Palm Sunday musings

Blogpost – Palm Sunday, 2009.  (Mark 14: 32-15:39)

 

I’m sitting in my office, thinking about the Passion.  The piano tuner is only feet away, banging and clearing out the dissonance in the sanctuary, but here I sit on the leather couch of the sacristy/priest’s lounge cum missioner’s office, realizing that even though I scheduled eucharist instead of a sermon for this Sunday’s liturgy of the palms (note to self: pick up pre-ordered palms on Saturday morning), it feels strange – very, very strange – to come to a Friday and not be thinking about the readings for Sunday, musing on them, trying to tease out meaning from the confusion, and sometimes settling for the utterly obfuscated, ineffable mystery of God, as experienced by my spiritual ancestors.

 

So here I am, in a musing mood.  And because when I have any integrity at all, I’m a writer first, I opened my bible and my laptop.

 

Now, we’d opened the bible before, earlier this week, we the potluck crowd, and we himmed and hawed over the passion, each of us trying not to break out into one of our favorite musical songs on the subject.  (“He’s someone-Christ, king of the jews…”)  We ate pancakes and quiche and salsa beans and rice and we talked about whether or not it happened just like this, and what it must have been like to have all his followers exit stage left in a dead run after the garden.  We talked about dangling corpses on crosses and the weirdness of our society that was so utterly comfortable with the shocking violence of the cross (all of mini-Jesus’ ribs poking through, blood streaming from his head, hands, and feet), but heaven help us if we have a hint that he was a man, sexually speaking – no, no, we must put a loin cloth on him, as out of place on a crucifix, historically speaking, as a set of white iPod earphone cords.

 

Hm.  Perhaps I shall put up a dead Jesus on a cross in my office, remove the loin cloth and tuck an iPod shuffle in there instead, just to make a point.  Or maybe someone would like to draw me a picture?  Anyway, I digress.

 

The piano tuner is gone now, and I have my iPod (not Jesus’) playing one of my favorite playlists, and the song just at present sings out, with much angst: How did we get here?  I thought I knew you so well.  (Yes, I’m listening to Paramore.)

 

It’s an apt question.  I wonder if Jesus ever asked it, you know, more or less, and in the grungy, earthy Aramaic that he spoke.  We’ll never know, of course.  Perhaps he was perfectly enlightened, as we all suppose.  Perhaps he could see perfectly well how it is he got to where he was, and just as Ghandi, or Martin Luther King, Jr, or Oscar Romero would have found the question confusing and pointless (‘what do you mean, how did I get here – isn’t it obvious by now?’ they might ask), so might Jesus, and it’s only that we are so very far removed from the culture and time in which he lived that we can get away with our blazing ignorance.

 

For we are ignorant.

 

We’re not speaking the same language.  We’re not under the same government.  We’re not worshiping in the same religion.  We’re not dealing with the same day-to-day issues, around which so many stories and moral tales are crafted.  We’re not dealing with the same kind of economic structure.  We’re not – most of us – members of the same class, and in fact, our social classes are organized in an entirely different way.  …And what’s most important of all: we mostly don’t know this, and we mostly don’t care.

 

Instead, we read the bible and we do one of two things with it.  We either take it literally and because of the above, we run away from it, screaming in horror (understandable, given some of what is in there.  Abraham is a liar, Jacob a horrible cheat, Joseph an unrepentant braggart, Lot committed incest with his daughters, David was a murderer, an adulterer, and let his daughter get raped by her brother and did nothing about it, and whatserface drove a tent peg through that guy’s head.  Family values?  Give me a break!)

 

…Or, we use it as a bludgeon against ourselves and others.  Enough said on that subject.

 

That’s option one.  Option two, is that we don’t take the bible literally and are left to wade through the morass of questions and unresolved issues currently debated by reputable biblical scholars (protestant, catholic, and orthodox alike), if we can even understand them when they speak, given that they like to use an alienating language all their own, comprehensible only by other biblical scholars.

 

None of these options looks particularly appetizing.  It’s enough to make the serious spiritual seeker toddle off to the nearest Zen Buddhist temple to seek enlightenment the old fashioned way: clear your mind and wait. (Popular in so many religions, depending on the sect, century, and part of the world.  Popular in Christianity, too.  We have lots of technical and alienating terms for it, you may not be surprised to know.  I won’t list them here.)

 

So, I return to the question that I frequently return to, and will always return to, as it is part of my own spiritual journey.  Why am I bothering with Christianity?

 

I think Holy Week, as we will shortly be in the middle of it, is a great time for this question.  And if you find this question particularly threatening (did your shoulders clench when you read it?  Are you frowning?  Are you feeling defensive?  Do you want to give me a good talking to at this point?) it might be a good one for you, too.  But only you can decide.

 

Why am I bothering with Christianity?

 

Mostly, because I still find Jesus to be, for me, the most compelling example of God’s dream on earth.  As John Dominic Crossin put it so perfectly, ‘if God were wearing sandals, God would look like Jesus.’  That was how Crossin explained the Incarnation (ie – God as Homo sapiens sapiens.)  And it kinds of works for me. 

 

A slightly lesser point, though still valid and important to me in responding to this question, is the fact that there’s an incredible amount of wisdom in the collected works (Canonical and Non-canonical, and as a writer I’m all about exploring extra-canonical stuff) of Christianity, and the works of the spiritual antecedents of Christianity, the works and wisdom of the Hebrew faith.  And I’d hate to just throw away not only the baby with the bathwater, but also the tub, sink, toilet and linen closet.  What a waste that would be.

 

So here I stay, and here I stand, sleeves rolled up, elbow deep in a scripture I just barely understand sometimes, trying to make it intelligible for the people who suspend their disbelieve for about twelve minutes on a Sunday to hear me speak, people who may pray their hearts out when it comes to the Lord’s prayer, but who may have to cross their fingers to get through the Nicene Creed with integrity.  Which is okay, really, and in my own opinion, a good sign.

 

It’s a good sign, because we need things that comfort us, and we need things that challenge us.  We’re not required to sign on the dotted line, to believe in everything.  (Stay tuned for Sare’s rant on belief.)  What we never need to do is check our brains at the door.

 

So, get ready for Holy Week.  It’s all ‘Hosanna, Yay Jesus!’ at the beginning, but it always ends in tears, because didn’t you know?  Every funeral service is really an Easter service.  (This is true.)  And even though the tears of sadness become tears of joy, there’s a loss of innocence in there, somewhere right about Golgotha, a loss of innocence that invites us to look at Easter with eyes wide open.  It invites us to rethink the Resurrection, no longer some far away mystical magical miracle, God waving his magic wand and suddenly Jesus isn’t dead anymore. 

 

Instead of this far away mystical magical miracle, we have a revolution that won’t die when you kill the revolutionary.  We have an idea that is immortal.  We have a hope that is ever-lasting.  We have a dream that won’t evaporate when we wake of a world that isn’t a utopia only because it’s actually possible – why? –  because God says so.  Why? Because the kingdom of heaven is like random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.  Because the kingdom of heaven is like a yard with dandelions, and no matter how you desperately try to stamp them out, the minute you go in for a glass of iced tea, they’re back.  Because the kingdom of heaven is like a dirty, dusty, smelly teacher in the backwater of the world two thousand years ago who taught of peace in a time of war and who was, unsurprisingly, killed for it, but whose words, two thousand years later, ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ is still quoted.  Because the kingdom of heaven is like a world whose humanity is beginning to mature, generations upon generations who are beginning to understand that a policy of killing people to stop people from killing people doesn’t actually stop people from killing people, generations upon generations who are beginning to understand that nothing is more important than making sure that people can eat and raise their children in peace – not safety, mind, not a sense of security that means my fence is higher than yours, my guns better than yours, but actual peace where there isn’t threat of violence, so you can get to know your neighbor without a fence.

 

And this is not a utopia.  This is not a tree-hugger’s dream.  This is not liberal foreign or domestic policy.  This is looking at the resurrection as if it actually exists in the world, as if that mystical magical miracle moment at the end of each Gospel – journalistically true or not – has some bearing on our lives because it is a truth of the Universe that the first century Christians experienced and described after their own fashion.

 

So.  Welcome to Holy Week.  Muse on it.

-Sare