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The Metamorphosis of an Ass

"When the companions of Jesus saw what was going to happen, . . . one of them struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear." For any modern reader of Scripture, that's that! The text simply describes a scuffle between the disciples of Jesus and the police prior to his arrest on Holy Thursday - nothing more. But that's not all an earlier generation of Christians might see in the text. In medieval and pre-medieval times people liked to read the Scripture allegorically. In other words, they felt every passage, indeed every word, contained some deeper meaning to be discovered - like buried treasure.

Take an 8th century English monk called the Venerable Bede. He notes regarding the passage I've quoted above that the disciple struck off the right ear of the servant. Now for Bede the right ear symbolizes our intuitive ear, the one attuned to the more profound meaning of things we read and hear. The left ear represents our tinny ear, the one that catches only surface meanings, that takes everything literally. So to strike off the right hear of the servant is to deprive him of his deeper sense of reality, leave him with a superficial appreciation of life. In that context it's not surprising that Jesus quickly protests against such surgery. "Enough!" he says. And then he touches the man's ear and heals him - which to Bede says: "Jesus has come to restore our intuitive powers, our ability to get beneath the surface of things, to hear what a merely left-eared rationalist or fundamentalist can never quite pick up - the presence and poetry of God in people, nature and events."

Now listen to the way the same Venerable Bede interprets today's Palm Sunday narrative about Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. The journey begins on the Mount of Olives. Olives were a source of oil for the lamps of ancient times. The Mount of Olives therefore symbolizes Jesus himself. His teachings are the oil by which we ourselves are enlightened and become a source of light to the world around us. Jesus then sends two disciples into the village opposite the Mount of Olives. This pair represents love of God and love of neighbor and the village represents the empires of this world whose walls Christ's Gospel of twofold Love must penetrate.

In the village Jesus tells the disciples they will find "an ass tied there which no one has yet ridden". The ass is us! the human race, untamed, tied up, owned by so many negative powers: pride, arrogance, envy, fear. "Untie it and lead it back," says Jesus. And if its owners say, 'Why are you untying the beast?' the disciples are to tell them, "The Master has need of it." In other words Christ is determined to repossess and tame us, to deliver us from whatever else lays claim to us. And what happens to the beast? The text says the disciples placed their cloaks upon it. That's a way of saying that once taken into the Church we shall all be beautifully caparisoned (like those steeds of medieval tournaments); we shall be adorned with sufficient evangelical beauty to convey Christ's presence into every situation we meet.

Now some theologians frown upon this antique and somewhat subjective way of reading Scripture. But if we stay within the ample playing field marked out by our great Creeds, occasional use of the method can be as edifying and delightful for us as it was for our ancestors in the faith - among whom were Jesus himself, who uses allegory in the Gospel of Mark to explain his Parable of the Sower; and St. Paul who in his Letter to the Galatians interprets the Genesis story of Sarah and Hagar allegorically to underscore our freedom as Christians.

-Geoff Wood