The Gospel According to Athon

by The Rev. Bill Gaventa

Preface
This story is an allegorical expression of thanks to the people whom we call "handicapped," "retarded" or "disabled" for what they and their families have taught me about the Story that calls us all together as disciples of Christ and the people of God.

To whomever it may concern, and whomever is able to translate my peculiar language into human talk, my name is Athon, or Emer, in Hebrew, which means a "donkey," a "foal" or an "ass." In as much as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have presented their versions of what happened on that first Christmas and Easter, and in the life of that man Jesus, I thought it only appropriate that I do the same. After all, I was there, or members of my family were, and those human beings wrote their stories from what they heard later from other people. (And you know how reliable that is!) But I am not going to give you a fact-by-fact description of what really happened. I just would like to tell you my story, and how I came to understand what Jesus' life really meant.

Now, you may wonder about the reliability of this account, for, after all, who has ever heard of a donkey or an ass contributing anything to the human search for truth, beauty or scientific accomplishment. You humans don't think we are very smart. In fact, you say we personify stupidity and dumbness. Being compared to one of us has never been a mark of success.

But our race has been around for a long time, watching you humans, and I think we have our own traditions to be proud of. My ancestors were back there at the beginning: with Abraham, who made his living as a donkey dealer; with Joseph ... as we carried grain to his starving family; with David, in his military exploits; and with so many other leaders of great importance.

We were an invaluable possession for the early Hebrews, for we were the first beasts of burden. We carried everything: grain, crops, feed, lumber, wine ... you name it. We were renowned for our strength.

And we were the public means of transportation. Moses carried his wife and children on our backs. We never got in trouble with the Judean Environmental Protection Agency. Our exhausts and wastes didn't cause cancer or holes in the ozone layer, they helped grow crops. We were both a necessity of life and a symbol of wealth. If a family was just a one-donkey family, they were just making it ... barely getting by. But people like Job had 500 of my ancestors in all shapes, models and makes. So ... economically, socially, militarily ... we were crucial in the history of the Hebrew people.

But do we ever get credit for that contribution? Do people ever seem grateful for the toil and sweat that we gave to build the nation of Israel?

No! You all know the lot of a donkey. I'll admit that we are not very pretty to look at. But we were never honored, even in a perverse way, by being made into idols and worshipped by humans. The golden calves, bulls and horses got all that attention. We could not even be eaten. But we sure could be given lots to carry. Nobody ever had second thoughts about that. We kept the economy running, doing the jobs that no one else would touch, but did we ever get any recognition?

Moreover, as if that wasn't bad enough, we were often the target of jokes and ridicule by human beings. Nobody minded making fun of us or calling us names. Nobody ever thought twice about beating us when we got tired, or when we acted out to protest our living and working conditions. But we couldn't even get credit for being the butt of others' prejudices and frustrations. Tell me, my friends, have you ever heard of a "scape-donkey?"

One of our prophets once said that we would have a children's birthday game named after us one day, but that humans would enjoy that because they could laugh at people looking a little dumb and silly. But we were not nearly so dumb as most people thought. For example, there was the day my famous ancestor taught Balaam a lesson. He saw an angel in the path on the side of a mountain and tried to avoid running over him. Balaam, that silly human, all he could do was to kick and beat my illustrious forbearer until he finally had to resort to speaking Hebrew to get him to stop. He asked Balaam a question that has reverberated through the ages, "Tell me, have I ever done the same to you?" That, my friends, was the earliest version of the Golden Rule, the biggest single challenge to the way people treat one another.

But the world of human beings changes very slowly ... if at all, it seems. People never learned the lesson of that first Golden Rule. When history came around to my family's time, and the time of that man Jesus, the situation was pretty much the same. My father was not even mentioned in Matthew or Luke's stories of Jesus' birth, but he was there, for what else could a struggling, young carpenter family afford? How else was Mary going to travel those long distances in the latter months of her pregnancy? So, while he was not mentioned, and while my credentials for telling his story and my own are not our education or our ability to write beautiful poetic verse, we do have a story to tell, a story from the viewpoint of living creatures who can tell you how hard life really was.

My dad did tell me, many times, about the beginning of Jesus' life. It seemed like anything but a joyful or peaceful season to him, with all those long trips to visit Elizabeth and the long journey to Bethlehem, followed by the crisis of not being able to find a place to stay when they got there. He told about the kind-hearted inn keeper who let them stay with all the other donkeys and about the pain and joy of an exhausted Mary giving birth to a young son. It was, to say the least, not the ideal time or place to bring new life into the world.

But my father also told me about stranger things that happened that night. Shepherds coming and talking about a savior being born in a manger and a midnight concert of angels out in the country singing about what a glorious night it was. And three weird looking men, foreigners, loaded with shekels and other treasures, who said they had come to see the "King of the Jews."

My father couldn't believe his ears. These humans really had gone nuts this time. Surely they had the wrong place. This child, son of a poor carpenter and a peasant woman, a king? A messiah? "Glory to God?" What was so glorious about giving birth in a dirty, crowded, smelly garage? "Peace?" These were hardly peaceful times. They were there because they were forced to be, and King Herod would soon massacre scores of children in his paranoia. From my father's point of view, it simply was not a very glorious, joyful, hopeful or happy night. Once again, he told me, these humans were fantasizing, sugar-coating with religion the harsh reality, tragedy and pain of life on earth.

He never had the chance to realize the significance of that night, for he never got to see and hear the end of the story. I was born, and Jesus and I grew up together. I watched him grow, carried him many times. He seemed to be unusually kind and thoughtful towards me and other animals, never laughing at us or ridiculing us ... never kicking or giving those back-breaking burdens to carry. Somehow, my awkwardness and often disheveled looks never seemed to get in the way of his caring for me as a living being. And I thought, "Well, there's always an exception to the assumptions and stereotypes we donkeys make about human beings."

But it was not until I was much older, and heard what happened to Jesus in his brief public life, that I really understood the significance of the stories my parents told me. As he acted towards me, with kindness and mercy, so he did towards humans, especially those who needed it the most, those who were hungry, poor, sick or handicapped. People whom society ridiculed, made fun of and ostracized, he never did. The people whom other people wouldn't go near, he touched ... and even ate with them. The people who were labeled as different, deviant or abnormal ... Jesus simply refused to worship the human love for categories and stereotypes that often justified treating people differently. The walls of stigma, shame and fear ... Jesus just acted like they weren't there. For all the people who didn't classify as important according to normal standards of status or prestige, Jesus always seemed to make time. And the words he said sounded like music to my ears:

Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your soul ... for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

But not only did he help and befriend the lowly, the people considered to be "the least of these," but also he acted like they had something to contribute to others and to the kingdom of God. He said that people who thought they could see and hear really were blind and deaf, and that those who couldn't, really did. Forgive me, if this is reading something into Jesus' words, but he seemed to act like all living creatures, including people, have strengths and weaknesses. We all are "normal" and "different." We all have our beautiful parts and ugly spots. We all are bundles of joys and tragedies. We all are incomplete, growing creatures, with needs and gifts. The question is not, as he said in a famous parable, how many talents we have but what we do with those we have.

And since we are the same in God's eyes, it is our attitude toward one another that is most crucial. It's when we pretend that we're perfect ... not like those "other" people ... that we start boasting and getting into trouble. Jesus' words were that "He who would be the greatest in the kingdom must first become the servant of all. Those sounded much like the question of a young woman with cerebral palsy (who used a wheelchair and was also labeled "mildly retarded") who asked, many years later, "can normal people learn to accept handicapped people the same way that handicapped people have to learn to accept normal people?"

It's we who reinforce whether people feel different or accepted. It's we who are called to move beyond pity to justice and love. How can people tell other people, who may be different on the outside, that they belong to God's family but then don't include them in the life of the people of God? Intentionally or not, they often make it impossible for them to participate. My spiritual cousin, the lost sheep, had something to say about that. Part of the problem was that high style that made it hard to get into the fold. The other was feeling unwanted, and that no one really cared. What the shepherd did was not only find him, but say that their community was not complete and whole until he was there.

But what did Jesus' kindness, compassion and respect for all people's humanity get him? For one thing, a lot of ridicule and scorn by all the good people who objected both to the company he kept and to the amount of time and attention he paid to people who weren't considered worthwhile. Scorn and ridicule ... you would not have believed it. Why, you would have thought he was a donkey, the way he was treated!

And the most distressing thing was that even the people whom he helped, the people who saw Jesus as Savior and Messiah, turned against him when he was not the King David or the magician they thought he would be. They ended up striking him, beating him, spitting at him, deserting him and in the end, killing him.

It was then that I began to feel real compassion for this human being, for he knew what it was like to be treated in the worst of ways — to be the victim of human pride and arrogance, their thirst for power and position and their contempt for those who serve them in inglorious ways or who remind them of parts of themselves and life they'd rather not see.

It was then that I remembered the words of Isaiah about the "son of man" who would be "lacking in form or beauty, despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, a man who bore the griefs of others, carried our sorrows and was wounded and bruised because of and for your human sins." My cousin, who carried Jesus on his entry into Jerusalem, said Jesus knew this was going to happen. And still he went ahead. What a burden that must have been!

But that was not the end of the story. You know what happened on the day they now call Easter Sunday. You know that people suddenly said that Jesus was alive and that he was the Son of God. And people began to talk about a God who loved human beings so much that God came to earth and lived the life that people had to live.

Only then did the significance of that first Christmas, Jesus' life and that darkest of Fridays begin to dawn ... that the one who was the Savior of life would choose to come into human life in the most ordinary, commonplace manner, by being born, as we so often hear but don't understand, in a "lowly" manger. It was indeed an unglorified beginning from the normal human point of view, but from the perspective of those people, who, like we donkeys, were often considered to be "the least of these," it was indeed the most glorious thing God could do ... to begin life on earth as he ended it, loving humans enough to share in their limitations, their struggles and their pain. The God of highest heavens lived and moved in the deepest of human hells, and had the sheer audacity to say that others could do so as well, and thereby find not death, but life ... and community ... and love.

The paradox was indeed the miracle: The son of God in the manger. The son of God on the cross. Crazy, yes, indeed, but a human named Paul also understood. "The foolishness of God," he said, "is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men, but God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God ... let him who boasts, boast of the Lord."

And I realized that we donkeys, like you humans, received an incredible gift in the life of that man Jesus, and I'm still discovering what it means. The only boast left is the song that once sounded so strange to my parents' ears: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill, among men and women of all kinds ... and we donkeys." Amen.

Bill Gaventa
32 Dead Tree Run Road
Belle Mead, NJ 08502

Bill has kindly given us permission to use this article with a request that those who use this resource tell him how they have used it. Visit the Boggs Center Web site.