This coming
Sunday is Palm Sunday. It is the week before Easter, the Sunday on which we
celebrate the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. As anxious onlookers, we await
the various fights we know are coming this week before the final showdown on
Golgotha. As a preacher, it is hard not to cover the same ground over and over
when the text offers such an obvious reading: Jesus rides into town on a
donkey, not a horse; he does not gallop in on a steed, he is not brandishing a
sword and there is not a swarthy army of willing fighters chomping at the bit
waiting to tear into the religious leaders and Roman oppressors. If you do your
homework on passages like this you realise that Jesus wasn’t even the first to
ride into Jerusalem in a revolutionary fashion. This comes as a sad surprise
for people who would like to paint Jesus as a one-of-a-kind maverick. There
were others who came into Jerusalem as an act of rebellion? Yes, and more than
one. There were other rabbis? Yip. Plenty. Thick on the ground they were. Surely
Jesus was the only one claiming divinity? Uh-uh.
When you
know a story as well as a seasoned Christian does, it becomes harder and harder
to enter the surprise of it all. Especially, perhaps with Easter. He dies on
Friday, but don’t worry, by Sunday he’ll be back. You can’t begin to consider
the agonising position of not knowing that accompanied those first disciples,
stuck in that Upper Room, or before that, Mary at the tomb. When Peter rushes
in, pushing John out the way, we can dawdle a little – we know what he is going
to find, or not find. No. We know the story, we run our fingers along the grain
of it like seasoned carpenters for whom no piece of wood holds any real surprise.
We are at home with the warp and woof of things. No surprises here; It’s a
donkey! We know. He has no army! Yip, I’m aware of that.
Has this
anything to teach us?
This week
we’ve had our own share of symbolic acts around South Africa. Which, like Jesus
coming into Jerusalem, should be no real surprise – we are not as a nation,
short of symbolic acts. Rhodes’ statue has become a source of dispute;
#RhodesMustFall has been trending on Twitter (which is the gold standard in
deducing the importance of things). Presented before us on TV was a shirtless
student in overalls throwing faeces around the statue and blowing on a whistle.
All sorts of thoughts and feelings and questions rose up in me: Haven’t we got
other issues we should be engaging with? Shouldn’t we be focusing on Zuma and
Nkandla? What about poverty and government graft? Education anybody? Is a
statue really worth this kind of firebrand rhetoric? Couldn’t we just flush
excrement down the toilet rather, and find other ways of protesting? Is it just
me or are public-forum, faeces-based acts of disobedience on the rise? And
questions like this.
Part of my
frustration is born of Apartheid Fatigue. Our whole lives have revolved around
this word, this concept and, in this country, there is no escaping it. I wanted
to complete a Masters degree on the writings of Marilynne Robinson (who happens
to be an American). As it turns out my thesis is now rooted in African texts
and postcolonialism. I’ve been shoe-horned into place. If we tap you this side and a little on that
side, we really can wedge you into this round hole. Maybe this is why I
think the way I do.
Or maybe it
reminds me of my own days at Wits in the early 90s where rioting was the order
of the day. While friends were attending O-Week on other campuses, finding
creative ways to funnel booze out of a cap, our rude introduction to tertiary included
diving into lecture rooms to avoid hearty bands of rioters, using the
overly-thick Introduction to South
African Short Stories as cover from shrapnel in the form of half-empty coke
cans and last week’s cafeteria muffins; Oh yes and there was trash, loads and
loads of trash.
Or maybe at
the root of all of this is defensiveness. We are after all a divided country.
There are events and issues that set us off: we don our colours, head to our
corners, slap each other across the face like wrestlers about to go yet another
round; we justify our positions, yell at each other in our own echo chambers,
and nail shutters to the windows before the next howling storm of racial and
cultural discontent.
But then
Jesus comes into Jerusalem on a donkey.
I don’t know
where wisdom comes from. Age can help to acquire it, of that I’m certain. I know
lots of wise, old people (I’m in a Methodist Church after all). But that is
also not necessarily true for there are enough exceptions to the rule - enough
people who have all the years but no wisdom, as if they spent a lifetime doing
a raft of things, but learning wasn’t one of them. Reflecting on experience is
probably another: I love that saying, you don’t learn from experience but from reflecting on experience. Yes. But this
again assumes age. I think young people can have wisdom too. I think a form of
wisdom arrives when we decide to lay down our arms, when we decide to stop
listening to only our own voices and we begin to listen to the voice of the
Other, when we lower our tone and actively decide not to be offended. You can
spot followers of the Palm Sunday Jesus a mile away: they tend not to get
hysterical about very much for they are very rarely caught listening to only
their own voice, which as we know is where most fear is born.
Who knows
what will happen to Rhodes. What I do know is that I can’t just defend him
because we seem to blame everything on the colony, and the colonialists are
after all my forebears and so deserve some reprieve from this constant
critiquing. I can’t defend him because of my own apartheid hangover. That is
not good enough. I need to listen. If I listen long enough I might realise that
the liberal voice that speaks the right words but is sluggish in action sounds
a little like my own liberal voice.
Back to Palm
Sunday.
When you
read this story in light of just this week’s storylines, it is a little
surprising. Worse than that, it’s offensive to the positions we would like to
hold and the sensitivities we nurture so carefully. I wonder if Jesus didn’t
ride into Jerusalem in this fashion because the enemy isn’t Rome. Like all
empires, their little reign came to an end. No, he rode in without a
historically relevant hit-list because he knew as we now know, in our most
honest moments, that we really don’t have to look too far to find our enemy.
As Walt
Kelly remarked through his cartoon character Pogo in a startling two-frame
cartoon strip: We have met the enemy and
he is us.
The greatest
thing Jesus ever did for us was give us a New Identity. When he did this he
graciously freed us to let go of all that stuff that weighs us down. You’re a
child of God and as such you are free not to defend yourself so much. You are
free not to get offended, and that, you know, is a tremendous gift. You can
live into a New Reality. If you are like me, you are able to consider your own
position of privilege and the discomfort that causes you – you become
courageous not simply about the world, but about yourself.
You see God
loves you and that is enough. He loves you so much that you are able to look at
what once offended and you can decide to no longer get offended. You can meet
it all with a surprising Grace, and you can apply yourself to being part of the
solution, and you can learn along the way. I’m holding out that Jesus loves me
enough that, when my Masters is done, he might even let me study the achingly
beautiful writings of Marilynne Robinson, or anything other than postcolonial
theory.
