Jesus was riding into Jerusalem fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9. A king will come victorious yet humble riding a donkey and not a war horse. Jesus was doing what scholars call a sign-act, physically embodying the message of God. His disciples praised Jesus and God. A multitude of disciples cried out,not just a few, not even just 12. There was also a crowd there. They are not said to cry out but they do lay their cloaks down for the donkey to walk on.
Some of the Pharisees in the crowd caution Jesus about this spectacle. A perspective from a Christian today may assume that all Pharisees are hypocrites and always bound to be the bad guys in the story. I want you to take a step back from that bias and consider what else the Pharisees may represent in this story. They were observant Jews, perhaps the people who held themselves to the highest standards outside of the Temple priests. They would remember the prophecy of Zechariah.
So why caution the disciples? Jesus was, at least from the perspective of the Pharisees, setting himself up as a king. This was a challenge to Herod and Caesar. In the previous chapter of Luke, a blind man had called Jesus Son of David, suggesting at a minimum a relationship to the most famous king, but maybe even Jesus as a king himself. Jesus was setting himself for punishment and even death. The Pharisees may have sought to protect Jesus and his disciples.
Pharisees may also have been wary of people praising Jesus. After all in the previous chapter of Luke, Jesus had rebuked someone for calling him good. Jesus said, “No one is good but God alone.” Jesus’s response here is very different.
Jesus tells them if the disciples were silent that the very stones would cry out. You may recall from the beginning of the Gospel of Luke that John the Baptist also warned people referencing stones. He cautioned the crowds not to rely on having Abraham as an ancestor to justify themselves before God. He warns them that “God is able to, from these stones, raise up children to Abraham.”
There seems to be something going on with these stones. Can stones cry out? Can people come from stones? We reflexively come from an Enlightenment mindset and classify stones as inanimate but it helps if we remember it wasn’t always this way. The world was once seen as full of a sort of spiritual energy and the unexpected miracle could be around any corner.
As an Enlightenment believer you may find yourself falling into a Deist viewpoint. For Deists, God created the universe, but is now separate and far away whether by physical distance or perhaps another dimension. Creation itself is made of life and non-life and never the twain shall meet. Miracles either never happened or at least haven’t happened for a long time.
What if this wasn’t the way? What if stones have power? We can at least look through the window at a pre-Rational worldview even if we can’t fully inhabit it. There were spirits everywhere and in just about everything. Stones held magical power and were sometimes connected to gods. People like Lot’s wife or those that confronted Medusa turned to stone. In Genesis people were made from mud. Idols could be carved from stone and make real change in people’s lives.
In a polytheistic world, gods and spirits were everywhere. Part of the journey from polytheism to monotheism involved a stop at henotheism having a high God in charge of lower gods and spirits. Despite moves toward monotheism, belief in local gods, and, even today, belief in angels, and demons have held on stubbornly.
In a world saturated with miracles, spirits, gods, and magic, stones crying out does not seem far fetched. In a world where humans were made out of little more than mud and breath, surely God could make stones into more humans too. How can we connect to that world and their people who saw the world that way?
We do not need to choose between Deism where God is unreachable and a pre-Rational worldview we cannot quite believe. There is another option. What if God is not separate from creation? What if God is not “out there” but everywhere around us? Everywhere you look is sacred. The sacred is not breaking in from outside, but is and always was part of everything we see.
We may see the world around us as unliving. In the early stories from around three to four thousand years ago, sometimes the universe was more than nonliving, it was dead. The world was made of the dead bodies of gods. In the Hindu Rig Veda X, the other gods sacrifice the god Purusha to make the world. https://www.britannica.com/topic/pantheism/Pantheism-and-panentheism-in-non-Western-cultures The Babylonian Enuma Elish tells of the god Marduk dividing the goddess Tiamat’s body in half to create the earth and the sky. The listeners to the stories got down the sense of everything coming from something bigger and sacred, but for them it was lifeless–literally dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat
Later Hindu writing speaks of a supreme being or soul of the universe known as Brahman.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/brahman-Hindu-concept Brahman does not need to be a god who is a person to affect the world nor to be on the outside looking in. Brahman is alive and everywhere. Brahman is the underlying nature of the universe.
Key Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas described God as a perfect being. The characteristics of God included omnipotence (all powerful), omnibenevolence (all good), and omnipresence (everywhere). Some of us like to call these the Omnis. Omnipresent is the key for us today. Frequently this is thought of as a potential to be anywhere, but what if it actually meant that God is always everywhere all at once. The Gospel of Thomas, a noncanonical gospel, records Jesus saying that he is everywhere, “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there” (Saying 77). In the same way in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus reveals that the Kingdom of God is not a “when,” nor is the Kingdom of God is just in one place or another. Indeed, “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’” (17:20-21)
For Quakers, no place is holier than another–not the inside of a meeting house, not a thousand year old church, nor a newly built non-denominational sanctuary. No one is holier than another regardless of how many pray for them and lay hands on them. Nothing is holier–not blessed bread nor wine nor building. Yet like the song says, “Everything is holy now.” (Peter Mayer, “Holy Now”)
Since the 17th Century, old ideas like pantheism and panentheism have gotten new life and interpretation free from origin stories involving the death of gods. From philosophers to poets to scientists many contribute. Key western thinkers on the topic include Baruch Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Paul Tillich. More recently scientists Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan have laid out pantheism as a new path to bringing science and reverence together. Sagan told us that “The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the Universe to know itself”. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman saw God within the world around us. They brought back the sense of wonder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism William Blake spoke of the ability “To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.” (“Auguries of Innocence,”
With pantheism or panentheism we can reclaim the wonder of God’s presence everywhere moving away from the disconnected God of Deism and the pre-Rational God which is no longer comprehensible. Holiness is right where we are not imputed from another dimension.
I have seen it standing amongst Sequoias. I have felt it floating in the deep blue above 300 feet of ocean. We do not have to believe in many spirits nor a God “out there.”
When you see a sunset God is there. In a rainbow and a butterfly God is there. Things do not need to be either only magical or only real. With eyes to see and ears to hear you can observe magic in the real.
We can turn our backs on Aristotle’s idea that maggots could magically appear from rotting meat
while still gasping in wonder at the Miller-Urey experiments where biomolecules form from electricity and a mixture of gases from the early earth.
We needn’t believe stars are holes in the roof of the sky in order to lose ourselves in a seeming eternity of the billions of years they have been there. Humility in the face of floods and atmospheric rivers do not require floodgates of heaven nor fountains of the deep. Nature is sacred, awful, and awesome.
Now we return to where we began. Seeing beyond Rationalism and magical thinking can go beyond restoring wonder to the world and offer new political realities. The improbable can be the truth. Can you see the possibility that Jesus is not just some foolish man from a small town in the backwaters of the Roman Empire? Could Jesus actually be a victorious king? Possibilities open up. Peace can solve problems that war cannot. Love can be victorious when we are told violence is always the answer.
Silencing the multitude will not take away the truth.The stones already cry out.
Can you hear them? The stones remind us. The Kingdom of God is among you. You are loved. Love one another. There is abundance. Make sure everyone has enough. Everything is sacred. Care for it well.
When have you seen the sacred in nature?
What do the stones say to you?
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