Jesus the Motilone Bari

I named this whole blog "Ants of God" after part of a story of the Motilone Bari Indians of the high mountains of Columbia. See more about them - and listen to a few nice native songs at http://www.bruceolson.com/english/english.htm Following is an excerpt from the book Bruchko by Bruce Olsen, published by Charisma House, copyright 1973 ... and 1995 by Creation House. I do not have any copies for sale. Chapter 17 ... JESUS THE MOTILONE We had been on the trail three days and were nearing Norecayra. It was late afternoon. Bobby and two other Motilones were ahead of me, their dark brown bodies hidden from view by the thick vines and bushes of the jungle. It was a beautiful time of day. The approaching darkness made the greens of the jungle soft and velvet-like. We were walking fast. In a few miles we would reach the communal home. I began to hear loud shouts ahead of us, excruci­ating yells that sounded as if they came from many different mouths. I had never heard anything quite as agonizing. My steps quickened, and I began mentally to sort out the medicine in my pack. The cries seemed more desperate as we approached. I had never heard Motilones cry out like that. They never even whimpered under the greatest pain. But Bobby and the other Motilones kept walking straight ahead on the trails, as though nothing were wrong. "Stop!" I said. Bobby and the others turned around. "What's that shouting?" I asked. "Shouldn't we see if there is anything we can do?" Bobby looked down at the trail. One of the other men, who was a witch doctor, shook his head. "There's nothing we can do." "But what's going on there?" None of the three said anything. They stared at me with dark, quiet eyes. As the cries continued to echo through the jungle, I got a little agitated. "Well, look," I said, "maybe you don't care about whoever that is, but I do. I want to see if we can help." They still didn't answer me. They're sad, I thought. There's something over there that is too sad for them to bear. "You don't have to come with me," I said. "But I want to see." They stood motionless until I turned and walked off the trail into the jungle, toward the sounds. After I had gone a few yards I heard noises behind me. They were following. The shouting men were closer than I had thought. And there were only two of them. One I knew well. He was a leader in his communal home and a fierce warrior. He had killed oil-company employees just to get their safety helmets to use in cooking. He wore a necklace of buttons from his victims' clothes and another necklace of jaguar teeth from a jaguar he had killed with his bow and arrow. Now, standing in front of a hole that he had dug — a hole that was a good six feet deep — he was shouting in a desperate, searching voice, "God, God, come out of the hole." The other man was in the top of a high tree. He was stuffing leaves into his mouth and trying to chew them, while shouting, "God, God, come from the horizon!" It was the strangest sight I had ever seen. It could have been laughable, but something kept me from seeing any humor in it. My three companions came up alongside me, looking sad and embarrassed. "You knew about this?" I asked Bobby. He nodded. "What's the matter?" He explained that the brother of the man shouting into the hole had died in a region that was not his home. He had been bitten by a poisonous snake and had died before there was time to get him back. According to their traditions, that meant that his language, his spirit, his life, could never go to God beyond the horizon. Now the man was trying to look for God, to get Him to bring his brother's language back to life, to live in his body. "And what makes him think he can find God by calling into a hole?" Bobby shrugged. "It's as good a place as any to look." The hopelessness of his expression was transmitted to his words. This was why God had let me live. I was there to tell them where they could find God. Perhaps this was an opportunity God had arranged. My body tightened at the thought of having a chance to share Christ after five years of waiting. Yet it seemed too much to expect. Inside I was praying. The man stopped shouting into the hole and came over to us. His hair was disheveled, his body covered with dirt. His eyes were holes into black space. "It's no point," he said. "We've been deceived." "How long have you been here?" I asked quietly. "Since the sun came up this morning." "And why do you say that you've been deceived?" He told me again the story of the false prophet the Motilones had followed, whose false promises had led them away from God. "We no longer know God," he said quietly. Then the other men tried to explain a Motilone legend that confirmed why this brother's death had such terrifying implica­tions. I didn't understand it all. Motilone legends are as complicated as any theology. But I did understand something new: their great sense of lostness. I had wondered again and again what Christ had to offer them. Their way of getting along with each other was far superior to that of Americans. But there was more to life than that. I thought of the night Jesus had entered my life. It had been so many years before, such a small point in time. Yet it was the root out of which everything I was had grown. Through it God had brought me peace and real purpose. And here were the Motilones in a search for God. But how could I explain things like grace, sacrifice, the incarnation? I could tell a there's simple story, and they would understand. But how could I commu­nicate real spiritual truth? A lively discussion started. The man who had been in the trees came down and joined us. He reminded us of the legend about the prophet who would come carrying banana stalks and that God would come out of those stalks. I couldn't quite understand the idea behind the legend. "Why look for God to come out of a banana stalk?" I asked. There was puzzled silence. It made sense to them, but they couldn't explain it. Bobby walked over to a banana tree which was growing nearby. He cut off a section and tossed it toward us. "This is the kind of banana stalk God can come from," he said. It was a cross section from the stalk. It rolled at our feet One of the Motilones reached down and swatted at it with his machete, accidentally splitting it in half. One half stood up, while the other half split off. Leaves that were still inside the stalk, waiting to develop and come out, started peeling off. As they lay at the base of the stalk, they looked like pages from a book. Suddenly a word raced through my mind. "Book! Book!" I grabbed up my pack and took out my Bible. I opened it. Flipping through the pages, I held it toward the men. I pointed to the leaves from the banana stalk, then back to the Bible. "This is it!" I said. "I have it here! This is God's banana stalk." One of the Motilones, the one who had been in the tree, grabbed the Bible out of my hand. He started to rip out pages and stuff them in his mouth. He thought if he ate the pages he would have God inside him. When nothing happened, they began to ask me questions. How could I explain the gospel to them? How could I explain that God, in Jesus, had been like them? Suddenly I remembered one of their legends about a man who had become an ant He had been sitting on the trail after a hunt and had noticed some ants trying to build a home. He'd wanted to help them make a good home, like the Motilone home, so he'd begun digging in the dirt. But because he was so big and so unknown, the ants had been afraid and had run away. Then, quite miraculously, he had become an ant. He thought like an ant, looked like an ant and spoke the language of an ant He lived with the ants, and they came to trust him. He told them one day that he was not really an ant, but a Motilone, and that he had once tried to help them improve their home, but he had scared them. The ants said their equivalent of "No kidding? That was you?" And they laughed at him, because he didn't look like the huge and fearful thing that had moved the dirt before. But at that moment he was turned back into a Motilone and began to move the dirt into the shape of a Motilone home. This time the ants recognized him and let him do his work, because they knew he wouldn't harm them. That was why, according to the story, the ants had hills that looked like Motilone homes. As the story flashed into my mind, I realized its lesson for the first time: If you are big and powerful, you have to become small and weak in order to work with other weak beings. It was a perfect parallel for what God had done in Jesus. But there were so many unknown factors in the way the Motilones reasoned. How could I be sure that I would convey the right thing? I couldn't. Yet I felt sure God had given me this time to speak. So I took the word for "becoming like an ant" and used it for incarnation. "God is incarnated into man," I said. They gasped. There was a tense, hushed silence. The idea that God had become a man stunned them. "Where did He walk?" the witch doctor asked in a whisper. Every Motilone has his own trail. It is his personal point of identity. You walk on someone's trail if you want to find him. God would have a trail, too. If you want to find God, you walk on His trail. My blood was racing, my heart pounding. "Jesus Christ is God become man," I said. "He can show you God's trail." A look of astonishment, almost of fear, spread over their faces. The man who had been shouting into the hole looked at me. "Show us Christ," he said in a coarse whisper. I fumbled for an answer. "You killed Christ," I said. "You destroyed God." His eyes got big. "I killed Christ? I did that? How did I do that? And how can God be killed?" I wanted to tell them that Jesus' death had freed them from meaninglessness, from death and the powers of evil. "How do evil, death and deception find power over the Motilone people?" I asked. "Through the ears," Bobby answered, because language is so important to the Motilones. It is the essence of life. If evil language comes through the ears, it means death. "Do you remember," I said, "how after a hunt for wild boars the leader cuts the skin from the animal and puts it over his head to cover his ears and keep the evil spirits of the jungle out?" They nodded, listening closely. "Jesus Christ was murdered," I said. "But just as you pull the skin over the chieftain's head to hide his ears, so Jesus — when He died — pulled His blood over your deception and hides it from the sight of God." I stood looking at them, hoping desperately that they would understand. Then I saw on their faces that they did. I told them Jesus was buried. A wave of grief swept over them. The man who was searching for his brother's language began to weep. It was the first time I had ever seen a Motilone cry. But the thought that God was dead, that they were lost, brought tears and sobs. I picked up my Bible, opened it and said, "The Bible speaks that Jesus came alive after death and is alive today." One of the men grabbed the Bible from my hand and put it to his ear. "I can't hear a thing," he said. I took it back. "The way the Bible speaks does not change," I said. "It is like the papers of your speech that I have. They say the same word one day to the next. The Bible says that Jesus came to life. It is God's banana stalk." I showed him the page and told him that the little black markings had meaning. "No one has ever come back from the dead in all Motilone history," he said. "I know," I replied. "But Jesus did. It is proof that He is really God's Son." They asked many more questions. Some I didn't fully understand. But I was sure that God had spoken through me. That night I prayed, "God, give validity to Your Word. Make it touch these lives." I claimed God's promise that His Word would not return to Him without any response. Yet there didn't seem to be any response. I continued to walk the trails with bobby, giving medicine to the witch doctors and showing them how to do their work more effectively. One evening, though, Bobby began to ask questions. We were sitting around a fire. The light flicked over him. His face was serious. "How can I walk on Jesus' trail?" he asked. "No Motilone has ever done it. It's a new thing. There is no other Motilone to tell how to do it." I remembered the problems I had had as a boy, how it sometimes appeared impossible to keep on believing in Jesus when my family and friends were so opposed to my commitment. That was what Bobby was going through. "Bobby," I said, "do you remember my first Festival of the Arrows, the first time I had seen all the Motilones gathered to sing their song?" The festival was the most important ceremony in the Motilone culture. He nodded. The fire flared up momentarily, and I could see his eyes, staring intently at me. "Do you remember that I was afraid to climb in the high hammocks to sing, for fear that the rope would break? And I told you that I would sing only if I could have one foot in the hammock and one foot on the ground?" "Yes, Bruchko." "And what did you say to me?" He laughed. "I told you you had to have both feet in the hammock. 'You have to be suspended," I said." "Yes," I said. "You have to be suspended. That is how it is when you follow Jesus, Bobby. No man can tell you how to walk His trail. Only Jesus can. But to find out you have to tie your hammock strings into Him and be suspended in God." Bobby said nothing. The fire danced in his eyes. Then he stood up and walked off into the darkness. The next day he came to me. "Bruchko," he said, "I want to tie my hammock strings into Jesus Christ. But how can I? I can't see Him or touch Him." "You have talked to spirits, haven't you?" "Oh," he said. "I see now." The next day he had a big grin on his face. "Bruchko, I've tied my hammock strings into Jesus. Now I speak a new language." I didn't understand what he meant. "Have you learned some of the Spanish I speak?" He laughed a clean, sweet laugh. "No, Bruchko, I speak a new language." Then I understood. To a Motilone, language is life. If Bobby had a new life, he had a new way of speaking. His speech would be Christ-oriented. We put our hands on each other's shoulders. My mind swept back to the first time I had met Jesus and the life I had felt flow into me. Now my brother Bobby was experiencing Jesus himself, in the same way. He had begun to walk with Jesus. "Jesus Christ has risen from the dead!" Bobby shouted, so that the sound filtered far off into the jungle. "He has walked our trails! I have met Him!" From that day our friendship was enhanced by our love for Jesus. We talked constantly about Him, and Bobby asked me many questions. But he never asked the color of Jesus' hair or whther He had blue eyes. To Bobby, the answers were obvious: Jesus had dark skin and His eyes were black. he wore a G-string and hunted with bows and arrowss. Jesus was a Motilone.