14th Sunday 2020
Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9,11-13;Matt 11:25-30.
“A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.”
If you attended a school with an annual diet of Gilbert and Sullivan, you may recall that line from “The Pirates of Penzance”. I mention it because paradox—an apparent contradiction which turns out to be the truth--is at the heart of today’s readings.
We encounter it first in the extract from the prophet Zechariah: “See now, your king comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant, humble and riding on a donkey.” There is a classic paradox here: in fact, if you wish to recall long past English lessons, there is also bathos—anti-climax—a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, as this victorious king comes trotting on a donkey like a four year old at the seaside. (Imagine if you like, William the Conqueror riding along the seafront at Hastings brandishing a wooden spade.) To move from older to current English usage, we might ask “What’s that about?”
At first sight, it makes no sense. Victorious, triumphant kings don’t ride donkeys; they ride warhorses, chargers, probably gloriously apparelled, and the words “triumphant” “victorious” don’t make natural bedfellows for the word “humble”. What point is Zechariah attempting to make?
To discover that, we have to read on. This triumphant king is a peacemaker “who will banish chariots from Ephraim and horses from Jerusalem…he will proclaim peace for the nations.” I suppose that you can impose peace by dictat, ordering it of a defeated nation, but it will be an uneasy peace, with rebellion probably bubbling beneath the surface. To return to the classroom once again, it recalls the description of the Romans put into the mouth of a British chieftain by the historian Tacitus: “they make a desert and call it peace”. If a victorious king, or anyone else, wants genuine peace, a touch of humility is called for, an element of give and take, a willingness to meet the other on his/her own terms. Looking back a century, the refusal of the victorious nations to bring this approach to the Treaty of Versailles, at the end of the First World War, sowed the seeds of the second, even bloodier conflict.
So Zechariah’s prophecy has lessons in itself, but for Christians it clearly points beyond itself to Palm Sunday, and to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, an event replete with paradox. Here is the Messiah entering His Temple, but doing so in the same manner as the humble triumphant king. His triumphal procession is a paradoxical affair. He is cheered and feted, but His mount is that same miserable ass, and the authorities of His Temple will reject Him, will bring about His utter downfall, His complete defeat. Yet, paradox of paradoxes, in that most comprehensive of failures, He achieves total victory, and reveals the whole mystery of salvation: that triumph masquerades as utter failure, that victory is gained only when it is surrendered.
As this is the basis of salvation, it is also the pattern of life in Christ, as He points out in the Gospel. The mysteries of the Kingdom are hidden from the “learned and clever” and revealed to “mere children”. I remember, many years ago, a not particularly learned twelve year old explaining that the creation accounts in the Book of Genesis were written in a particular way that the people of biblical times would be able to understand, a concept which the brilliant scientist Richard Dawkins is apparently totally incapable of grasping.
Think too of the ordinary, common-or-garden folk to be met in every parish, who have a simple yet intense prayer life, and a close relationship with Jesus, yet are sometimes sneered at by more sophisticated Christians. Of course we need brilliant scientists and learned theologians—the brutal horrors perpetrated by jihadis and the psychological damage often inflicted by literalist biblical fundamentalists show the danger of ignorance in religion—but such scholars may well be further from the Heart of Jesus than Mr. and Mrs. Suchabody from the two up and two down on the corner.
Finally, we come to the most difficult paradox, as Jesus claims that His yoke is easy and His burden light. Many of those who come to Him, labouring and overburdened, may feel that His yoke weighs heavily upon them. Are the ease and lightness of His yoke and burden wishful thinking? I would answer “No”, but at times that can be a matter of faith rather than of current experience. Sometimes we have to carry the Cross a long way before its lightness is revealed—but it will be.
