Liturgies

I got a new understanding of the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem by becoming friends with a donkey.

As many of you will have experienced, Peter has a rainforest block with cabins in Numinbah Valley. Peter became spiritual director for my late wife and me while she was dying of cancer over 30 years ago, and in the process we became good friends. Not long after we met him he bought Sallywattle and I’ve been privileged to watch its development and go there for short retreats ever since. But on my last visit there some months ago, I found he’d gathered together some farm animals: 3 sheep, a Shetland pony and a donkey; and I found each of them has different characters. When I went over to them with some cut-up carrot, the sheep, especially the ram, nearly knocked me over in their rush, the horse was a bit more polite but still very eager, and the donkey just waited its turn.

But before that the horse and donkey visited at my cabin. They were quite friendly but after a while the horse drifted off and the donkey just stood there without moving so much as an eyelid. So, being set such an example, I pulled up a chair and meditated next to him. We shared a lovely session and he returned the next day and we did it again, in total comfort with each other.

No doubt, all the animals benefit from their full-time living at Peter’s retreat, but the donkey’s behaviour is quite remarkable and it just makes you want to be with him.

So I can understand why Jesus would want to be with a donkey as he knowingly and willingly began his final week.

Of course we can discern other reasons for having a donkey with such a leading role in the story. The main one is that donkeys don’t rate in the noble image stakes. Can you imagine John Wayne riding a donkey in one of his movies? And certainly the Roman legions who were apparently making a triumphal parade through Jerusalem earlier the same day wouldn’t have had a donkey in sight. Not among all the smartly harnessed horses and banners, weapons and chariots that made up the legionnaires’ accoutrements for their parade.

• The Roman parade proceeding on horseback was about demonstrating the power of the empire of Rome.
• Jesus’ procession on a donkey was a complete contrast and was demonstrating the humility needed to enter the empire of God.

I can see now that riding on a donkey would have been perfect for that, and comforting for the participants too.

So Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was in no way triumphal, but was in one way a parody of the earlier triumphal Roman procession.

People devise many ways to try to come to grips with the sacred mystery within which we are embedded. Some of them become doctrines or even dogmas. None of them are reality or ‘the truth,’ but as models they all in various imperfect ways point to at least some aspects of truth.

The story of Jesus’ last week is most commonly portrayed in terms of the old sacrifice model. Two thousand years ago this was pretty standard religious practice: animals were killed on the altar to placate the gods and bring salvation to the participants. This practice is not part of modern life and I personally find the sacrifice model completely unhelpful because of what else it requires to make it work. In suggesting that Jesus had to die as a sacrifice to obviate our sins and save us from eternal damnation, it requires a God who not only is completely separate from us but who somehow needs placating. It also removes us from any part in the creative process: we’re just creatures that are born with a burden of sin and it’s only Jesus’ death that can save us from its effects. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow for the fact that suffering in the face of adversity is an option avoidable by spiritually aware people. I’ll say more about that later.

The model I prefer is one which is well backed in scripture whereby God is, is all there is, I AM. If that’s the case, we are not separate creatures but inherently Divine and one with the One. We can’t be anything else because God is all there is.

In order to live this physical life, we probably need to develop a sense of individuality and that is expressed in our ego. This loves to try to force on us the idea that we are separate and need to put ourselves first. But the Holy Spirit is, and always has been, within us waiting to be heard above the noise we’ve allowed our egos to make as we’ve allowed them to be our master rather than our servant. This divine spirit within shows us that we are not really separate at all but at one with the One and with complete access to all that is divine. We can go through life being completely asleep to that reality, or we can choose to wake up to who we really are.

Hence we are inherently no less Son of God than Jesus was. To say otherwise is to sell him and us short. Because that presumes there’s no way we could rise to his level spiritually given he had the advantage of a superior relationship with God. So it would be easy for him and impossible for us: we’d be let off the hook. I think we are all capable of doing what Jesus did, and that was to become completely Awake and so live completely within the Divine Will: it is available within each of us to the extent we’re prepared to listen and respond to the Holy Spirit within. He became fully Awake and so to a state of being the Christ, of being the expression of God who also seeks to express as being you and me.

Jesus had become completely Awake and thus completely single minded and unconflicted: he knew absolutely that God is Love, there is nothing to fear, and we are made to be manifestations of God

• if we can wake up,
• put our ego in the back seat and
• respond completely to the guidance of the still small voice of the Divine Spirit within us and thus fully express the Christ.

We are told that a way to approach this awakening is to start by always choosing the option that brings you peace. Then you find that the more you do this, the more you remain in peace with all that happens to you.

Just try to think what your life would be like if you were fully at peace, could stop being fearful, and were confident that all was well, and hence not worried about what had gone before or what might come later.

That’s sort of what happens if you become passionate about something: when something becomes your all-consuming passion. Then nothing else seems to matter, and indeed, if you are passionate about spiritual maturity, it doesn’t.

The alternative name for Palm Sunday is Passion Sunday. In this context passion has commonly come to mean suffering, so this was the beginning of Jesus’ week of suffering.

I don’t think that at all. Just like we all can be when we are fully Awake to the spiritual life, Jesus was fully in control of his life and he had chosen this week-long process. We are co-creators of our lives and nothing happens to us that is outside that. In any case, suffering is always a choice because it is an optional way of responding to what is happening. Awake people would not make that choice.

I can attest to this from personal experience. I was my wife’s full-time nurse for the last few months of her life and at one point I began to despair. Suddenly I found myself in a place where I was a mere observer of this feeling rather than a participant in it and I realised that suffering is indeed an option we don’t need to accept. Whatever the seriousness of the experience, we can retain our peace. Finding this place, what I sometimes call my God-centre, was one of my most life-changing moments and when I’ve told other in the midst of difficulties about it, they’ve found it too to their great joy.

Jesus may have got to the stage in his ministry that he was frustrated by how many people were misunderstanding his message and wanting to turn it into something about pursuing physical power instead of becoming spiritually awake.

If he came back now he’d sadly find the same thing!

So maybe he decided it was time to give a complete demonstration of what authentic living was all about for him. (Such a demonstration would also hold up a mirror to those who remained asleep so they’d see how dark such a life could be. But that’s an issue for another time) ……And being fully passionate about authentic living, where better to go to demonstrate it than to Jerusalem at Passover time when everybody who could be was there?

To use a common phrase, Jesus came to town with all guns blazing. Like all of us he had a few dicey moments when he wished he was somewhere else, but he remained at peace and was completely passionate about his path, knowing that taking it was the only way he could continue to live authentically, even though it would kill him. He knew this physical existence is but a phase in eternal life so that physical death is just a transition, and a joyful one at that, so there was nothing to worry about there. The process of getting to that point was obviously scary even to him but his passion for the task would carry him through this.

The Gospels tell us that leading up to this week as he approached Jerusalem he told people

• that the Kingdom of God is within them,
• that we need to receive it like a little child.
• He told the rich ruler that he could not realise the Kingdom completely until he stopped hanging on to other things: he had to be single-minded about it.
• Mary and Martha put on a dinner for him when Mary anointed his feet with perfume because they’d obviously discerned what he was about.

Meanwhile the Pharisees’ frustration at Jesus’ popularity was mounting.

Jesus’ passion to help people awaken to the reality of their inherent divinity, was strongly fuelled by the wrong-headedness of the Roman Imperial pursuit of temporal power and the Pharisees’ pursuit of religious power. So, knowing it would be the death of him, he deliberately set out to make his point:

First, by leading a rival procession riding a donkey, he lampooned the Roman power, and also the view by many of his countrymen that he should lead a revolution to get them out of their bondage,.

Then he proceeded systematically to attack the Pharisees’ religious power:

• He lamented that the people had ignored his teaching about what would bring them peace.
• He went to the temple, drove out the money changers,
• He taught his message of finding inner peace and freedom.
• He made the Pharisees increasingly livid as he beat them in every attempt they made to trick him with curly questions, and then went on to say “beware of the teachers of the Law: they like to go around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in public and have the most important seats in the synagogue and at banquets. All they do is for show and without love – they’ll be punished most severely.”

Jesus sure was passionate and it led, as he knew it would, to his arrest and the whole process of his trial and crucifixion. While he was being interrogated at one point he pointed out that ‘God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for to him all are alive.’

I continue to be amazed at how thick his disciples are portrayed as being, because even then they don’t seem to have had any understanding of what he had been teaching them and demonstrating to them for years: that the Kingdom of God is within, that it gives unfailing inner peace which facilitates unconflicted living, and that anybody can fully express the Christ within by Awakening to that reality.

So the crucifixion completely depressed the disciples until first Mary Magdalene, and later many others, experienced Jesus manifesting to them in a way which convinced them he had indeed transcended physical death. He came to each of them in ways that would be most significant to them, even manifesting as physical body to Thomas so he could prove to his satisfaction that Jesus was alive, and purely spiritually to Paul and innumerable others, including many of us, since.

Finally he made it clear that his followers should stop focusing on him as Jesus and work at expressing their own divinity and become who they really are – expressions of the Christ.

Jesus was, perhaps uniquely, one in whose company others come to experience God and learn to become faithful expressions of The Christ. Throughout the Easter season, his passion was such that he submitted to the worst people can do in order to be faithful to the best we can be: thus he was faithful to his own authenticity.

In this way Jesus, rather than saving us from the wrath of a wrathful god, showed us how to live authentically, showed us how depraved we can be when we don’t, and showed us how to wake up be true to our Selves and follow our own paths in peace, without fear, and with passion; how to be true expressions of God: how to be, as he was, a true expression of Christ.

It’s truly amazing what can be achieved when we become passionate about living authentically and in harmony with our true purpose. We are at peace, we go forward without fear and that makes us incredibly strong and resolute. Even miracles happen.