'The Maori Jesus' - Easter

(from a sermon delivered to Geelong Grammar School in 2012)

 “As yet they did not understand the scripture,

that he must rise from the dead” John 20:9

My sermon theme across Holy Week has been “heroes”. In these dark days of pandemic many of us are looking for heroes; for a saviour even. And perhaps alongside this, I might add David Bowie’s words from the 1970s: “we can be heroes”.

This night of Easter Vigil, I would like to share with you the story of James K. Baxter, an unlikely hero. He is one of New Zealand’s best-known poets and was a somewhat controversial figure before his premature death at just 46 years of age. Both his parents were heroes in their own right. His mother, Millicent Brown, was educated at P.L.C. in Sydney, and went on to study at the University of Sydney in a time when very few women did so. His father, Archibald Baxter, is best known as a conscientious objector in the First World War. It was a big deal to take such a stance at that time, when acts of pacifism in time of war were rewarded by being arrested by the armed forces, transported to the front line of the battlefield, and then tied to a fence in the line of fire.

James K. Baxter has been compared to Australian poet Francis Webb, and like Webb purportedly began writing poetry at the tender age of seven. He went to university at 17 and that year published his first collection of poetry, Beyond the Palisades. He later dropped out of university and famously took up a job as a humble cleaner at the Chelsea Sugar Refinery, before marrying Jaqueline Sturm in 1948, and around this time he converted to Catholicism.

After becoming a father and building a life as an academic and successful poet, in 1968 Baxter had a profound spiritual experience; he claimed that God had instructed him in a dream to “go to Jerusalem”. He took this call quite literally, left his university position and went to a small Maori settlement on the Whanganui river, called “Hiruharama” or “Jerusalem”, where he set up a Christian commune. He lived in extreme simplicity, continued to write poetry, and made frequent visits to Wellington and other New Zealand cities where he worked with the poor and spoke out publically against the injustices of society as he saw them.

It was an idealistic and a gruelling life of poverty that he chose for himself, and after just four years it began to take its toll. In January 1972 he was forced to leave the community he had founded at Jerusalem, and on 22nd October he suffered a coronary thrombosis and died. He was buried on Maori land near his beloved community of Jerusalem, and is one of the few pakeha, or white New Zealanders, to have been given the honour of a full Maori tangi, or funeral.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, as I was preparing my Easter Vigil sermon, and looking for heroes, I couldn’t go past James K. Baxter and his haunting Easter poem: “The Maori Jesus”. It is a poem that eats into you, a poem that turns things upside down in order to get a better look at truth. You may know it. In fact I published it in the St Peter’s parish magazine soon after taking up my Incumbency here in 2012. It is an Easter poem; but it comes with a warning. It is not the sort of Easter poem you might expect. The Jesus Baxter writes of is not your clean and tidy, neatly orthodox Jesus; neither is Baxter’s theology of the resurrection quite what the professional theologians might present. It is rough and down to earth, controversial even; much like Baxter himself. Yet I think it holds a poignant resurrection theology for these dark times of pandemic.

“The Maori Jesus” by James K. Baxter (c. 1966)
I saw the Maori Jesus
Walking on Wellington Harbour.
He wore blue dungarees,
His beard and hair were long.
His breath smelled of mussels and paraoa.
When he smiled it looked like the dawn.
When he broke wind the little fishes trembled.
When he frowned the ground shook.
When he laughed everybody got drunk.

The Maori Jesus came on shore
And picked out his twelve disciples.
One cleaned toilets in the railway station;
His hands were scrubbed red to get the shit out of the pores.
One was a call-girl who turned it up for nothing.
One was a housewife who had forgotten the Pill
And stuck her TV set in the rubbish can.
One was a little office clerk
Who'd tried to set fire to the Government Buildings.
Yes, and there were several others;
One was a sad old queen;
One was an alcoholic priest
Going slowly mad in a respectable parish.

The Maori Jesus said, 'Man,
From now on the sun will shine.'

He did no miracles;
He played the guitar sitting on the ground.

The first day he was arrested
For having no lawful means of support.
The second day he was beaten up by the cops
For telling a dee his house was not in order.
The third day he was charged with being a Maori
And given a month in Mt Crawford.
The fourth day he was sent to Porirua
For telling a screw the sun would stop rising.
The fifth day lasted seven years
While he worked in the Asylum laundry
Never out of the steam.
The sixth day he told the head doctor,
'I am the Light in the Void;
I am who I am.'
The seventh day he was lobotomised;
The brain of God was cut in half.

On the eighth day the sun did not rise.
It did not rise the day after.
God was neither alive nor dead.
The darkness of the Void,
Mountainous, mile-deep, civilised darkness
Sat on the earth from then till now.

It is easy to forget how scandalous the person of Jesus was to so many in first-century Palestine. He was a working-class man, the son of a carpenter, a “chippie”. His followers were not academics or judges or upstanding religious figures. They were not even courageous. Most fled when Jesus’ hour came. Only the women, and the disciple he loved, remained weeping at the foot of his cross, and outside the tomb.

Baxter’s resurrection Void is perhaps a little shocking, not quite the ending we would expect. But it is an important reminder of what resurrection is, and what it is not. Jesus’ conquering of the grave may not have been as tidy as we present it in our Easter liturgies. It probably took time; resurrection takes time; God’s time, not ours.

Historically, for the early church, it probably took much longer for the Risen Christ to truly manifest, than three days of our sacred texts and liturgy. It was more of an unstoppable tide. Slowly, but surely, for those grief-stricken disciples, and those fragile early church communities, into the Void came a spark of light, breath of new life: in the upper room, by the lakeside, on the road to Emmaus, on the Damascus road.

Resurrection is a mystery, yes, but it is also a truth; a deep and profound truth we share with countless thousands across the centuries.

The exquisitely crafted drama of the gospel of St Matthew is designed, in and through the Spirit of God, to draw us into the living reality of Christ’s resurrection, here and now, so that it may become our own reality. Like the two Marys at the tomb, the resurrection may be a fearful thing, beyond our understanding. They receive the truth, it hits them like an earthquake, like an angel’s voice, and then they run to tell the others, with “fear and great joy”.

Resurrection comes in unexpected ways, and in God’s time, not ours. I have to confess, in this time of pandemic, resurrection truth feels more like an earthquake than a gentle Spirit breath or angel’s voice. Or perhaps even Baxter’s lobotomy and resurrection Void!

But like the grieving Marys, in fear and great joy, let us run to tell others of the truth we have found in the risen Christ.