Thought for the Week: The Judaean Spring

Martyn Kelly considers the tale of hope that emerges from Easter in the 'Thought for the Week'

On Palm Sunday traditional Christians process around their churches, politely flourishing palm crosses. They are celebrating the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, riding a donkey along crowd-lined streets. The whole Easter story is a neatly-packaged summary of a series of fast-moving situations laced with gnomic statements that mostly make sense only with hindsight.

What happens if we try to see events through the eyes of the original protagonists? What replaces our traditional images? Let’s start with the idea that a significant and noisy minority in the crowd would have quite liked the idea of violent revolution. The reputation of Jesus as a radical preacher did not rule him out as a possible leader. I was meditating on this in 2012 when images of the Arab Spring were still fresh in my mind. Indeed, the ramifications were still unfolding, particularly in Libya and Egypt (Syria was yet to implode). It was not difficult to make the links between the euphoria in Benghazi and Tahrir Square and a day in Jerusalem two millennia earlier. This would have been no place for the faint hearted, nor was it a family-friendly occasion. Adrenalin would have been coursing through the bodies of the participants; hearts were pumping; everyone was alert to the possibility that soldiers would have been sent to quell the riot.

Jesus’ own reaction is seen in Luke 19:41: ‘as he approached Jerusalem… he wept over it…’ predicting its destruction and the wholesale slaughter of its inhabitants. It is useful to remember that the actual destruction of Jerusalem by a Roman army led by Titus occurred in AD70, within the period that the Gospels were being assembled and edited. Some of his statements would have seemed more prescient in retrospect, and none more so than this, which, itself, drew on events seventy years earlier when Pompey invaded Judea. Maybe, just maybe, this verse is a comment on the unrealistic expectations of the crowd he had just ridden through?

When Jesus used the phrase ‘a reed shaken by the wind’ in reference to John the Baptist (Matthew 11:7), he was invoking a metaphor used by Confucius 500 years earlier and 6,000 kilometres to the east. Confucius said: ‘The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.’ Confucius conceived an ideal ruler as a benign wind blowing over his people, so we can see, in these phrases, a comment on the futility of revolt in an age of empire. The Romans did not fit Confucius’ prescription for the ideal ruler; nonetheless, Confucius and Jesus both captured an age-old tension between principle and pragmatism.

The true miracle of Easter may be that a tale of hope emerges from the duplicity and barbarism. This hope, however, did not arise overnight. Taking Confucius’ aphorism a little further, it only takes a single storm for an old oak tree to crash to the ground (the fate of Jerusalem in AD70) but the seeds of the ‘grass’ that was to become Christianity had been sown. The New Testament shows the young religion ‘bending to the wind’ as it spread through the Mediterranean. We are the outcome of that adaptability even if ‘bending to the wind’ sits uncomfortably within a tradition that values ‘speaking truth to power’. That principle, itself, only works within the context of the serenity prayer: ‘Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to know the difference.’

Martyn Kelly is the author of The Theology of Small Things published by Langley Press Direct.

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