"Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna…hosanna to the son of David…blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord…hosanna in the highest!” The cheers of children singing ‘hosanna’, dramatizing the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday welcomed the beginning of the Holy Week. World and regional events this month, the subsequent passion and death, resurrection and ascension – at the beginning of the Common Era – amidst the trials and victories of our realities got me thinking.

Are we witnessing the alignment of planets with the sun in the solar system of regional politics and world events that jolts in such a new era of increased awareness for justice, and faith being put into action?
Moana Carcasses’ election, as the first naturalized citizen – of Tahitian descent – as new Prime Minister is the dawning of a new era, one that tests confidence on the provisions of rights and freedom in national constitution.

Pope Francis’ election is another. Since the post apostolic age, Pope Francis I is the first pope not from continental Europe. The Holy See of Rome for the first time rode into Saint Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday without any bullet proof glass. On Maundy Thursday when Christian faiths keep a prayer watch to remember Jesus on Mount Olives before his arrest, Pope Francis will conduct a first ever special service in a juvenile detention center.
Similar in magnitude, the enthronement of the global leader of Anglicans, Arch Bishop Justin Welby of Canterbury was done for the first time by a woman, who is also the first female Arch Deacon of Canterbury, the Venerable Sheila Watson. The new Arch Bishop Welby prophesied a woman will one day head the Anglican Church.

The 10th General Assembly of the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) endorsed in Honiara the re-inscription of Tahiti on the UN decolonization list. It also mandated the World Conference of Churches (WCC) to lobby the UN to investigate human rights abuses in West Papua and its independence. The issues of West Papua and Tahiti independence have become faith issues.

Of unequivocal importance is the government stand, to lobby for West Papua observer or full membership status at the June Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leader’s summit in New Caledonia.

When you look at these events with an eye of faith, it seems the script for the political drama that unfolded in parliament and was already written as part of a global trend of change.

It began when pacific church leaders debated the issue of independence for Tahiti in Honiara. Coincidentally, the PCC assembly debated freedom from Paris on March 6th, a day after the ‘Gospel Day’, or "Arrivee de l’Evangile”, which marks the day London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries first arrived with the Gospel in the pacific. They arrived aboard the Christian ship ‘Duff’, which anchored off the coast of Tahiti at Matavai Bay on March 5th 1797.

The Gospel of Christ was first planted in Tahiti 216 years ago. Tahitian teachers evangelized Cook Islands Samoa, Tonga, who then evangelized Fiji, Micronesia and Melanesia. Tahiti, is the Jerusalem of pacific Christian faith and cradle of its modern civilization. Wherever the gospel went, trade, commerce and the imposition of Victorian morals and ways followed.

Coincidentally, the spreading of the Gospel westward retraces the ancient migration route of the pacific people which originated from the Asian continent eastward into West Papua and PNG into the rest of Melanesia and Polynesia.

In this we witness two great movements across the Pacific Ocean from West Papua in the west to Tahiti in the east and back west again. They represent two great victories and triumphant entries as our people populated new land and brought the Gospel to transform us from our old ways.

If we look closely, the two points of these two great entries and New Caledonia in the south of Melanesia form an inverted triangle of bondage, where people are still under colonial oppression.

So why does the hope and aspirations of the Maohi people, the Kanaky and the West Papuans matter to us, and why do we care so much that we can change governments simply because they do not support these causes for freedom?
Anthropologists will tell you that Vanuatu is the focal point of all migrations in the pacific. All countries east of Vanuatu settled or landed temporarily in Vanuatu before they made the journey east to Fiji all the way to Tahiti and south to New Caledonia. Through Vanuatu all pacific people can trace their ancestry through the Solomon Islands, PNG, West Papua, into the Asian continent and all the way to Africa.

All countries north, south and east of Vanuatu share a deep cultural connection and linguistic connection because they can call Vanuatu their ancestral home or point of dispersal.

Moana in most Polynesian languages is the word for ocean.

In the Moana theology of the ocean authored by the Arch Bishop Winston Halapua of the Anglican Diocese of Polynesia, it is the ocean or the moana, that surrounds all our different pacific islands, ethnic groups, joins us and gives us a single identity as pacific people, or people of the moana. This has deep theological underpinnings and inference to the church as the body of Christ made up of the different parts, but united through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit made available on Pentecost.

As we observe the passion of Jesus and the seven words of the cross, we must bear in mind that the Maohi, Kanak and West Papuan are also going through a time of suffering. Their people are being tried under Pontius Pilates who wash their hands off their cause. Most are executed simply because they want the freedom and right to self-determination.

They too want to experience a resurrection with our Lord, into a new beginning that gives them freedom to willfully follow Christ. Christ desires that we offer our lives and services to his kingdom on our own accord and freewill.

But how can they willfully give their lives and service to God, their country and their people when they do not have the freewill to determine their own destiny?
Several points need special mention.

Moana’s election is no coincidence. When our leaders neglect their responsibility to the struggles and aspirations of the oppressed, God raises someone from the land of the oppressed, through which he introduced the gospel to shed light on our Christian duty to those under the yoke of colonialism.
God raises the hope of the oppressed people of the moana through the election of Moana. Whether he takes up the cause with his heart or his pocket will determine how long he stays in power.

When the Gospel moved from Jerusalem to the west and Jews dispersed all over the world, it took a Great Britain, a western nation to go back east and re-establish a homeland for the Jews in the modern state of Israel.

The great movements across the pacific continuously swing back and forth like a pendulum, bringing sweeping changes with Vanuatu at its center. It is swinging from East to West at the moment. Whether it will bring change for West Papua will depend on Moana or Vanuatu getting West Papua into the MSG as an observer in June at the leader’s summit.

When Fr. Lini said Vanuatu cannot be truly free until the rest of the pacific is free, he was not merely making a political statement, but a prophetic one. We are all under the inverted triangle of bondage. Unless we break down the pyramid of power that strangles our people and the resources of our land, we will never be truly free.