Occupy Jerusalem

The Occupy Wall Street movement started when the Canadian editor of an anti-consumerism magazine proposed the occupation of Wall Street on September 17, 2011. His call to action went viral and spawned a worldwide movement. Groups representing the “99%” protested a variety of causes and many engaged in criminal behavior causing millions of dollars of property damage. These protesters required public safety agencies to clear encampments; make arrests and restore order. Media reports spun the movement as representing the economically trampled on one hand or as anarchists trying to take over the world on the other. I saw firsthand in San Francisco how a small group of people disrupted communities and disrespected people who chose not to be part of their movement.

Behind it all is a man not really interested in meaningful reform proclaiming, “We will wreck the world.” He and his followers are self described anarchists. His first act of defiance was to jam a quarter into a shopping cart dispensing machine in a Canadian supermarket parking lot rendering it inoperable. “I didn’t stop to analyze whether this was ethical or not. I just let my anger flow.” What followed was a philosophy that espoused the hatred of big business in any form. “Let your anger out. When it wells up suddenly from deep in your gut, don’t suppress it -- channel it, trust it, use it. Don’t be so unthinkingly civil all the time. Rage drives revolutions.”

With the beginning of Lent, we celebrate and remember a very different Occupy movement in Jerusalem. Occupy Jerusalem took place 2,000 years ago on what we call Palm Sunday. Matthew 21 describes it this way, “The disciples…brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Hosanna in the highest heaven!’ When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, 'Who is this?’ The crowds answered, ‘This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.’”

This “occupy” movement started with one man and twelve apostles. This was no call to anarchy but a call to repentance. Jesus would unite God to man on the cross and break the power of sin. If Jesus and his followers were part of the 1%, it was only to reach the 99% that were perishing. Where one man called followers to anarchy to, “wreck the world,” Jesus called people, by grace, to be saved through faith.

1 John 4:4-6, “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.”

John 1: 1-5, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”