before the cross and confess that we have not always been willing to be lifted up as You were — in sacrifice, in surrender, in love poured out for others. Lift us from our self-centeredness. May our lives draw others not to ourselves but to You. Amen.