SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THAT OTHER ARAGALAYA: a small Palm Sunday sermon!

 

(above) Daily Mirror photo; (below) https://liturgy.co.nz/passion-palm-sunday-holy-week-2023

In the midst of a flood of social media messaging about a false prophet and a fallen angel a deep conversation with Shantha Premawardene helped me regain my sanity and restore some clear thinking. 

Part of our conversation focused on Holy Week and that other Aragalaya, Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode in on a donkey to Jerusalem along with the masses, challenging the oppressive Roman government.  In 2022 Galle Face, they shouted #GoHomeGota, expressing Sri Lankans’ desire to be free of an incompetent and corrupt leader, elected no doubt, but who had driven the country to bankruptcy.  Palestinians chant Allahu Akbar! invoking the greatness of their God to free them from oppressive Israeli occupation; the masses that gathered round Jesus,  waved palm branches and shouted Hosanna! meaning Help!, help to be liberated from the rule of Caesar.   

Capitalism and the cooption of the Christian message by white privilege (the blue-eyed long brown haired white person that we have come to recognize as Jesus is just one symbol of this cooption) has translated the rewards of believing into material benefits.  If you love and obey God, you will be rich and prosperous. The corollary, that if you are not rich or prosperous, then you are an unbeliever and a sinner, is an assertion that underlies the twin discourses of prosperity theology and capitalism - anyone could become rich through hard work and if you are poor, it’s your own fault.   

Through my work over the last three to four decades with women, poor and isolated communities and more recently on women's human rights,  I know that the lack of hard work is most times not the cause of poverty, discrimination and exclusion. They are structural inequalities that are perpetuated by those with power, and by those who feel threatened when the dispossessed demand their rights, just like the chief priests and scribes were indignant and disturbed by the Palm Sunday Aragalaya.  And in a process not dissimilar to what happened to the leaders at #GotaGoGama, Caesar, the Roman head of state,  was so fearful that he had Jesus arrested and then crucified a few days later.

Rome was a colonial power and subsequent to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, they destroyed Jerusalem.  We are also told in the Bible that Jesus wept at the fate that he knew would befall the city.  However, he didn’t paint the destruction as a simple binary between good (Jerusalem) and bad (Rome) but also advised that it was important to ‘recognise the things that make for peace’(Luke 19:32)   

Direct parallels are difficult to draw, and in my thinking the forces of evil that actually result in suffering, discrimination and exclusion today, are the forces of patriarchy and toxic masculinity;  the unrelenting push for economic growth irrespective of the destruction it causes to the planet and to people; the antirights and exclusionary politics of extremist, racist movements; and the institutions that uphold these concepts and use their power to expand their own evil constituencies.

As activists (and as Christians) just ranting against these forces of evil is insufficient. We need to be aware of how in different, seemingly insignificant ways, we collude with these forces.  A women’s rights activist informed me a few weeks ago that her network “had no position on sex work or trans people” – but this appearance of neutrality by refraining from challenging  entrenched societal prejudices that exclude sex workers and trans people  is in fact indirectly supporting the status quo and is not neutral at all. 

So as we go into the Holy Week, it is time to start thinking not just about the Easter Sunday bombings and the suffering it caused, but also about state violence that has been perpetuated on Sri Lankans since then.  The visible  baton charging, the tear gas and the arrests are horrific enough,  but it’s time to call out the economic violence that continues to insidiously impact on the most vulnerable and which will intensify with the call for tightening belts.  We must “recognize the things that make for peace” and continue to call for them. Hosanna!! Aragalayata Jayawewa!!

#Aragalaya #PalmSunday #EasterSunday #Omnia


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