Palm Sunday & Paris 1942

Today is Palm Sunday the day Jesus returned triumphantly to Jerusalem riding a donkey down streets lined with hopeful crowds waving palm fronds in welcome. Many believing they were witnessing the coming of a Messiah who at the very least would free them from Roman occupation. Within a week much of the crowd would turn against him, his followers would be divided, he would be betrayed, executed and rise again.

It’s a familiar story, but you can’t fully understand it without understanding what was going on in the Jerusalem of the day. What was it like to live under occupation and why did so many, so willingly cooperate with their Roman occupiers. Occupation by a foreign power is something North Americans don’t generally worry about and have little to no experience of, but if we cross the ocean to Europe there is much we can learn from relatively recent and seemingly unrelated events such as the Nazi occupation of Europe in the early 1940’s.

Just as we grew up with the Easter story, most of us have some knowledge of the events of the Second World War and mythically heroic tales of resistance to Nazi rule. If not from literature then from films and carried on by Hollywood into a later era in similarly themed movies like Red Dawn. The truth though is far more sinister, like those conspiring in the background against Jesus there was far more complexity and subtly to the reactions of Parisians to German occupation in we’ll say 1942.

Occupation tears the fabric of a people apart. Loving families betray each other; a father in law that adores the man who married his daughter would often willingly turn him in to the Romans or Gestapo knowing his loving son-in-law would face torture and certain death just in order to save his daughter and grandchildren from punishment. Otherwise faithful wives in destitute households prostituted themselves to German officers and Roman Legionaries to make ends meet. Likewise with the education system now overseen by the conquerors children unwittingly told on their parents for suspected subversive activities resulting in a late night knock on a door and disappearance to a concentration camp. Fear, desperation and humiliation could and often did tear even the tightest bonds of family and friendship apart. Just as Judas swore he would never betray his Lord (and probably meant it at some level) friends and families that swore undying love broke apart under the strains of fear and coercion.

Where you could not trust your family and friends a member of the resistance often had to turn to the lowest rungs of society for trust and safety. The smuggler or dealer who knew the back alleys and hidden trails, the fraudsters and forgers who could create false papers to guarantee safe passage; occupation jumbles up the pieces of society and soon the doctors, teachers, lawyers, and magistrates who choose to resist find themselves dependent for survival on the very segments of society that would have once avoided and shunned.

Yes in both eras there was resistance; Barabbas was a Jewish resistance leader released as a good will gesture by Roman governor Pontius Pilate and considered a Zealot a religious based group fighting Roman authority. Although not documented in the Gospels there were undoubtedly other resistance groups ranging from faith based ones to ordinary bandits who likely as is often the case fought each other as fiercely as they did the Romans. As in Nazi occupied Paris betrayal was the norm and fear your day to day companion.

Today we romanticize the French resistance but it too was divided. There were groups based on ideology; communist resistance groups, socialist ones, ones who wanted to re-establish the previous order and even Royalists who saw an opportunity to return France to a pre revolution monarchy. Initially primarily made up of former French soldiers who escaped surrender then later ordinary French men and women joined; they fought the Germans, but rarely in open battle (as that would certainly result in their destruction) and like their ancient brethren in occupied Judea the French resistance groups fought each other at times as hard as they fought the Nazis, each side jockeying for an advantage when their eventual liberation came about.

And yes many under occupation join forces with their oppressors. The Romans employed locally recruited Jewish forces – notably under King Herod – as front line forces to battle the resistance just as many French – particularly in the autonomous ‘Vichy’ south joined and fought alongside the Germans. It is worth noting that the first American ground forces killed in any number in the fight against the Nazis came during the Operation Torch landings in North Africa where American troops landing in Morocco and Algiers first came under fire from French Vichy forces. Once again allies fighting nominal allies before gaining on the real foe.

Paris and Jerusalem had very different endings; Canadian, American and British forces landed in Normandy, France on D-Day June 6^th, 1944 and began the liberation of Europe. Paris was declared and open city and the German commander ignoring orders from Hitler to destroy the capital withdrew with scattered resistance from an organization called the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). In Judea, the resistance grew, place names like Masada became legend in the Jewish faith and the Romans destroyed the Holy Temple. Eventually Rome fell and Jerusalem it seemed waited for another occupier to come along.

Throughout all this something changed, a small scattered and afraid group of followers of an executed Jewish mystic grew a collective backbone. A new faith later named after its inspiration called Christianity grew, it’s followers suffered torture, jail, persecution and execution, and yet they did not so much as throw off the shackles of occupation but rise above them. A believe grew that regardless of who he was you could love your neighbor, that we were important, we are loved as individuals and there is something better waiting for us after this world. That a loving God would give up his own son to the end that all that believe in him shall not perish but have eternal life. That is the light that came out of the dark of occupation. Out of a world where friend turns against friend, of families divided, of suffering, cruelty and injustice that we are worthy, we are loved and better days lay ahead.