John 12:12-16
Were you happy with the Palm Sunday Rap we did together with the children? What part of it made you excited? What made you feel uncertain? Is uncertainty necessarily negative or bad in our lives? Or can it be a state of being in which we still engage meaningfully with ourselves, with the activity at hand, and learn something?
We’ve all heard of some of the different intelligence categories: the most familiar may be I.Q..These days we talk a lot about the importance of E.Q. (emotional intelligence) and Multiple intelligences. I have one more addition for you - recently, I had an opportunity to learn about “Dynamic intelligence” at a workshop regarding children’s development and thought ‘That really sounds like theology or faith.’
What is dynamic intelligence? To put it simply, “It is the ability to make decisions, and to learn from our decisions, when we face something NEW.”
Our lives continually present us with:
Predictability: (which feels comfortable) and
Uncertainty: (which is an opportunity for growth).
(Several pictures of the ordinary moments of our daily lives.)
Some of these moments require us to make a decision, some do not; it depends on whether we are faced with some degree of uncertainty. What represents Uncertainty among these pictures? (Traffic cones)
Before we study the story from the Gospel of John which N read for us this morning, let’s try some exercises to see which parts of an activity are predictable and which parts are uncertain.
Which part of this activity is predictable and which part is uncertain?
The same question. (Which part of this activity is predictable and which part is uncertain?)
Some predictability is essential; it creates stability and consistency and helps with establishing a routine or a system to support peoples’ well-being. Yet, how about this? Think about children or ourselves. If we make a decision in a familiar situation and we already know how it’s going to turn out, we may feel comfortable (or even bored…) but we’re not going to learn or grow from it.
Some uncertainty is not helpful. For example, if there’s only uncertainty dominating a situation where multiple people are supposed to work together, with no guidelines or protocol available to tell them what to do and how to do it, it would be nerve-wracking or at least annoying. However, how about this? Think about how children and we learn. If we make a decision and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out, we may feel excited or stressed. But we will learn something from our decision.
Dynamic intelligence affirms that some important growth and learning occurs when we continually experiment with new situations, especially when working in community (experimenting along with other people). We need to develop a balance of static intelligence and dynamic intelligence. We need both of them when we work in community. Yet, embracing uncertainty is particularly important because it is about making new decisions to create new norms. It is dynamic because we cannot know ahead of time the outcome of experimenting with new challenges and new opportunity. It requires us to adopt a growth mindset. This “growth mindset” is really a model of faith, and children are the natural teachers in this field: typically, children look for opportunities to learn from uncertain situations, while adults often look for ways to return to the predictable.
Now, let’s engage with an exercise on today’s Gospel story, which is printed in the bulletin. There are some highlighters provided under your chairs, one yellow and one blue for two people to share. Read the passage and highlight all the parts you perceive as illustrating either Predictability or Uncertainty. Please highlight Predictability in blue and Uncertainty in pink (or yellow). Which part of this story is predictability and which part of this story is uncertainty?
How many of you highlighted “Branches of palm trees” in yellow as Uncertainty? I did!
Here’s the result of my own exercise:
“The festival” is Predictability as it is the holiday all Jewish people were expected to observe.
“The great crowd” is Uncertainty. A large body of gathered people can present the potential of power: power to change or power to resist change. Power to rebel or power to oppress. When many people gather around a strongly held hope, it is perceived as a threat by the authorities.
“Jesus coming to town” is Uncertainty. You don’t know what Jesus is going to do.
And there happened to be some palm trees. These familiar plants that had always been there, part of the scenery, become a powerful symbol of resilience and a banner of the dream for a new kingdom. People coming out to meet Jesus was a huge event, defying the people in power and authority. People even shouted with the loudest Hosanna! People declared, “Jesus is the new King!” Everything these crowds were doing was loud, shocking, explosive, dismantling, unsettling.
Then Jesus came onto the scene, with a different kind of Uncertainty. He found a donkey - by the way, “finding” is Uncertainty: something happened to be there, and you had to happen to find it: the humble, small, young, four-legged animal. And Jesus “sat” on it, gently, unhurried, quietly. This peace, this warmth that Jesus embodies, almost invisible yet powerful, contrasting with the crowd’s loud welcome is the new norm of Uncertainty. At first, you are not sure what he’s doing – it seems very un-Messiahlike, acting with such beautiful, tender, feminine uncertainty…
Remember young Mary on the donkey when she was pregnant with him and, after Christ’s birth, migrating to Egypt, travelling at night? The new King shows that love is the truest, most powerful Uncertainty, visually displaying the new norm of the peaceful realm of heaven on earth. Some people among the crowd who went wild for Jesus at first - who were enchanted by their own conception of what the new King should be like - betrayed this new peaceful Uncertainty and nailed it on the cross - because they sadly couldn’t understand Jesus’ new Uncertainty.
What can we learn from this story?
Palm Sunday is not about Predictability but Uncertainty. In most cases, society wants us to believe that to be successful we need to learn how to establish predictability through an aggressive, individualistic, survival mode of life on this land. But - relationship is a fundamental Uncertainty. People are Uncertainty. So in the pro-survival model, the need to build strong relationships often goes missing. Even the Bible tries to strengthen Predictability in today’s story. Is there anybody who highlighted this in blue? “As it is written: Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt.” Let us ask, if there had been no mention of the donkey in the earlier literature of Jewish history, would it make the Uncertainty of Jesus’ finding the young donkey less legitimate? Would it be less true if it has not been predicted? Like “If it is not written in the Bible?”
The written prophecy in the earlier literature doesn’t make Jesus’ new norm of Uncertainty more or less true than what it is. It is Jesus’ own creative variance - finding a donkey and sitting on it. Faith is a beautiful and humble companion when we journey through and between Predictability and Uncertainty in our lives. Important spiritual growth happens when we let loose the reins of faith, adopt a “growth mindset” through Uncertainty, and run free on the road of Creativity.
On this Palm Sunday, 2018, I hope you see the palm leaf in your hand as a reminder of the alternate, gentle kind of Uncertainty Jesus invited us to embrace to create and recreate beautiful variances of justice, peace, and compassion. May our faith, as the spiritual dynamic intelligence, be the reins for navigating Uncertainty through love, in our lives. Find your donkey.
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