Strange Revolution

One of the greatest parts of living in a different culture for me (Jim) has been the perspective it gives when looking at our cultural interpretations of our faith.  Here in Kenya, Palm Sunday is a really big deal, maybe bigger than a Christmas service.  In our American context, this seems odd, but I've been trying to picture this through the lens of poverty.  When I used to consider Christ's coming to Earth, I was struck by how he shunned wealth and was born into poverty as the lowest of the low.  In fact, as we were preparing to come to Kenya, I wrote about this in a newsletter.  Here it's different.  We're confronted with poverty on a daily basis and it's been interesting to realize that for a large part of the world, Christ's birth in a stable is remarkable only because He became one of us.  The only shocking part is how normal His birth was.

The Maasai people are herdsmen. Each night, they drive their goats into traditional thorn-fenced enclosures around their mud and stick homes.  The youngest and weakest goats are kept inside the entrance to the house itself.  We tend to associate stables with dirtiness, bugs, etc... the last place you'd want to have a baby.  To them, Christ's birth in a stable is completely unremarkable.  Most likely, this was a common sentiment of Jesus's contemporaries.

This makes a lot of sense when we begin to think about what these people must have been thinking when the Messiah rode into Jerusalem.  They thought primarily in political terms.  The Christ was going to bring liberty to the persecuted Jew.  When Jesus began his ministry, they were probably surprised at first that he was not in any way nobility, but his presence as a normal person was even better - this was a revolution, and who better to stick it to the man than one of us?  People were understandably excited.  Normal people were finally going to receive justice; they were going to have power; the Messiah was there for them!

Large crowds danced and celebrated his entrance to Jerusalem.  They followed wherever the Messiah went.  They were fully expecting to be redeemed.  This was the perfect revolution: A new government was going to be founded under the principles of their religion overseen by their religious leaders.  It sounds a lot like the Arab Spring but even better; The Messiah could work miracles and he was a normal citizen.

But it all ended up being a very brief flash in the pan.  The first thing Christ did when he entered Jerusalem?  Come unhinged in the temple, throwing out the money tables and calling it a den of thieves.  For the next few days, he attacked the corrupt Jewish leadership, said nothing against the Romans, and seemed more interested in changing people's spiritual lives than pursuing any real physical revolution.  Most people weren't buying this type of revolution.  The religious leaders were hurt, defensive, and ready to do anything to stop a raving lunatic. By the end of the week, Jesus was dead.  Some revolution.

I do the same thing.  Instead of expecting Christ to first be changing ME, I look to Him for political justice, for equality, for healing, and for power.  An inward spiritual revolution is pushed to the margins for more tangible revolutions:  social equality, justice, healing the sick, power... all the same things people were buying into when they marched triumphantly into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  Today they'd be camped out in downtown Jerusalem hoping somehow to stick it to the man, blogging about Joseph Kony, trying to stop modern slavery, sex trafficking, the spread of HIV...  All the kinds of things that Christ did, but I'm beginning to realize that focusing on these things can actually kill the real message.  It's an inward, spiritual revolution.  I'm guilty of overlooking this in my personal life, on the blog, in my home.

This Easter season, let's recenter our lives on His revolution.