U.S. President Donald Trump watches as Rev. Mariann Budde, second right, arrives at the national prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, on Jan. 21, in Washington.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
Michael Coren is an Anglican priest, journalist and author of the memoir Heaping Coals.
As a Galilean he was an outsider in Jerusalem, that epicentre of ancient Judaism soaked in history and conflict. Most of his ministry had been carried out in small towns, often with the poor and the dispossessed, and far away from the mighty and the powerful. That’s not a surprise – remember, even by Galilean standards he and his hometown were considered insignificant. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
It can, it did. The great radical of history, the rebel who sang the world a new and perfect song, the revolutionary who told us that all was possible if we forgave and empathized, understood and loved. Yeshua, Jesus, the Christ. This week we remember and commemorate his death and resurrection, the paschal sacrifice for all humanity. Initially welcomed into Jerusalem, days later he would be rejected and disowned, suffering a grotesque execution reserved for slaves and traitors. It’s a time for humility and reflection.
I can’t help thinking that there will be little of either among U.S. President Donald Trump and his people, even though theirs is the most ostentatiously and aggressively Christian administration in recent American history. The term needs qualification of course. These are mainly Christian nationalists (a painful oxymoron), conspiracy theorists obsessed with the end times, Catholics who condemn the Pope as being dangerously left-wing, prosperity preachers, and mere charlatans – Mr. Trump himself adopted the mantras of the Christian right only when he first ran for president.
So, what would I as a priest say to the man and to those around him this holy season? I’d quote the figure they mention so often, and how he said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” I’d remind them of the rich young fellow who asked Jesus what he must do to obtain eternal life, and that Jesus replied that he should sell everything and give the money to the poor.
I’d tell of Jesus in the Temple, who found people selling bruised animals for sacrifice and exchanging currency at fraudulent levels, and how he made a whip of cords, drove these exploiters out of the temple, poured their coins onto the ground and overturned their tables.
I’d remind that when Jesus spoke of war and peace, he used words that in the original Greek are not passive but demanding and insistent. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” No arms trade, no military occupation, no threats to bomb and kill.
I’d speak of community and society, and how the MAGA cult of harsh individualism is antithetical to Gospel values. “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” said Jesus. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
I’d ask them what they say to God during times of prayer. In those intimate, emotionally naked moments do they genuinely listen, do they open themselves up, ask for guidance, and question their bombast and abuse? Or do they use religion, rather than faith, as a justification for malice and division? It isn’t the first time this has happened, though some of us hoped we’d embraced history’s lessons.
I’d ask if they wondered how Jesus would have reacted to a hard-working mother being arrested and deported even though all she wanted was a better life for her children. Ask them if admiring force rather than reason was the message of the beatitudes. Ask whether the Son of God told us to lie. Ask why they were so opposed to women’s choice when Jesus never mentions abortion. Ask why they were so intimidated by society’s fringes when that was precisely where Jesus found his natural home.
Ask them, plead with them, to embrace the truth of the Easter heart set free. And that I’ll pray for them.