Mules

And then another meander of thought in which we hunker down on Jesus’ own seminal choice for an ass-consort, when taking his posse straight into the central nation-state “lair” for a final showdown (Mk 11:1–11 and the other gospel treatments). Chapter 11 goes deep into this culminating episode in the Nazarene’s confrontation with the Powers, conjuring the context as a public battle of disparate parades—Jesus-on-a-burro coming from the east with Passover pilgrimage crowds faced off in the space of urban Jerusalem against Pilate-on-a-horse with equestrian legion coming from the west, strutting might and militancy. At stake is the meaning of the monarchical evocations entertained. Is the Galilean prophet in quest of provoking a Maccabean-like revolt under the aegis of a Davidic Redivivus? Or is his orchestration subtly pillorying not only Roman pretension, but also the historic Israelite choice for royal pomp and wealth betraying Israel’s original vocation (I Sam 8:4–22; 10:17–19; 12:1–19)—and doing so by way of a “ridden riddle”? Did Jesus’ choice for a common burro over a royal mule subtly signal Israel’s original MO as a “kingdom” (!) of “priests” recovering nomadic autonomy and localized savvy learned from Sinai sands and Canaanite hill country (Exod 19:6)? The tack here reads the messianic theatrics as parabolic polemics: riding down Temple-State ostentation by adopting an ancient convention of solid “positioning” on the back of the long-time “friend” whose particular abilities had long enabled human viability in that otherwise harsh ecology. And it begs reading in relationship to archeo-shards of memory of our species’ first self-depictions as far back as (17,000 BCE) Lascaux Cave paintings of magnificent animal compositions flanked by miniature and minimalist human depictions as well as later (13,000 BCE) Trois-Freires Sorcerer evocations of human-animal composites—an owl-eyed, horse-bear-human-deer-bison eco-being in true-to-form rendition, not yet self-isolating in the delusion and solipsism of civilization and its aftermath. What if the central thrust of this final epiphany is indeed a recovered monstrosity—a “God” becoming incarnate in history not merely in anthropocentric anatomy, but actually a burro-human hybridity generic and genuine to that particular local ecozone and significant of localized symbiosis in whatever unique partnerships it marshals in quite varied ecozones?