Features
Easter: God’s own story
Easter is here again. And once more, we will go through the motions as usual. In Ghana and most parts of the Christian world, Palm Sunday opens the Easter season by reminding us of the triumphal entry of Jesus to Jerusalem days before His crucifixion.
Triumphal in the sense that even though the Jewish religious leaders were planning to kill Jesus, He boldly rode into Jerusalem where He knew they were waiting for Him. At His appearance, the multitude who wanted to enthrone Him king, cut off palm fronds which they strewed before His donkey while others waved theirs.
Ghana, however, has a unique way of marking the day. Instead of the date palm fronds, Ghanaians have adopted the oil palm leaves which may be excusable because date palm is not as abundant in the country as oil palm. And trust the ingenuity of the Ghanaian! Palm Sunday has become the occasion when people who, for one reason or another, have not eaten palm nut soup for a long time, make sure this chance does not pass them by. Of course, it must be complemented by fufu, otherwise the trouble you take in preparing the soup would not be worth the while. All this is part of Easter.
After Palm Sunday, all attention shifts to the following Friday, that is Good Friday, a day set aside the world over to commemorate the crucifixion and subsequent death of Jesus Christ. Most Ghanaians, especially, those of the orthodox faith, wear funeral clothes to go and mourn the “death” of Jesus in church.
Then Sunday comes, and people troop to their various churches in all-white attires or something with a touch of white to celebrate the resurrection power of Jesus. The songs commemorating the momentous event vary. The Methodists surely have a lot to sing but one that they would never miss on Easter Sunday is Robert Lowry’s hymn that goes like this:
1 Low in the grave he lay, Jesus my Saviour,
waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord!
Refrain:
Up from the grave He arose;
with a mighty triumph o’er his foes;
He arose a victor from the dark domain,
and He lives forever, with his saints to reign.
He arose! He arose! Hallelujah! Christ arose!
2 Vainly they watch his bed, Jesus my Saviour,
vainly they seal the dead, Jesus my Lord! [Refrain]
3 Death cannot keep its prey, Jesus my Saviour;
He tore the bars away, Jesus my Lord! [Refrain]
The Pentecostals would prefer something like this:
Owuo anntumi no, w’adi asaman so;
Nkunim di hene, cne Awurade;
Y3ma wo mmo Yesu, y3ma wo mmo Messiah;
Nkunimdi hene cne Awurade.
In translation, the song declares as follows:
Death could not beat Him, He has triumphed over hell;
The King of Victory is the Lord;
We congratulate You, Jesus, we congratulate You Messaiah;
The King of victory is the Lord
For most people, including so-called Christians, the “real deal” is yet to come. After church, the boozing and revelries must be allowed. After all, the Bible says: “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God, what is God’s.” For many, that is all Easter means. But what is the real meaning of Easter? What really happened at Easter?
The following story provides a clue. A very rich man called Mr. Emmanuel Love was celibate and childless. He had a sweet spirit and showered gifts on all the kids in his neighbourhood. But he took a special liking to a particular boy, Manson, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Man.
One day, Manson’s parents travelled and left him in the care of Mr. Love. As naughty as children are, he sneaked out of the house for a splash in a nearby stream. Unknown to him, the flow was fast and upstream, compelling him to swim against the current. He was drowning gradually.
Just in the nick of time, Mr. Love discovered that Manson was nowhere to be found. By intuition, he dashed towards the stream and found him struggling to make it ashore. Without thinking, Mr. Love dived into the water and did his best to bring the boy downstream as both of them gasped for breath. But the rescue came at a great cost. Mr. Love was left crippled. After a few days, Manson’s parents returned from their journey and went for him. They heard what had happened and felt extremely sorry for Mr. Love but there was no need crying over spilt milk.
About a year later, the family relocated to another city, perhaps unable to process the thought of seeing Mr. Love like that. But they kept in touch with him while Mr. Love frequently sent letters to Manson encouraging him to study hard and be the best that he could be. About a decade later, with Manson in his late teens, Mr. Love realised he was deteriorating in health. So, he decided to go and visit his little friend before the inevitable happened.
On reaching the city, he began to trudge across a community park to Manson’s house close by. As he hobbled along due to his condition, some youngsters enjoying a game of football on the field started hurling insults at him for delaying their game. Finally, he reached home and immediately asked for his boy.
Mr. Love was told Manson was playing football nearby, apparently on the park Mr. Love just crossed. His parents sent for him and when he came home, he recognised the visitor as the handicapped man who just struggled along the field. He questioned his parents why they should entertain such a wretch in their home. When they explained who he was and reminded him how the man ended up maimed for life, Manson could not hold back his tears.
He dashed to call his friends on the field to come and see his hero. When they came, they were also snubbish but in tears, Manson explained how the man’s condition evolved. Mr. Love asked if they got the money he had been sending in his letters. To their shame, they never opened them, and when they did, they were amazed at the amount he had sent their boy over the years without their knowledge. The best was yet to come. Mr. Love told them he had come to inform them that he had bequeathed his estate to Adamson and left.
Do you get the picture?“He was wounded for our transgressions.” Our sins took Jesus to the cross. Yet, we despise Him. The Bible prophesied before He appeared in human form that when people set their eyes on Him, there would be no comeliness in Him that they should desire Him. Just as Manson forgot all that Mr. Love suffered for him, so do we treat Jesus with contempt. We only pay lip service to Him.
Perhaps, we treat Him with disdain because we do not really know Him. Let me show you an open secret. Jesus is God the very God! Period. Yes, Easter is God’s own story. The Creator of the universe stripped Himself of all His glory, took upon Himself the form of a servant, and allowed sinful men to kill Him so that He would shed His own blood to cleanse us from our unrighteousness.
The blood of bulls and sheep was not pure enough, neither was the blood of any man deemed righteous enough to atone for our sins. So, God became a Man to have blood in Himself to shed for us. That is the true Easter story.
Yes, the Ancient of Days became the Babe of Bethlehem, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, became the Lamb that was slain; He is the Consuming Fire yet, the Living Water; when Mary held the Infant Jesus and kissed her Son, she kissed the face of God. He is the Mighty God, Wonderful Counsellor, the Prince of Peace, the Everlasting Father, the King of kings, Lord of lords, the Great I Am. He can be anything He wants to be.
C.S. Lewis, a British author and speaker who was an unrepentant atheist until he found Jesus Christ, said this about Him in one of his discourses.“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
“He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this Man was, and is, the Son of God, or a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Contact: teepeejubilee@yahoo.co.uk
By Tony Prempeh
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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