Tales of Liberation
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 28, 2021
Passover
The story of Passover is an ancient one. A famine in Israel forced the patriarch Jacob to lead his large extended family to Egypt, to reunite with his son Joseph, who was an influential official in the court of the Pharaoh. Over the course of the next 400 or so years, the numbers of Israelites grew and grew, until ultimately they became numerous enough to pose a threat to Pharaoh’s power. And so they were forced into slavery, and unable to leave.
400 years of bondage, until God sent Moses to try to persuade Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to leave and return to their homeland. Moses threatened Pharaoh with 10 different plagues, from turning the water of the Nile to blood, to frogs, gnats, boils, and so forth, until the final threat: the death of all the Egyptian firstborns. And finally, as a result of this carnage, from which the Israelites were spared, Pharaoh liberated them; they were ordered to leave so abruptly that they had to take their unleavened bread dough with them and flee into the desert.
At this time of year we retell these ancient stories, and it’s easy to assume we do it simply to follow traditions. But if we really look at the stories, we see their continuing relevance; their timelessness. We hear these stories, and like good Unitarian Universalists, we ask, “But are they true?” A better question for us might be, “Are they accurate?” The answer is, of course, ‘who really knows?’ But are they true? Absolutely.
The truth is this: that throughout human history people have waited for liberation, as they do today; from enslavement, certainly. People wait for liberation from oppression of all sorts; from poverty, from disease, from segregation, from ignorance.
Today we tell stories of liberation from the power that oppresses; the power of empire, whether Pharaoh, or the Roman emperor, or the United States Congress. “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” wrote Frederick Douglass. “It never has, and it never will.” We see this, throughout history, over and over.
Our theme for the month of March has been Commitment. And shining through all the liberation stories we will tell this morning is human commitment: commitment to freedom, to autonomy, to flourishing and being able to seek one’s own destiny.
Once the Israelites escaped from Egypt, they were forced to wander in the desert for 40 years, in search of the Promised Land. What truths do we learn from this? Well, perhaps liberation is a process, not achieved all at once. Perhaps commitment must be an integral part of the liberation story, in order to maintain any progress. Perhaps commitment has to be tested, over and over, for a community to discover who they are and what they believe; to put off the old habits of oppression and truly become a people, to grow into their own power.
Finally, perhaps we cannot achieve liberation without faith. For sometimes we need to leave in the dark, grabbing what we can carry, and set forth without knowing exactly where we are going. We take those first steps, as Martin Luther King, Jr. was reported to have said, even if we cannot see the top of the staircase. Faith makes it possible for us to set forth toward liberation. Commitment carries us through the rest of the journey.
Palm Sunday
What if Jesus was an anti-Roman subversive? What if his entry into Jerusalem was intended, not to proclaim himself as the Son of God, but to mock the power of the Roman Empire?
During Jesus’ lifetime, Palestine was ruled by the far-distant Roman Empire. In order to maintain control over the populace, Rome installed either client-kings, such as King Herod, or Roman prefects, such as Pontius Pilate.
During important festivals, such as Passover, it is estimated that during Passover the population of Jerusalem might swell from 50,000 to 200,000. And so, Roman soldiers would march into the Jewish cities to make a show of force and keep the large crowds that gathered from setting off any uprisings.
This would have been so before Passover in the year that Jesus, too, entered the city of Jerusalem.
Biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Domenic Crossan have proposed that in that year, there were two processions entering the city. Coming from the west, they wrote, would be this: “A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.” (Borg and Crossan, The Last Week, found in https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20150323JJ.shtml?fbclid=IwAR3w-JQWVpr2BbmE1tdfboVPZZQZOQhio9QdaadQUA7L1449mJ0XODgaxGY)
Borg and Crossan go on to remind us that in Roman eyes, the emperor was considered the Son of God. And for believers in a different god, YHWH, this could be seen as a heresy, a rival religion forcing itself on the Jewish populace during their religious festival.
Jesus staged his triumphal entry to make fun of the show of power from the Romans. He approached from the east, astride a small donkey.
The symbolism of the donkey and the foal, as described in the Gospel of Matthew, is intentional. Borg and Crossan posit that the donkey was a nursing female, with her young colt. Rather than the might, and noise, and palpable power of the Roman procession, here was a man riding a female donkey, with her nursling beside her. The contrast could not be greater: power vs. nurture, strength vs. vulnerability.
What subversive message was Jesus sending to the people cheering him that day? Perhaps it was a message of coming liberation. It would be couched in terms of the coming of the Kingdom of God, meaning, of course, the Jewish God, YHWH, not the Roman emperor.
Once again, we see the faith and the commitment that are part and parcel of liberation. Jesus’s faith in a message of a kingdom of justice and liberation, and the faith required to set out to proclaim this message in the face of oppressive foreign rule. Jesus’s commitment to stay the course, to walk through the Passover knowing that he was going to be hunted, and likely captured and killed. With his simple procession, Jesus would create a threat to the empire, a threat that had to be crushed. He carried on, in the face of great danger. Once again, we see that liberation requires both faith and commitment.
Hosanna, shouted the crowds. “Praise!”
Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
Unrealized Liberation
I was struck by the realization that the Jews had been enslaved in Egypt for over 400 years. It’s been just over 400 years since Africans were first brought to what is now the United States and enslaved for life. And while slavery finally was abolished officially in 1863, there continues to be a long and winding path to liberation for Black Americans.
The history of Black Americans is one of gains and losses, over and over. We are most familiar with parts of the story, usually the gains. We have heard of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when blacks were given citizenship, the right to vote, and in some areas, land for farming. We know less about the details of the brutal efforts of white Southerners, once Reconstruction was over and federal troops withdrawn, to enact Jim Crow segregation laws and strip many blacks of their property and their rights. We have heard of the Great Migration beginning during World War 1, when southern blacks began moving north for wartime jobs. We are less likely to have heard that southern whites stopped trains, tore up train tickets, and tried to prevent blacks from moving north. We have heard of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, but we are less likely to have heard that the responsibility for desegregation of schools was turned over to individual states, and that some of them, rather than integrate, simply shut down public schools. Desegregation of schools was delayed by court case after court case, to slow the process to such an extent that an entire generation lost their opportunity for an equal education.
We remember the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and the growth of black voting and political power as a result. And we have watched in recent years as the Supreme Court dismantled key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, which has enabled renewed voter suppression.
Gains and losses, over and over again. Whenever blacks make substantial gains in the United States, there is a backlash, and whites rise up to solidify their power. President Obama, followed by President Trump. Just in the past few months we have seen the Black Lives Matter protests force national conversations about policing. The 2020 presidential election forced conversations about voter suppression. And of course, in response, we watched in horror as white supremacist insurrectionists stormed the U. S. Capitol building on January 6 of this year; a swift, violent, response to what they perceive as a loss of political power. We have watched as 43 states have drafted new laws designed to make it more difficult for people to vote.
“The trigger for white rage,” wrote Carol Anderson, a professor of African American history at Emory University, “inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.” (Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, p. 3.)
There can be no liberation without commitment, or faith. We see it here, too, as we do throughout history. There is the faith that God sees people in their struggle, and cries out with them. And there is the commitment to keep trying to push this country toward the realization of its own stated goal – one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This country is fortunate to have citizens with such faith, and such commitment. Theologian James Cone, who was Black, wrote, “Human beings are made for each other and no people can realize their full humanity except as they participate in its realization for others.” (Cone, God of the Oppressed, p. xiii.)
May this long American liberation story be realized within our time, and may these people of faith and commitment finally be seen and recognized, so they can help lead us to be the nation we have always said we aspire to be.
