Let me allow you into a disproportionately important aspect of my recent shock at changing cultures. Cycling to and from Biola, I hit several traffic lights at times when there are few cars about. Cars trigger the lights -– my bike and I did not. So for months I would dismount, get onto the sidewalk to press the crosswalk button to get the lights to change. Humiliation.

Until, that is, I discovered the secret trigger. The large dark circles on the pavement at the stop lines are magnetic sensors: they can’t detect an upright bicycle, but if you lay down your bike perpendicular to the road surface you trigger the sensor. No more humiliation of abandoning my rightful place with the cars to tread the sidewalk with mere pedestrians.

Through this pathetically small, victorious discovery I have begun to overcome culture shock in the country I now call home. Do you, like me, dread humiliation and dread being the foreigner?

But before I start getting too comfortable, I must remember that God actually came to his own created world but was treated like an unwanted foreigner. Holy Week narrates very foreign events. We can’t quite get our heads round the incongruous acclaim of the hasty assembled grassroots activists welcoming a donkey-traveling Jesus into Jerusalem. The Psalms proclaiming triumph on Palm Sunday aren’t our native tunes. They don’t tend to grace our iPods. Neither is Jerusalem immediately our city of hope. (Witness recent diplomatic failures) Anyway L.A. more than caters for our hopes. After all, if you have the happiest place on earth to hand, why look to the way of suffering?

But we must venture into Holy Week with the humiliating posture of those experiencing culture-shock. The foreign tastes and smells of our gospel must not be too hastily consumed as if these were familiar fast foods bringing an end to the season of Lent. Rather, we must be brought into the foreign land of God’s doings that defy our comfortable abstraction and application.

We must see the humiliation of Jesus. Enmity and betrayal overtake him. The fickle public turns their mass applause to mockery. We must contemplate Jesus’ suffering culminating in death on a cross outside the city gate. And even as we contemplate this strange foreign whirl of activity, the Spirit and our confession draw us to the humiliating realization that it is God’s loving resolve in the person of his Son that we see. He would save us. This is for us; all of it in its messy and humiliating particularity, for us. This is the true pathos of his passion.

Cycling and successfully triggering the lights in my new homeland is my truly bathetic way of securing my identity in the face of the swirling disorientation of a big move. But it’s not successful cycling that is required but humble, pedestrian obedience. And we cannot obey unless we observe. Indeed observance is another way of saying obedience.

This Holy Week, observe the obedient humiliation of Jesus. Learn the incongruous but glorious truth that because he walked to the cross in the once and for all culturally jarring events of that time and place, we may now walk by the Spirit of his resurrection.

So lay down your bike, not as a mark of cultural assimilation, but as a far more counter-cultural step toward walking humbly in Christ!