In the early 90’s high in the mountains of Southern Mexico a self defence movement was formed by the Indigenous Mayan Indians. They were under attack from Government and corporate forces which sought to drive them from their ancestral lands. Their motto became ‘Ya Basta’ – Enough.
After a few years of one sided skirmishes the Mayan rebels who had taken on the name ‘Zapatistas’, were surrounded in a small town in the heartlands of their territory called La Realidad (which means ‘the reality’). The army surrounding them outnumbered and outgunned them, hardly anyone in the world outside had heard of the region, let alone the small rebel force, and the Government of Ernesto Zedillo was confident that it could simply eliminate the whole community with little repercussion – and so end their resistance movement.
There was no way that news would get out of the town, telephone lines had been cut and there were no journalists or news stations for hundreds of miles. The situation for the Maya was entirely hopeless, until their communications officer, who had adopted the nom de guerre ‘Marcos’, decided to take the unusual step of using a little known communication system which hooked up to his computer. He sent an email. The email was picked up by the BBC, who passed it on to Reuters and Associated Press, in an instant the world had heard and the Mexican army was compelled for shame to hold its fire. The Zapatistas melted through the blockade and disappeared into the mountains and jungles. Marcos later said that in the face of war the Zapatistas decided to wage peace and they began to grow a movement based on education, building schools and clinics throughout the region and becoming a popular movement that the Government and Corporations are still to this day unable to shift.

Today is Palm Sunday, the Sunday we remember the entry of Jesus in to the Holy city of Jerusalem.
A couple of weeks ago on Mothering Sunday I quoted the verse from Paul’s letter to Galatians
‘Jerusalem the Holy, is the mother of us all’
The city of Jerusalem is a mythic city, Jerusalem the Golden city, a utopia which represents the ideal of human society.
It is into this mythic story that Jesus enters.
And you wont be surprised to gather that as a Unitarian I find that it is on the level of story that I find access to Palm Sunday and Easter itself.

R S Thomas who was an Anglican vicar wrote: “Poetry is religion. Religion is poetry. The message of the New Testament is poetry. Christ was a poet. The New Testament is metaphor. The resurrection is metaphor; and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity… ”

Although there is no need in Unitarian circles for consensus, it is nevertheless the case that for the most part Unitarians reject mainstream Christian doctrines like the doctrine of Atonement, whereby it is argued by the orthodox that Jesus died to redeem us from sin, that his death was in other words a sacrifice by which the human debt of original sin was cleared.
Since the Seventeenth century we have asked who could this debt have been owed to?
What great all powerful God would need to owe any debt let alone redeem it, with this or any other price.
We have argued instead that Jesus message was one of the goddess and mercy of God, God who was like a loving parent and that this teaching overthrew the need for sacrifice altogether, and this is a view of theology that is at last finding uptake in more mainstream traditions too.
Following this liberation, we find no need for the doctrine of original sin at all – and consequently no need of the doctrine of resurrection. And so many of us leave it there and celebrate Easter as a festival of renewal, Springtime and revival.

But I want to return to this point of RS Thomas, and others, that the point of the story of Christianity is not its factual authenticity, not its documentary truth, but its metaphorical or poetical power. A poem can say something truthful because poetry functions on the level of truth, even if it is not a statistical recording of the actual historical data.

I ve recently been reading about the academic study of the historical Jesus. The study of the archeological, anthropological and sociological context of the stories which are related in the Christian Scriptures. These academic studies bear out the view that many stories about Jesus are in fact no more than stories, they just couldn’t have happened the way the Bible writers tell us.
Here’s one example; in the book of Luke, Jesus public ministry begins when he walks into the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth and reads from the scrolls; “The spirit of the Lord is upon me – his word is on my tongue”.

Well archeology tells us that Nazareth in the first century, was a tiny hamlet of perhaps 300 single story dwellings of two rooms; one for livestock, one for people, and it had no public buildings at all; there was no market, no meeting house and certainly no synagogue.
And historical anthropology tells us that Jesus might have spoken Aramaic but its vanishingly unlikely that he would have read the Hebrew of Isaiah where the quote Luke has him read comes from, and historical sociology tells us that a 1st century peasant carpenter would have been unlikely to be able to read at all – illiteracy in Palestine at the time would have been 97% only 3 % could read or write, some of the Rulers and Roman govenors and some clergy, and carpenters or Tekton as Jesus is described in Mark’s Greek were at the lowest end of the spectrum of the working poor.

But as poetic truth, the story may have more to say; that the figure of Jesus of Nazareth shared with the prophet Isaiah a poetic way of conveying the message of liberation and equality, and that he spoke it authentically from his own place or centre.

And so might the story of Jesus resurrection mean more than the literal tale.

The parables by Jesus, Jesus way of communicating directly with common people through metaphor and story became the parables about him; the way that the first communities following him transmitted the truth and power of his intimate presence and influence in their lives.
Jesus story of the great banquet read by Xina is a tale that sociologists of the period, historians who understand the context in which the tale is told can reveal to us is a story of real transgression, because 1st century Mediterranean society was based on patronage, on clear hierarchical power relationships, without these boundaries it must have been assumed society would completely disintegrate.
John Dominic Crossan writes “If one actually brought anyone off the street, one could…have classes, sexes, and ranks all mixed in together…” and that is a situation which would have been unthinkable for a 1st century theocratic society.
He suggests that we think of our own times and reflect for a moment – if beggars came to your door consider the difference between giving them some food to take with them, and inviting them into the kitchen. And then think of bringing them into the dining room to eat with your family, or of having them come back on Saturday night for supper with a group of your friends.
In any given society food rules are basic to interaction, “Implicit in them is a series of obligations to give, receive and repay”.
The table operates as a minature model of society. And society is based on give, receive and repay.
These are the conventions and transactions that Jesus is radically opposing in his parable of the great banquet – He suggests, I think, that we that we overturn debt and redemption, obligation and benefit (or sacrifice and atonement) altogether…

a day after coming to Jerusalem he demonstrates this new kind of meal in an upper room when he breaks and shares bread, he makes a new kind of model of society which he calls the Kingdom, a place of open commensality, a non discriminating table, depicting in miniature, a non discriminating society. (John Dominic Crossan)

And so what happens next in the story?

In the years after appearing so dramatically in the siege of La Realidad in Mexico, the person known as ‘Marcos’ had eventually retired from public view.
The Zapatistas project was still under attack but a new generation of activists were positively moving forward. In the face of war the Zapatistas had successfully ‘waged peace’ and their Little Schools in particular were a model of social action for justice. For a teacher called Galeano, the little schools were “a way for us to communicate, to know other people from the city, from our country, and from the world. It is a bridge for us to communicate through.” But on May 2 2014 Galeano was attacked outside his school and brutally murdered, he suffered blows from machete, one to his mouth, and died from gunshots at close range to his head.

This murder led to a wave of public grief and defiance and Marcos, reappeared for a brief moment; in a statement he said:
When we saw compañero Galeano, we saw the murderers, and we also saw who is behind those murders. Galeano lives!
In and act of poetry as well as defiance he dropped his own name Marcos and took on instead the name Galeano.
“We think one of us must die so Galeano can live.” he said “So death does not take a life but a name.”

This is the story of a modern resurrection.

In response to the attack, the Zapatistas are asking for justice rather than vengeance – so now, months after he was attacked and killed, Galeano says;
“If you ask me to summarize our laborious path in few words, it would be: Our efforts are for peace, theirs are for war.”

Thank you for your attention

 

If you’re interested I ve been reading: John Dominic Crossan ‘Jesus a revolutionary Biography’, Reza Aslan ‘Zealot’, Helen Bond ‘The Historical Jesus – a guide for the Perplexed’, there is plenty on line about the EZLN try http://www.mexicosolidarity.org/programs/alternativeeconomy/zapatismo/en or http://www.schoolsforchiapas.org/