My undergraduate degree was a double major, one half of it being in English, with a concentration in Medieval to Renaissance British Literature. This meant, among other things, a whole bunch of Shakespeare. Even so, I slipped in several courses in other areas, including Black and Post-Colonial Literature, James Joyce, and Poetry, American and Contemporary. It was in one of my poetry courses that I first heard a professor declare that a poem was only good if it had meaning independent of the poet, that is, one should be able to confront the poem on its own and get meaning without knowing anything about the poet and his or her context. The image that comes to mind is poem as feral beast, run amuck, with leaves and twigs in its hair.
Certainly great literature has an ability to transcend time and place. While our lives are nothing like that of King David, we can see in him a mirror of humanity, if not our own, a humanity we have experienced in others. The same is true for a King Lear. But as a completely unorthodox Shakespearean, one who has been challenged to direct some of those four century old texts for the stage, I’d also say that they do not all stand the test of time, and that the idolatrous worship of some supposed version of Shakespeare’s texts is disastrous. Anyone who has studied how the texts were assembled, for we have no script from Shakespeare himself, knows that there is much uncertainty in what we have.
The antisemitism of The Merchant of Venice cannot be excused away, nor can the misogyny at the heart of The Taming of the Shrew. If the audience cannot understand half a soliloquy, packed as it might be with words no longer familiar to English speakers, then it fails to entertain, to move. The shrewd director, and here is where I am a heretic to some, will make those minor alterations and revisions necessary to make the play work for the audience, for if the audience is not moved, then the play is not the thing at all.
One does not need to know that the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke grew up on a Michigan nursery, the business of a family that had once served as gardeners to the Kaiser. A poem like “Child on Top of a Greenhouse” works perfectly well as a feral poem, but it doesn’t hurt to know that this isn’t some any child in some any place, but is in fact young Ted, and the place is Michigan, a climate not unlike our own. We can almost see that greenhouse, that child, that partly cloudy sky and sun fall bright and beamed. The volume in which the poem originally appeared contained an entire section about this childhood, powerful and sensual, enough that you can almost smell the root cellar and that hard working poppa, soap, sweat, and soil.
If poetry and plays from the last half millennia benefit from context, so too does ancient scripture, especially our scripture, the newest portion nearing two millennia old, the oldest a good thousand years older still.
So it is that we come to the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Reading back through the lens of resurrection belief, we see in it one scene in the penultimate act of a divine play, the characters puppets swept up in a divine agenda. We layer on later theologies, so that this is Christ the King, eternal messiah of the House of David. And in doing so, we miss something big.
The Hebrew people had been mostly under foreign control, either as client state or as subjugated people, for most of the prior five centuries. A rebellion a century and a half before Jesus had offered a moment of freedom, but then corruption and nepotism crept in, and all was lost. Even so, ancient histories and ancient scripture inform us, telling us that the Hebrews were notoriously difficult to govern, especially when it came to their Temple and to the hard fought sole worship of Yahweh.
Worst still, for anyone that would dare try to govern this people known as “stiff-necked,” the Hebrew founding myth was that of escape from a foreign power. Every Passover was oil on the fire of long-harbored resentment, every Passover a promise that if the people found the right leader and rose up, they could throw off even the mightiest of rulers.
Pontius Pilate, not the vacillating wimp portrayed in the gospels, but in reality a man known for his cruelty and his disdain of the locals, did not stay in Jerusalem year round. It just wasn’t a great place to be. But he rode in at the head of a Roman legion before Passover. The image that comes to mind is the lone man standing in front of a line of Communist tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and any attempt to rebel against Roman rule was likely to be just as futile and bloody. Indeed, four decades after the death of Jesus, it would be.
Knowing this, we can see the entry into Jerusalem for what it is, not some feeble pre-coronation ceremony for an eternal king, but instead a protest against the hateful and violent power of Rome. But instead of a protest that would lead to more violence, a violent revolution followed by an earthly kingdom for the Jews under a benevolent warrior from the House of David, this protest was a form of civil disobedience, would lead to the ultimate image of non-violence resistance, hanging on a cross. This protest was one in a string of events that would show the power of love over hate, the power of love over violence, the power of love over even death itself.
There are those who, like that professor I had many years ago, think any randomly chosen line from the immense and ancient text we call the Bible must have meaning out of context. But Jesus does not have meaning out of context. His context is that of Jewish reformer, of prophet and activist, of such power that his mere touch could make the unclean, sinful, and diseased feel whole again. His context is Passover, and David, Isaiah and Jeremiah railing against corrupt politicians, Amos and Micah railing against corrupt religious leaders. He quotes scripture, reads it in the synagogue. The context of Jesus is not that of polite society and good manors and the selfish cult of Ayn Rand disguised as patriotism. His context was passion, a people’s campaign for the poor and the oppressed. These, he claimed, were the people God really loved.
Many might see Palm Sunday as a dress rehearsal for Easter, in other years a chance to engage the kids in worship in a more energetic way than usual, not dragging in, but bounding about the sanctuary with palms. It is spring, after all, and again, in other years, we are in a season when things turn light and life feels new, as new as the plants so fertile in Ted Roethke’s poetry, erupting from the soil in our gardens. But Jesus and his followers are engaged in protest and disobedience, for Jesus sees beyond the now, beyond the Roman governor and his Legions. Like a child on top of a greenhouse, he sees beyond, and everyone points and shouts, today in praise, in a few days, “crucify him.”
But there will be more pointing up, at ascension, another cacophony at Pentecost.
Palm Sunday is not some abstract theology of some wimpy holy kingdom. Oh, there is a holy kingdom involved, but it is filled with fiery love, so powerful that it is stronger than fear, stronger than death. And isn’t that exactly what we need right now?
Amen.