Monday, March 23, 2015

On poop and Palm Sunday





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.

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