Palm Sunday: Clean hands are of the conscience

Common service in the church

Probably something I have not taken due notice of before, on Sunday mornings, I will usually wake up to a live church service on BBC Radio 4, the ones from the Church of England, I am more attuned to. The time did Spring Forward to British Summer Time, though it was more like British Raining Time, this morning.

However, today, Palm Sunday, I recall that when the readings came up in church, it was like a déjà vu moment, I very remembered I had heard it before, recently too. At church, with the new normal of no congregational singing, a cantor doing most of the musical stuff in front of the congregation or in the choir, much of what we do is sitting down apart during the greeting and certain congregational recitations.

The gospel in song

The children without a Sunday School with preoccupied and distracted by toys, puzzles, or their colouring books. The gospel was first read to announce the triumphal entry of the Lord into Jerusalem on the ass of a colt the second gospel was of the Passion, the first 54 verses of 66, of the 27^th chapter in the Gospel according to St Matthew, sung by the cantor and a laudable feat at the best of times. [Bible Gateway: Matthew 27:1-54 (NRSVA)]

As I have been listening to books on Audible rather than reading them on Kindle, there was a sense of how the words we heard seems to take on life as you read the words being sung to our hearing. I could not help but see the level of human wickedness that greeted the desire for the chief priests of that day to get rid of Jesus Christ.

A window on religious wickedness

When Judas Iscariot realised what his betrayal of Jesus Christ would lead to, he went to return the 30 pieces of silver the chief priests and elders gave him for his dastardly deed and they indifferently said, “What is that to us?”, on picking up the money he threw down in the temple, they deliberated amongst themselves agreeing it was “the price of blood”, bought a piece of land with it, not for anything but the burial of strangers to whom they will have no duty, obligation, or responsibility and called it the field of blood.

They agitated the crowd to prefer a murderer and thief over Jesus Christ and even Pontius Pilate when he made to wash his hands off the matter, recognised that they were against Jesus out of envy. Just the thought that someone bringing succour, healing and peace to their people making them somewhat irrelevant as they could never rise to minister to those needs was their all-consuming passion to destroy Jesus, he had to be killed.

Culpable in every way

I could not entirely absolve Pontius Pilate, his wife warned him not to have anything to do with Jesus, he had the power and authority to set Jesus free, much as whatever the decision he took would determine the fate of Jesus Christ in that place.

Out of fear for his position and hoping to avoid an insurrection, all acts of self-preservation of status and person, he delivered Jesus to them and the ritual of crucifixion started with scourging and mockery, the act of capital punishment will also be carried out by those under his command, just as he decided to place a notice at the head of the cross declaring Jesus, the kind of the Jews.

It all made for sombre reflection; the Holy Week has begun. In these pandemic times, as we sanitise our hands to prevent disease and contamination, Pontius Pilate would never have been able to wash his hands clean of the matter that underpins the force of Christianity, the cross and the consequent resurrection of Jesus Christ. Clean hands are first of the conscience and the decisions we make long before symbolically washing them in a bowl of water would mean anything.

Suffocated by ultracrepidarians

The wisdom of madding crowds

Never have we needed a surfeit of expertise in these trying times, people who have not just an idea of what they are talking about, but are ready, willing and patient enough to take the time to inform and educate to the point that others begin to understand and grasp the basic knowledge of things.

It’s been difficult to navigate the deafening cacophony of those in captivity of the Dunning-Kruger effect, those who have not even conspired to dilettantism that enter the fray to pontificate and postulate as authorities in subjects where they have no schooling but are so opinionated to the point that experts are relegated to the inconsequential or forced into the feigned balance of pitching their vocations against novices. Ultracrepidarianism is rife.

Conspiring conspiracies

With the Coronavirus pandemic, the person we probably need most to shut is President Donald Trump, he needs to get out of the way and let the experts take control. He speaks like an idiot, spewing a multitude of jumbled words redolent of someone who has done nothing in a long time to improve his faculties. [Jolted by Her Own Illness, Pandemics Scholar Gains Insight into Botched COVID-19 Response - Scientific American]

Excerpted from Scientific American

Hitching a ride on the Coronavirus bandwagon, 5G technology has now branched out into a deluge of conspiracy theories promoted by every useful idiot from religious leaders through politicians to celebrities.

I cannot begin to repeat or perpetuate much of what I have read or heard, only that the ignorant and illiterate have become willing hosts of propagating the contagion of pseudo-science, fables and incredulous stupidity with property at risk of destruction and possible loss of life and livelihood. They have become the personification of a virus. [The Coronavirus Collection: Conspiracy Theories – Snopes] [5G Conspiracy – Snopes]

The church online

I guess the only respite I had was in the celebration of Palm Sunday, we have reached the end of Lenten season and entered the Holy Week. Quite inauspiciously, we have now completed 2 weeks of the intended 3-week lockdown to expire on Easter Monday. There is a likelihood it would be extended. [Palm Sunday - Wikipedia]

The etymology of quarantine is Venetian of the 14^th to 15^th Century spoken in the northeast of present-day Italy, quarantena meaning 40 days anglicised to quarantine of which the Lenten period is also 40 days. [Quarantine – Wikipedia]

Yet, what a relief it was that I would able to attend the online Palm Sunday eucharistic season of the Manchester Cathedral, streamed life on Facebook from the homes of the clergy presided over by the Dean of the cathedral. There is a daily morning (09:00) and evening (16:30) prayer service streamed live too. [Manchester Cathedral – Facebook]

Experts of mercy

In a week suffused with the excess of illusory superiority, hubris, and cognitive dissonance almost presenting as schizophrenia, here were people not given to the eschatological incomprehensibility of those of another creed, but with humility, patience, service and love for their congregation led us in worship, adoration, and celebration of the day.

Was I glad to see so many clerical collars? We must be thankful for small mercies. In other news, I joined the Labour Party on the 19^th of January, the day before the close of eligibility to elect a new leader. That contest is over, and Sir Keir Starmer was elected, my choice for deputy leader came second. It is my hope that the Labour Party that I have voted for since 1992 now has the opportunity of becoming a party of government after 4 straight electoral losses. I wish Sir Keir, every success. [BBC News]

I heard no Hosannas

Ancient & Modern

Sometimes, I crave for a particular religious past, one stated, written and regimented with uniformity.

Sundays with tongue-twisting names like Sexagesimal and Quinquagesimal rather than the well known Palm Sunday where the Common Book of Prayer was opened to a particular page as you followed the vicar in the prelude and response of worship.

The sound of the pipe organ in readiness for traditional hymns in English at times or in Yoruba when I was in Nigeria; the solemnity of it all.

The loud sound of the band

The difference is a band, a keyboardist rather than an organist, two box guitars, two acoustic guitars and the percussionist - a drummer doing the drums.

Cue the music with the beating of the drumsticks and the music begins loud and ready for our voices singing to the text displayed on the screen in the front.

Even in my quiet times, I cannot maintain the consistency of a beat over time, the percussionist starts easy and before you know it, a riot of beats descends on us, I thinking surely this can go wrong but it all works out beautiful.

You are left in awe and praise of the drummer who is quite exposed, almost extrovert to a fault and basically commanding the flow of worship even though you have the lead vocalist and at least 2 backing vocals in the band, none of what might be called free-styling ever comes close to the daring-do of the drummer.

A Protestant to Pentecostalism?

As I grow older, loud is betraying the possibility that I might be able to confidently pass off as youth anymore, the jumping to the beat is almost an excess to the High Church Anglican eye.

The service was enlightening and insightful but we had left behind tradition as I knew it, the Palm Sundays of old where we sat in pews and if I had dozed off as I sometimes have done in church lately, the lovely ushers would have caressed the back of my neck with the exhilarating barbs of a palm frond leaf.

Honestly, I do miss the Hosannas; talk less of the overkill of dramatising Jesus on an ass of a colt riding into Jerusalem.

For all said and done, the journey is mine to travel and in every place, blessed still is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.