Palm Sunday: Protest and Extremism

From a sermon by Ray Anglesea delivered to a joint service of West End, Robert Stewart Memorial and Jesmond United Reformed Churches



It wasn’t Hosanna the jeering, hostile crowds were chanting but “Farewell Mohamed, we will avenge you.” Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street trader, didn’t mean to start a revolution. On the 17th December, a week before Christmas, this 26 year old Tunisian university graduate and street trader wheeled his barrow into the market square of Sidi Bouzid, a dusty town in central Tunisia. He set up his stall at the street corner and began calling out his wares. Within minutes he was interrupted by a municipal inspector who started to confiscate his merchandise; the inspector alleged he did not have a trading permit. Grabbing his fruit and vegetables back the local inspector slapped him in the face.


Perhaps that was the turning point that burst into a revolution. For an Arab man to be slapped by a woman in public was the height of humiliation. Bouazizi, embarrassed and enraged, stormed over to the municipal office demanding the return of his stock. There he was beaten again. Now angry and enraged he went to the main regional government office. He was turned away. “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself,” he shouted. At 11:30am, less than an hour after the 1st altercation, Bouazizi was back in front of the gates of the governor’s building. He sat down and poured two bottles of paint-thinner over himself and demanded once more to see an official. Then he lit his cigarette lighter and by the time the flames were extinguished he had suffered third degree burns over 90% of his body.


He was taken by ambulance to a hospital 70 miles away then later to a special burns unit in Tunis. On 4th January 18 days after setting fire to himself Bouazizi died. By then the protests had already started. Dissent and remonstrations began to spread like grassfire throughout the capital and regional towns powered by Facebook and Twitter. Police fired on the crowds in several towns. The death toll mounted. On the day of Bouazizi’s death the Jasmine Revolution erupted into full force. Within a week President Ben Ali of Tunisia had fled the country. A 23 year old dictatorship collapsed in a matter of days. Weeks later the 30 year old rule of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (who had amassed a family fortune of £40.5 billion), was at an end. Bouazizi had become a martyr. The very ordinariness of his life has given his story the power to overthrow dictators. The rage, frustration and poverty that first erupted on an ordinary Friday morning in a nondescript Tunisian backwater has now spread to Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Syria.


Does Bouazizi’s story ring any bells? A death on a Friday, a poverty stricken nobody from a backwater nothing town, the martyr a symbol of rebellion, beaten, spat on, abused, humiliated, mocked, abandoned. On this Palm Sunday of all days we remember the early morning madness, the protest, the repression, complaints and objection; an excited demonstration in the dense architecture of Jerusalem, a young servant king on a donkey fulfilling Zechariah’s messianic prophecy, who was to turn expectations of political deliverance on its head. Amongst waving palm branches the smell of defiance was in the air, a possible subversive peasant uprising, threats of arrest, and criticism by those who thought Jesus and his group were going too far, too fast. “This is the controversial field preacher and healer,” they shouted. “This is the son of a virgin who went to parties and turned water into wine.” Danger! Controversy! Fear! In the backwater of a destitute and penurious provincial town amid the Judaean hills there were too many authoritarian, conflicting and violent ideologies. And one of those unjust and immoral ideologies was religious extremism. Religious groups and individuals had become radicalised; a pathological illness which feeds on the destruction of life. In Jerusalem nothing has changed.


Perhaps the greatest Scottish poet of the 20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid, a passionate nationalist and convinced Marxist described his time as an age “whaur extremes meet.” Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve who was no stranger to extremism; indeed the extreme political beliefs that bewitched many during MacDiarmid’s time in the 1930’s possessed something of the quality of religious faith. The result of the extremes of global recession in the 1930’s caused many Jarrow miners and ship builders from this region to walk over 300 miles, with their MP Ellen Wilkinson, to London, demanding employment and an end to abject poverty.


Hand in hand with extreme political views is the extremes of religious intolerance and fanaticism that sometimes goes with it; recent decades have been characterised by worldwide suffering of many as a result of the actions of radicalised religious groups. Complex religious views still prevail - the murder of a Catholic police officer Constable Ronan Kerr, 25, killed after a booby-trap device exploded under his car, in Omagh, County Tyrone: the attack on a United Nation base in the city of Mazar-e Sharif which killed 14 people, seven of them UN staff, as a result of an American pastor who burnt the Koran. "The desecration of any holy text, including the Koran,” said Mr Obama “is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry; to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous, and an affront to human decency and dignity.” Yet don’t let’s deceive ourselves – it was the Christian evangelical fundamentalism and neo-conservative ideology that underpinned the Bush administration that took the American nation to war in Iraq, aided and abetted by the British Government; “a war widely perceived without any basis in international law and a war that could not be described as just or moral,” stated Prof. Michael Northcott, Professor of Christian Ethics, Edinburgh University in his book An angel directs the storm. Perhaps the engineer’s song’s from the musical Miss Saigon “The American Dream” has faded, to many minds the extravagant new life of the American dream has now become the American apocalypse.


But that was last week’s breaking news. Senior church leaders have brought to the forefront of all our concerns at the start of this Holy Week the situation of Christians who are living with the daily threat of violent persecution often in unstable environments. Our thoughts this Holy Week are with the leaders and people of Jerusalem, the Middle East and the African Ivory Coast faced with massive instability and uncertainty, and with many disturbing signs of what may come. We also think with anguish of the sufferings and anxieties of the Church in Pakistan, in the context of the brutal killings that have occurred in recent months and weeks; the murder early in March of Shahbaz Bhatti the minister for religious minorities in Pakistan, a Christian and a critic of Pakistan's blasphemy laws, who was shot dead by gunmen on his way to a cabinet meeting in Islamabad. The continuing attacks on Christian communities in parts of Nigeria and Gays in Uganda are a matter of deep concern, and in Zimbabwe Christians are still subject to constant attack because of their brave stand for justice. In Southern Sudan, after a referendum more peaceful than most people dared to hope, the Church faces the huge challenge of helping to shape a new nation; the same challenge of witnessing to a unity beyond political boundaries inspires the continuing courageous ministry of the Church in Korea.
At the beginning of Holy Week, we stand with Jesus before the gates of the city of Jerusalem, the Holy City in a world dominated by news of religious fanaticism and extremism. Simon Montefiore in his new book Jerusalem: The Biography describes the city as “the global focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions; the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism. Jerusalem is the house of one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions. She is the only city to exist twice, in heaven and earth. The city which is the cosmopolitan home of many sects, a hybrid metropolis of a hybrid people with many interlinked and overlapping cultures and layered loyalties, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone.” It is a city of religious extremism indeed; an illuminated stage for the cameras of the world in the age of 24 hour news.


As believers and as human beings, we stand today at the gates of the city at the start of Holy week – a 'city of wrong' as one great Muslim writer, Kamel Hussein, called it in the title of his fictional meditations, City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem as he meditates on the last week of Jesus’ life; a city where so many sufferers are silenced and where so many innocent on both sides of the terrible conflict are killed and their deaths hidden under a cloak of angry, selfish, posturing words, whatever language they are spoken in. “We know in our hearts,” stated the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently “that so much of what fuels the violence of religious extremism is in ourselves too: the passionate longing for power and control, the impotent near-mindless fury that bursts out in literally suicidal ways in cities around the world, and brings destruction to so many. We know the urge to defend what can't be defended because we can't lose face.” We search for any drop of the elixir of tolerance, sharing and generosity to act as the antidote to the arsenic of prejudice, exclusivity and possessiveness. “We too are citizens of this city of wrong.”And as Ian Cowie reminded us in his poem Welcome to the City – “ don’t interfere with politics or economics – if you get it wrong for our city, who knows? We, too, might have to liquidate you.”


And in this city of protest, of religious extremism, in this city of wrong, we stand at its gates to remember the extremes of a different kind, the extremes to which one man was driven because of faith, and draw a very different message. The Easter narrative helps us to understand that what the world needs is not a retreat from faith, and religion’s moral codes, but an approach towards the mystery of creation marked by the humility of Jesus and infused by the sympathy that He showed to all mankind. The extremes to which Jesus was driven were the furthest reaches of human suffering. Scourged, beaten, tortured and crucified, His body was robbed of all dignity, like the Tunisian street trader, his existence extinguished in excruciating pain. Jesus’ journey on the Via Dolorosa was a consequence of others’ actions, specifically the rejection of His message, and the promise of redemption through faith which He offered. He was betrayed by the religious leaders of His time, who put a rigid adherence to rules, hierarchy and status before the message of love. He was condemned by the secular powers of the Roman occupation, who chose expediency rather than principle. He was, ultimately, denied by His own disciple, Peter, who sought the good opinion of others before the truths of his own heart. In each case, suffering came because men lacked zeal and passion, would not stand up for what was right and preferred a course the world seemed to deem prudent rather than the path they feared would render them exposed. Those in the Easter narrative who betrayed Jesus did so because they acted in a manner which was political, calculating and worldly.


The journey to Calvary that Jesus made was, however, for them as much as anyone. He confronted the ultimate extreme — a painful death and the cries of the world jeering in His ears — to prove that compassion can triumph over calculation, and that sacrifice can redeem sin. He required a faith that might be considered so strong as to be extreme. But His quiet adherence to the principle of love, and the willingness to sacrifice His interests for others, and then His Resurrection, completed a symbolic but real journey, and began a new phase of human spirituality.
The extremists who challenge our peace this Easter in Ireland, in the Middle East, in fragile African states come not as Jesus did, to redeem, but as His tormentors did, to uphold an arid purity and proclaim a vengeful power. Their faith is a political religion, like MacDiarmid’s Marxism, their vision is exclusive and self-indulgent, and their hands are clenched round a gun. The faith of Jesus was of a very different kind: His outstretched hands on the Cross were there to embrace all mankind. If the world is to overcome the dark passion of those whose hate drives them to violent extremes, it can only be helped by contemplating the message of compassion from the One who went to the ultimate extreme for love.


Five months ago Bouazizi was a frustrated, poverty stricken nobody in a nothing city. And that, I suspect, explains his astonishing posthumous power as a symbol of rebellion, anger and political upheaval; peaceful protestors demanding basic human rights: the humble fruit-seller who had a bad day, and couldn’t take it anymore. In the ongoing aftermath of the North African and Middle East revolution that fills our newspapers and television screens, Tarak Ben Ammar, formerly a manager of Michael Jackson’s world tour is planning to make a film about Bouazizi’s life and death. A Kuwaiti businessman has offered $10,000 to buy his cart. A square in Paris is to be named after him. Two thousand years later the ongoing Jesus revolution too is still turning the world upside down. Jesus turned out to be the only beloved son of God, who died that our sins may be forgiven, and that those who believe in him might have eternal life. And for that assurance and promise of that priceless gift we can say with the cheering Palm Sunday Jerusalem crowds. Alleluia!
Amen


Revd Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working across synod church partnerships.