Palm Sunday and the feast of all fools...
The perfect day for a spot of holy foolery...
a day to find our expectations subverted...
April fool!
Here comes the King
Roll out the red carpet....listen for the marching bands...
But wait!
Where is the white charger, where the guard of honour, where the strident announcement that might is right?
Can this rag taggle cavalcade herald a triumphal procession, this tired man on a donkey be the king at all?
We need our king to be strong.
We need him to take over.
We need the world to change.
Hosanna!
Save us now!
The cry gets louder, but it comes not from the great and the good, nor even from those who hold the purse strings, not from those voices with the power to confer authority,since they hold it themselves.Money talks, but not today.
The proclamation issues, instead from the mouths of street kids, pariahs, those on the edge
Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Royal David's son!
But not like this.
You have to be joking.
There must be some mistake.
April fool!
Later anger erupts...the madmen are taking over the asylum
The vagrant preacher presumes to destroy the holy order of the Temple, the Lord of Misrule challenges the protocols that determine who can do what, the catalogue of acceptable behaviour in that holy space.
Tables turned, established customs criticised in an appeal to an older order.
By what right does this man – carpenter, not priest or Levite, court controversy?
Who does he think he is?
By what authority does he issue his challenges?
April fool!
He'll be laughing on the other side of his face by Friday.
No popular acclaim but a thunderous cry from the masses
“Crucify...crucify......we will have none of him”
What price “King of the Jews” when you're nailed to a cross, unable to move a finger
What sort of Saviour is deserted even by his crazy gang of illiterate supporters?
No laurel crown but a cruel circlet of brambles forced down on his head.
No bowing or scraping but the vicious slapstick of scourging
April fool!
But wait!
In comedy, timing is all.
The world may seem stuck on Good Friday, determinedly putting love to death at every opportunity,
clinging to the belief that might & money rule the day.
Wait!
Friday now, but Sunday's a coming...
Sunday when we peer into the darkness of death but hear instead a joyous cry
“Look behind you”
Sunday when the world is turned upside down once more, when heavenly chaos sweeps away the strictures of our misguided world in a tide of wild, exuberant creativity.
Sunday when we find that weakness is power and folly is wisdom.
When finding life means losing it.
When dead men walk and weeping turns to laughter.
April Fool!
2 comments:
Just wonderful! "in comedy timing is all." love that image of our jester king!
"Look behind you!" Lovely :-)
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