It remains conjectural what lay at the heart of the sermon that an abruptly skeletal Archbishop Robert Rivas delivered on Easter Sunday. Was it a lesson about humility? Or was it just naked partisan politics under a cassock? Certainly he referenced politicians more often than he did the man whose name has always been synonymous with Easter.
Thanks to the government’s curfew and social distancing, Rivas was left to preach to a congregation in absentia via video-cams, with not a collection plate in sight. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were to see the leader of the opposition, Mr. Philip J. Pierre, coming out of a tomb, and as he steps out he goes immediately and knocks at the side of another tomb with a big stone blocking the entrance?”
I know what I would do, never mind I can think of no possible motive for hanging around graveyards in the middle of the night. I would try ever so gently to squeeze out of my diffident friend Philip what he’d been up to inside that tomb. Also, how long he’d been having intercourse with the dead. Did his graveyard conversations have anything to do with boloms and the next general elections? Why was he banging the side of that other tomb? I might also have diplomatically recommended a heart to heart with someone at the Wellness Center.
Rivas went on, his tone reminiscent of Christopher Lee in The Prince of Darkness: “He wonders where his help would come from, when suddenly an angel appears and rolls the stone away. The angel then says to him, ‘Do not be afraid to do what you have decided to do for the good of the nation.’ And then the angel disappears. Then with great emotion, and with love for the nation stricken by a pandemic, Pierre sighs and says: ‘Allen, honorable leader of the nation, come out of your tomb. The time of isolation is over. Come and see the light.’ ”
The archbishop urged his invisible congregation to imagine Philip J. Pierre, of all people, inexplicably skulking around a pitch-dark bone yard in the dead of night. We are left to wonder about what the leader of the opposition might’ve been doing inside the first mentioned tomb, why he was banging the one next door with a big stone blocking its entrance. The robed storyteller offered no clues. Obviously he’s into Stephen King suspense!
Then there’s the angel that drops in from nowhere to reassure and advise an ostensibly petrified Pierre (his demeanor while moving a certain dead-in-the-water no-confidence House motion comes to mind) to do what already he had “decided to do for the good of the nation.” After the angel has said his or her piece and vanished into thin air, the leader of the opposition tells the leader of the nation, through the wall of their tomb, presumably, to come out, now that the darkness has given way to light. (Rivas does not say whether LUCELEC played a role.)
Does Aesop come to mind, dear reader? Noah’s Ark? The archbishop does not tell when they were entombed, whether or not they were still breathing. He says only that at a frightened Pierre’s behest, “the prime minister walks out with his team of parliamentarians, each with his or her portfolio, standing six feet apart from each other—even though the CMO had said there was no reason for distancing anymore. The two leaders maintained their distance, just in case. However, the playing field had changed and they had learned the lesson of the tomb: Bad politics was worse than COVID-19 and could keep a nation in bondage and in a tomb. Visionary leaders could rise above differences and take their people with them in building a nation where all are invited to share at the one table of life.”
Who knew there was such a thing as “the lesson of the tomb” and that it involved politicians and a CMO? It occurs to me that when Jesus was asked why he spoke to the people in parables, he replied: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” Also that “parable” is defined as “a simple story to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson—as told by Jesus in the gospels.” Which raises the question: On one of the most important days on his church’s calendar, what moral or spiritual lesson did the words of Rivas the archbishop illustrate?
The day Philip J. Pierre talked the leader of the nation and his fellow parliamentarians out of their tomb into the light, Rivas revealed, “death gave way to life, the two leaders put away their swords and with a pen signed a declaration that would be binding for fostering good politics for integral development and the progress of the nation. All over the world, leaders, on hearing this story, adopted more humble and servant leadership styles, putting aside arrogance and aggression and became willing to cooperate more in the interest of the common good for their nations.”
Stay with me, dear reader, I promise it can only get better. The archbishop has kindly given us the first hint that Allen Chastanet and his crew of ten were rotting in their mass grave until Pierre spoke his resurrecting words. “Death gave way to light,” spake the archbishop to his quarantined audience. What’s more, he said, the two leaders laid down swords we never knew they carried until now. But best of all was the hyperbolic impact of the resurrection of Chastanet & Company on “leaders all over the world.”
By now even the staunchest defenders of Robert Rivas will be acknowledging, albeit only in their heads, the devil was at play in the details of the archbishop’s Easter Sunday sermon. I dare to ask: What preacher in his right mind would attempt to rewrite what millions of Christians consider the Bible’s most important story —The Resurrection—especially on an Easter Sunday in the time of COVID-19 that in just three months has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands the world over, the majority quite possibly believers? With only the best intentions, the especially faithful might say the archbishop could’ve been having a bad day; that all things considered, he was on the recalled occasion not quite himself. That he was overwhelmed.
Indeed, who in his right mind would dare to rewrite the resurrection story, to the extent of naming eleven politicians as representative of Jesus rising from the dead at the behest of a graveyard stalker. But then Rivas had been equally fast and loose with his recollection of events preceeding the death of Christ on the cross. He said: “On Palm Sunday . . . we see Jesus riding on a donkey and bringing peace. Could you see Mr. Trump, Mr. Putin, Mr. Boris Johnson, Mrs Angela Merkel, Mr. Allen Chastanet, Mr. Keith Rowley, riding a donkey to bring peace to the capital cities in the world?” In his telling the donkey as “a simple mount,” and “Jesus on the donkey the symbol of a humble leader, a king he comes to serve, not to be served.”
Whether or not inadvertently, the archbishop left little doubt where he stood politically. Surely he knew he was implying that such as Donald Trump, Angela Merkel through to Allen Chastanet were not servant-leaders. (I choose to believe his audience resisted the archbishop’s invitation to fantasize over Angela Merkel riding through the streets of Jerusalem astride an ass!) The archbishop’s unspoken declaration was that the Democrats in the U.S. and the St. Lucia Labour Party in Saint Lucia, opposers of Trump and Chastanet, respectively, were made of more humble stuff; that they were committed to serving—not to being served!
No surprise that Rivas recently issued the following public apology. He never meant “to offend anyone,” he said, “especially the prime minister, when right now we need more than ever to be our brothers and our sisters’ keepers.” He paused, bowed, before dramatically re-engaging the video-cams. “Forgive me, my dear prime minister,” he went on, “if my parable caused you grief and ambiguity in your mind. I . . . am . . . sorry.” Rivas alone knows whether he meant to say an over-sensitive Allen Chastanet had seen insult where there was none.
In any case the apology caught me off balance. Not that I thought it unnecessary. On the contrary, it seemed to me Robert Rivas had grossly insulted not only the local faithful but also believers world-wide. And not just because he had turned his pulpit into a political platform. Discarding the Scriptures in favor of his own profane convoluted address on the holiest of days was nothing short of sacrilege. Indeed, there was a time when such behavior would’ve resulted in the blasphemer being stoned. Speaking of which leaves me to wonder about the Trinidadian archbishop’s state of mind when he imagined his own “parable” more suited to the recalled occasion than the recollections of Christ’s apostles.
Rivas slyly intimated that the prime minister may have requested an apology in his own behalf. The truth is that demand came from the higher echelons of the Catholic faith. Time will tell whether what the archbishop offered in the guise of an apology harmonizes with the orders of his blessed superiors!
