Now, O Lord,
Take my lips and speak through them;
Take our minds and think through them;
Take our hearts and set them afire with Your love.
Amen.

Contemplation, Resistance, Simplicity: These are the terms — the postures, as we call them — that were named as particularly appropriate for the season of Lent. While we may not have referred to them every week, they remained subtly etched in our liturgy and quietly active in all of our reflections. They were the watchwords of Lent. Even if we did not always tend to them, they, it might be said, kept watch over us.

Lent is that season when we follow Jesus into the wilderness by figuratively inhabiting deserts of our own —
perhaps by disabusing ourselves of some of the pleasures, distractions, and excess of consumer culture.
Perhaps by intentionally taking on a discipline of study or a spiritual practice.
It is not completely coincidental, I think, that it was during the season of Lent that Haven began a new ministry of simple meditation and quiet contemplation.
To say that Lent is a time for simplicity and contemplation is to say that it is a time of letting go and becoming more mindful.

There is an interesting and profound connection, too, between simplicity and contemplation — for to simplify is also to clarify. When we let go of the distracting ephemera that so quickly fills our time, our minds, and our homes, we begin to create the mental and spiritual space to concentrate and intensify the deeper truths of life — our own mortality, our own weaknesses, our deepest desires and ownmost longings — and we thereby prepare ourselves for encounter with God. To simplify is to clarify and to make room for contemplation.

And there is also a connection here with resistance:

There is a real subversive potential in the life that has been made simple, minimal, and concentrated. For the unencumbered existence, the life without a spiritual investment in the ego or the world as it is, the one who has “unplugged” from the matrix will be more nimble, less visible, less policeable. And all the more dangerous to the status quo for those very reasons. I have said before that capitalism is threatened by silence. But so too does it tremble before simplicity.
***

As we leave the desert of Lent and begin to follow Jesus on the path to his passion and death, Contemplation, Simplicity, and Resistance continue to keep their watch over us.

Indeed there is a profound simplicity to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem: A donkey, some peasants and their coats, some palm leaves.
The acclamations of “Hosanna” seem almost out of place,
disproportionate to what is actually happening.
A man on a donkey, moving slowly toward his own death. Does Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem need to be “triumphal” in order to be effective, to be subversive, to somehow embody resistance to the empire that is poised to murder him? 

In the face of empire, with the abundance of ornamental might and spectacular violence at its disposal, what could be more subversive than the smallness and simplicity of the approach of a man on a donkey?

***

The clip we just watched, in it’s own way, juxtaposes Simplicity with Resistance even at the level of cinematic technique — even in the way the movie was made.

This scene seems to lack all the drama that Hollywood would have us believe is fitting to a movie about a biblical story.

Think of the silly disputes over the Darren Aronofsky’s Noah film, the conservative reaction to the “liberties” he’s said to have taken, the “embellishments” he’s said to have added. And yet, these guardians of the tradition seem somehow oblivious to the fact that such embellishments and “novelizations” of biblical stories have always been the norm. Especially among the cinematic favourites: Ben Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told, King of Kings. Indeed, even the ostensibly more “literal” adaptations of the Jesus movie, or the Passion of the Christ, regularly fill gaps by supplementing one Gospel version with another, by adding transitions between scenes, or by imposing an extraneous narrative logic.

But the liberals are no better. They’ve praised Aronosksy’s artistic liberties as imaginative or even courageous. But in so doing, haven’t they simply mistaken the culture wars for what really matters? Haven’t they confused some calculated provocations with real courage and imagination? They seem to miss the possibility that minimalism and even a certain literalism could be more urgent and more crucial than bourgeois embellishments.

I offer you Pier Paolo Pasolini as one such literalist. His portrayal of Jesus’ life in his 1964 film, The Gospel According to St Matthew, is a true cinematic translation of that biblical book. Somewhat ironically, this gay, Marxist, lapsed-Catholic is able to beat the conservatives at their own game: The script of the film is taken word-for-word from Matthew’s Gospel, with no attempt to fill the gaps or downplay the awkwardness of his translation. The result is a disjunctive and sometimes unwieldily series of events.

He does not turn Jesus into a complex, liberal, do-gooder, but let’s the figure of the Jewish messiah be drawn with understated even laconic lines.

Jesus and the disciples are seemingly flat in Pasolini’s film, almost emotionless. Their demeanour seems completely lacking in passion. To add this emotional complexity would have been to provide something that is not present in the text itself.

There is an extreme physicality and earthiness to his portrayal. There is no attempt to convey psychological depth, let alone transcendence or luminosity in these scenes.

Pasolini sought to portray Jesus not as he has come to be understood in the tradition or in popular consciousness, with familiar clichés, but in the discreet strangeness of Matthew’s narrative.

And simplicity was his route. The minimalism of his technique (no studio, no artificial lighting, no make-up, no professional actors) was meant to clarify, to intensify, the way in which Jesus — and the people he attracted — should be experienced as awkward and thereby troubling and disarming. Indeed, Pasolini describes Jesus as embodying a certain violence toward the status quo by virtue of his strangeness.

He said that the figure of Christ that he was trying to convey was one who should
“finally assume the violence inhering in any rebellion which radically contradicts the appearance and shape of modern life”

In other words, Pasolini is saying that Jesus should be seen as the embodiment of all countercultural revolt. A revolt against what Pasolini described as a “grey orgy of cynicism, irony, brutality, compromise and conformism.”

Pasolini’s minimalism and literalism do not preserve the purity of history or tradition, they convey a small but profound revolt. He uses a method of simplicity in order to clarify and intensify the possibility of resistance.

Listen to Roger Ebert on this film maker:

Pasolini attempted to find a "sacred technique" to render his version of the story of Christ, plunging into its spiritual mysteries with an almost brute physical immediacy. Faithful to the Biblical text on which it is based, the starkly beautiful Gospel nevertheless dwells on key Pasolinian themes: the plight of the oppressed, the struggle between rationalism and spirituality, the sacredness of the outcast.

You see, Pasolini sought to find a way to make the simple, the minimal, the understated, carry a revolutionary potential — A potential that exceeded the grand and verbose spectacle of contemporary culture and politics.

And does this “sacred technique” of Pasolini’s not bear a profound resemblance to the Jesus of today’s Gospel? For the simplicity of Jesus’ approach — a donkey, some peasants and their coats, some palms — was nonetheless deeply disruptive and troubling to the empire. It was disruptive and troubling enough to get him killed after all.

And the simplicity of his entry into the city, his minuscule movement toward Jerusalem:
did it not culminate in an extreme simplicity?
In a (dare we call it contemplative) self-emptying on the cross?
In an ultimate act of resistance?

Contemplation, Simplicity, Resistance: these postures, it would seem, have something to do with the one who comes in the name of the Lord.

They would seem to indicate a way we might undertake our “approach” to empire
not by expanding our power, but by pointing to the power of weakness,
By making way for the awkward approach of the Messiah.
and by awkwardly gesturing toward the approach of the Kingdom.
“not with thunder and silk,” but with peasants and with palms.
In contemplation, simplicity, and resistance.
Hosanna, indeed. Amen.