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St. Stephens Uniting Church 

Williamstown

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SERMONS OF REV. DR. KEN DEMPSEY  2010

DATE       2010

LECTIONARY              year C

SERMON TITLE

Turning water into wine:

Is Christianity the superior religion

Mark 1:16-20

Luke 5:1-11

John 21: 1-11

1 Peter 3: 8-17

Matthew 5: 6-12

2 Corinthians 5: 16-21

Matthew 5: 21-26, 43-48

Mark 8: 34-38

Romans 8: 31-38

Matthew 26:36-52, 69-75

Mark 15: 33-37

Matthew 28:1-10

John 20: 1-18

Acts 9:36-43

John 10:22-33

May 2 2010

John 13: 31-34

May 16 2010

John 3: 1-17

Matthew 19:13-15

Baptism: Celebration, Commitment, Community

May 30 2010

Ekekiel 43: 1-7a

Mark 12:28-34

Trinity Costs

June 13 2010

Philippians: 2 1-11

Mark: 8: 27-38

Who do you say that I am?

June 20 2010

Galatians 3:21-29

Luke 8:22-39

Jesus Liberates¹

July 4 2010

Galatians 2:15-21

Luke 7: 36-8:3

Accepting the Unacceptable

July 11 2010

Luke 8:4-15,19-21

God enables the harvest to happen

August 29 2010

Deuteronomy 6; 1-9

Luke 10: 25-37

‘Be merciful and you will live!’

September 5 2010

Jeremiah 2: 4-13

Luke 14: 25-33

“Collaborating with God in making his Kingdom a reality”

September 19 2010

Hosea 11: 1-11

Luke 12: 22-34

‘Living the Kingdom: healing through forming cords of human kindness and  bonds of love’

September 26 2010

Colossians 3: 12-17

Let Love Reign Over Me

10th October 2010

2 Samuel 11: 26-12:15

Mark 4: 21-25

The Power of Parables 1

Turning water into wine:

Is Christianity the superior religion 

Once every three years you hear the story of water being miraculously turned into wine and I wonder what you think. Do you think it happened? Do you say no it could not have happened. Who has seen water turned into wine? It is a myth. If your thoughts run along these lines you may just switch off. This would not be a surprising response because as 21^st century women and men, we have been raised to believe that the only things that are true are those that can be  demonstrated scientifically to occur. Neither I, nor anyone else, can prove that Jesus turned water into wine. We lack the kind of evidence needed to do so. And, I think that the claim that Jesus turned water into wine is not what matters the most about this story.  Consequently, I am leaving the issue to one side.  The most important things about this story have to do with the symbolic truths it seeks to convey.  In order to understand these and their relevance to us, we need to know something about the situation of the community for whom John wrote his gospel.   

John’s community

The community for whom John wrote his gospel was a Jewish Christian sect.  That is, it was mainly comprised of Jews who had become followers of Jesus.   Like all sects, it was inward looking, preoccupied with itself rather than with the world outside.  It is not surprising that this particular community was inward looking because its members were victims of persecution. The members of this sect had been expelled from the synagogue for following Jesus. This was serious stuff: Judaism is not principally about religion it is principally about one’s ethnic identity. If, in the first century you were expelled from the synagogue you were no longer considered a Jew or at least an acceptable Jew. Given most people lived out their life in a small village, your neighbours and relatives invariably knew of your disgrace.  The members of this sect had been socially ostracised: cast off, kicked out.

 When the members of John’s community initially chose to become followers of Jesus, they had no intention of surrendering their Jewish religion, let alone all their local Jewish associations. The members of the sect both individually and collectively were trying to cope with an identity crisis; a crisis brought about by having wrenched from their grasp core activities and people who gave their lives much of their meaning.  Although socially and religiously ostracised they had not let go emotionally or psychologically of their Jewish community and its religious practices. 

Some of them yearn for reinstatement in their Jewish community.  They want to be with their relatives and former friends. They are still yearning to participate in the religious ceremonies from which they are now shut out. If a group you belong to, rejects you, or, if a person who has played a crucial part in your life now refuses to have anything to do with you – perhaps a son or daughter -- you will know how members of John’s community felt.  They were obsessed with their sense of loss and many were prepared to do almost anything to restore their past life.

 For John, however, restoration of their old Jewish life is the last thing he wants for them.   He certainly does not want them to repudiate Jesus in an effort to win back their place in the local Jewish community. And later in his gospel he tells them that if they retract their commitment to Jesus they will be eternally dammed.

 With his Jesus stories, John sets out to draw a firm line between Jewish religious practice and the newfound faith of his congregation. Examine his gospel in its entirety and you will find John offers many contrasting pictures between life with Jesus and life without Jesus. For John, life without Jesus means engaging in traditional Jewish ritual and keeping Jewish law.

 By choosing to recount the story of the miracle in Cana, John is trying to help his hearers make the transition from being Jews to being Christians. He aims to move them from being a sect within Judaism to being a Christian community.  He seeks to do this by convincing them that what Jesus offers is far superior to what Judaism offers.  For John the miracle of turning water into wine demonstrates that Jesus is God’s Son, and it demonstrates that Jesus can bring about a miraculous transformation in people’s lives. 

 Because John’s community is living under the threat of persecution, John communicates his messages in code. John is very critical of Judaism and he does not want his criticisms to attract a further round of persecution against his little band of Christians. In the miracle he uses three coded statements to convey his message that Christianity is superior to Judaism.  He conveys this message firstly, by having Jesus choose six instead of seven jars to fill with water, to be turned into wine.

 The function of the jars was to supply water for the Jewish rite of purification. This water was used for washing before and after a meal to achieve the cleanliness demanded by Jewish religious law.  Water was used in Judaism not only to cleanse the flesh, but to remove symbolically one’s sins.

 Why did ritual cleanliness matter so much to the Jewish people?  For this reason.  If you were unclean then you would be out of favour with God whom the Jews believed demanded holiness above all else, and holiness was achieved through purity or cleanliness. If you were out of favour with God then according to commonsense wisdom all kinds of terrible disasters could follow: illness, loss of wealth, loss of loved ones, and your own death.

 The fact that there are six stone jars signifies for John that the purity system is imperfect because, in the scriptures, seven is the perfect number.  The system was declared imperfect for several reasons. Firstly, it was imperfect because it focused on external cleanliness: such as eating the right food rather than on internal cleanliness: Jesus’ purity of the heart.   You will recall Jesus saying “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God”. 

 Secondly, the purity system was declared imperfect because it was divisive and ostracising.  In order to comply with the system’s demands, certain groups of people were avoided, turned away from the meal table, or the synagogue.  They were ostracised for fear that contact with them would make one unclean and therefore unholy in the sight of God.  Those turned away included the chronically ill, and the uncircumcised, tax collectors, and women of ill repute.   So yes, it could be divisive. It divided people into insider and outcast, the physically whole and the maimed, the sinner and the righteous, the Jew and the Gentile.

 The claim that the purity system was seriously flawed had validity,  but so that we are not over critical of the system let us keep in the front of our minds the fact that Christianity also is often divisive and hierarchical in character.  Methodism began life as a society with an informal attachment to the Church of England.  It was comprised principally of members of England’s poorer classes – people who, according to historians, were not usually welcome in the parish church.  Roll the calendar forward to the last half of the nineteenth century and you find that successful businessmen are exercising a disproportionately large degree of power in Methodist affairs.  The church bureaucrats allowed this situation to arise because they believed the Methodist Church needed their financial input.

 I do not know if class factors still influence the way status and power are distributed in today’s church, but we all know that many contemporary churches discriminate against homosexuals and women. When it comes to the practice of social discrimination most contemporary churches cannot afford to point the finger at Judaism. Most of us commit similar offences against our humanitarian principles. No, in regard to such matters the Christian churches cannot claim to be superior to the Judaism of the first century of the Common Era.

 The next coded message is imbedded in the words that the Chief Steward utters to the Bridegroom. “You have kept the good wine until now.  Everyone normally serves the good wine first and the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk”. The expression ‘good wine’ has a double meaning.  It is a reference to the generosity of the bridegroom for his guests.  But, for John, the words witness to the deeper truth and that is that Jesus is the true bridegroom and he has been much more generous than the bridegroom whose marriage is taking place.

 John’s message is that Jesus comes offering the free and extravagantly generous gift of a new life that is far superior to any wine, and certainly to what the Jewish religion can offers Jews. John also poses the question: “How is Jesus able to offer this extraordinary gift of new life?  In verse 11 of chapter 2, he tells us that it is the fruit of Jesus’ glory. Still another coded message.  What is Jesus’ glory?  Jesus’ glory is his death and resurrection.  It is symbolically significant that John has Jesus turn water into wine on the third day of Jesus’ ministry. This makes it a foreshadowing of the resurrection on the third day of the first Easter.

 In summary, for the several reasons I have presented, John affirms that Jesus offers something superior to that offered by Judaism.  There are contemporary scholars who, like John, claim that the Jewish religious system with its overriding emphasis on purity was imperfect.  There are scholars who say that in the end, it failed to deliver joy, and it failed to deliver a vital relation with God for most people.  It offered a minority of people a sense of being holy but it inflicted great hurt and isolation on many others.

  The last time I preached on this passage of scripture, which was more than three years ago I went along with the assertion that Christianity was superior to Judaism.  I am no longer prepared to make that claim.

 Here is something to ponder. Judaism could not have been as bad as Christians have traditionally claimed it to be because many of the Jews who became followers of Jesus gave up on Christianity and returned to their old religion.  The further the first century progressed the stronger became the church’s message that Jesus was a divine being.  This message was hard for Jews to accept because it appeared to them to contradict their conviction that there is only one God.

 By the end of the first century Christianity had become a predominantly Gentile religion.  It seems the great majority of Jews found their religion sufficiently rewarding to stick with it, or go back to it after a flirtation with Christianity.

 Here is a further thought to ponder. Does our experience of church life convince us that Christianity offers today what John believed it offered the people of his community? Do we perceive that contemporary church life brings joy, a sense of being in a vital relation with God, and a transformed relation with one’s fellows? 

 Does contemporary church based Christianity offer something unique? Does it offer substantially more than Judaism or Islam or Hinduism, or Buddhism? If it offers as much as we often claim it does, why do the great majority of Australians – including the great majority of those who have first hand experience of Christianity because they grew up in a church community – fail to see that it offers something unique and beneficial?  If Christianity delivers so much, why are young parents failing to arrive in droves on a Sunday morning to ensure their children learn about Jesus. Why be more concerned about their child’s back hand stroke, or swimming stroke, or guitar playing than her or his spiritual wellbeing? Is it because when they look at church life, or the lives of church people what they see fails to inspire? May be we have exaggerated the life bestowing power of the gospel message the churches offer.

 Please do not misinterpret what I am saying.  I am not saying Christianity in its present church manifestations is bankrupt. No, it does work for many: for many it brings joy, a personal sense of fulfillment, a sense of wellbeing that comes from being part of a caring and friendly community.  All that granted, I still think we are often excessive in the claims we make for Christianity.

 No one knows why the great majority of Australians do pass the church by today.  It may be most people fail to see anything in the church’s life that they would love to possess themselves.  May be the fact that our worship life and our message seem to be stuck in a medieval time warp prevents many people seeing that there is something worthwhile occurring. Much of what Christianity is endeavouring to offer is presented in the language, concepts, and worldviews of bygone eras.  Look through the hymn book, the Bible, the creeds, and many contemporary theological statements and ask yourself how would much of this strike you if you had not been raised in the church.

 On the basis of the evidence of our own experience, I do not think we are in a position to make the claims to religious superiority that the writer of John’s gospel and other early church leaders often made and which many contemporary church leaders still make.  Only yesterday, we sighted this message in big bold print, on a church billboard on our side of town. Jesus is the only way to God. 

 I believe we should dissociate ourselves from such an exclusive and affronting message to the people of other faiths of Melbourne. Instead, we should acknowledge joyously the signs of God’s presence in the lives of people of other faiths, and seek to find common ground with them.  God has fed us through Jesus but he has surely fed Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, and the folk of many other religions through other mediators.  AMEN

 * Main sources used in preparing this sermon: Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and David K. Rensberger, Johannine Faith and Liberating Community

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Turning Lives Around

Of the three gospel stories presented earlier I am focusing on Luke’s because it is the story set down as today’s lection.  Luke’s narrative of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples focuses particularly on Simon Peter, James and John rate only a passing mention. Luke sets the scene on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  It is morning, and a great crowd of people is listening to Jesus’ preaching. To be better heard, Jesus commandeers Simon Peter’s boat as a speaker’s platform.  When Jesus finishes speaking, he instructs Simon Peter to make ready for a catch in the deep water.

Simon Peter expresses serious reservations about Jesus’ directive. He and the other fishermen have fished all through the night and caught nothing.  Simon Peter knew that the chances of netting fish in the morning were virtually zero. He was probably saying something like this to himself:  “Who does this Jesus think he is handing out advice on catching fish, he plies another trade!” 

Rather than voice such thoughts, he says to Jesus, “At your direction, Master, I will let down the nets”.  To his astonishment, he nets so many fish that he needs help from the other boat to land the catch. Peter experiences a profound sense of awe. He falls down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

Jesus tells Simon Peter not to be afraid and declares that from that time forward he will be catching people!  The reading ends with the declaration that Simon Peter, James and John left everything and followed Jesus.

What a remarkable story. Did it happen as told?  Most mainstream scholars say probably not. There are competing accounts of the same incident – such as Mark’s -- which differ in decisive ways. They cannot all be true in a factual sense.  Some elements of today’s story are possibly factual, but, in evaluating the incident we should keep to the forefront of our minds the fact that Luke’s concern is not to offer a historically accurate account of Jesus’ life and ministry but to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Saviour and Lord.  He is writing to persuade members of the Christian community to remain with Jesus and to persuade those experimenting or flirting with Christianity to surrender their old way of life and become followers of Jesus too.  To this end, he does not hesitate to adapt Jesus stories in order to show Jesus possessed divine qualities whilst he was conducting his ministry. 

I doubt Peter declared Jesus was Lord at a first or second meeting with him. After all, Peter and all the early followers of Jesus were Jews. All Jews were monotheists, as was Jesus himself.   As monotheists, they worshipped only one God, Yahweh. For any Jew to declare a human being divine was blasphemous.  The followers probably did not commence seeing Jesus as divine until after the First Easter. Many mainstream scholars believe that it was what happened after the first Easter that led to the development among Christians of the conviction that Jesus was God’s only Son and our Saviour.  It was the followers post-Easter experience of Jesus – their visions of him, the changes for the better in their own lives and personalities that convinced individual Christians and slowly the Christian community collectively that Jesus was more than a prophet, a spirit person and a wise man. As the decades of the first century past the conviction that he was a divine reality grew.

By the time the gospels were written, which was in the last third of the first century, Jesus could not have been a more exalted figure in the Christian community.  By then He was the Way, the Truth and the Light; Emmanuel, God with us, the Bread of Life, and so forth.  Luke wrote his gospel in the 80’s. It is inevitable that the exalted status Jesus enjoyed in the Christian community by that time infused and shaped Luke’s account of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry.  He wanted to get the good news out.  To convince his readers about the validity of the claims the Christian community was making about Jesus Luke embellished the Jesus stories that were circulating among Christians.  One thing he sought to show was that from the start of his ministry Jesus  possessed the power and knowledge of God. So, he took the straightforward story that Mark told in his gospel about the call of the disciples and introduced miraculous elements.  Jesus did know where the fish were even when the fishermen did not, he had the power to ensure a miraculous haul of fish occurred when these experienced fishermen could catch nothing.  So revelatory were these events that Luke’s Peter declares that Jesus is Lord.  No other gospel account of the calling of the disciples contains Peter’s declaration.

Some people will be worried by the claim I am making that the gospel stories are a mixture of remembered incidents in Jesus’s life and of material that is not factual but testimonial in character and which has been deliberately introduced to suit the writer’s purpose.

Some people may be troubled, firstly, because my claims challenge their strongly held belief that the gospels are the inerrant words of God and, secondly, because what I have said casts doubt on their belief that Jesus is God’s Son and our Saviour.

I can understand these concerns, but I think the evidence we have of numerous inconsistencies, errors and contradictions in the scriptures make the traditional claim untenable that the scriptures are literally God’s words.  Just compare Mark’s account with Luke’s account of the calling of the disciples. Which is the ‘true’ account? They both cannot be.  Probably neither!

I also think that often Christians make the false assumption that the only truth is empirical truth, and if parts of the scripture can be shown to be factually incorrect then the Christian edifice falls over. I do not think that Christianity or individual faith should wrest on the foundation of sand provided by the insupportable assertion that the Bible is literally God’s words.

Historical facts are not the only kind of truth.  Although the stories we hear in worship week after week are not necessarily factually true in every respect, and some may have no basis in fact at all, they may still be true in a metaphorical sense.  They may still convey important truths for us about the meaning and value of life; as to how to live our lives well, what God values, what he expects of us and so forth. 

It does not concern me that Luke’s story of the calling of Peter did not happen as described because it has much of value to teach us.  Here are four valuable things it offers us.

Firstly, by telling the story of an unexpected abundant catch of fish instigated by Jesus, Luke communicates the message that Jesus is special. This Jesus can bring about significant and worthwhile changes in human lives, as he did in the lives of his inner circle of disciples.

Secondly, Peter’s display of awe in the presence of Jesus reminds us that the disciples came to see that Jesus was extraordinary human being in part because he brought them into contact with God and offered them unique insights into God.

Thirdly, and as Marcus Borg stresses, the story reminds us that for Christians the decisive revelation of God is a person, whereas for Jews it is the Torah, and for Muslims the Qur’an.  We do talk of the Bible as the revelation of God, yet from the early centuries, Christians have affirmed that the decisive revelation of God is Jesus.  Yes, Jesus shows us what a life filled with God is like. 

Fourthly, the story alerts us to what Jesus asks of followers.  He does not say to Simon, James and John, now I expect you to give your assent to certain beliefs. He does not say believe that your Scriptures (that is the Jewish Bible) are literally the words of God; that I was born of a virgin, that I am the second person of the Trinity.   Nor does he ask them to introduce into their lives an additional ritual, or spiritual exercise.  Instead, he calls on them to leave the old life entirely behind and commit their future lives to him and his mission.

Mark has Jesus say: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). Luke adopts this message from Mark.

The last question I want to consider today is this: What message does Jesus’ call of his disciples to follow him convey to us today? We need to acknowledge upfront, that what Jesus asked of his disciples was a big ask, and from a contemporary perspective, a contentious one.  When Jesus made his dramatic entrance into the lives of his future disciples, those disciples had firmly established adult lives with significant responsibilities. In their society, adult children bore financial responsibility for aging parents as well as for their spouses and children and often for members of their extended families.

Take Simon Peter.  He had a wife. Our culture trains us to prioritize family and our jobs.  So, from today’s moral perspective Peter’s decision to walk away from his family and his trade starts to look a little iffy.  You can envisage Peter’s neighbours, friends and family telling him his behaviour was reprehensible. And what must his wife have said!

For our part, let us try to empathize with Peter for we too, at times, fall short of what we undertake to do.  If we empathize rather than reject his action as morally irresponsible, we may increase our understanding of what committing to Christ may entail for us.

If we use the New Testament to try and sort out what being a follower today means we need to bear in mind that the social, religious and political context was markedly different to ours and the context always affects the character of discipleship. The goal of Jesus’ ministry was preparing people to participate in the kingdom; that is in God’s reign on earth. He called for big sacrifices and an unqualified commitment to the work of the kingdom because he probably believed the coming of the kingdom was imminent. Would he have told them to leave all and follow him if he had not seen its establishment as of overriding importance in their particular historical context?

The kingdom did not come in the way Jesus appeared to have expected, and it still has not come.  As I said, we live in different circumstances.  How many of us organize our lives in anticipation of God directly intervening to re-create the life of our society?  How many of us would think Jesus expects us to do what he apparently called the first disciples to do – to prioritize discipleship above family and jobs, and, if need be, to die for the cause. May be none of us thinks Jesus expects these things of us.

One member of the congregation said to me recently that God has given us responsibility for members of our immediate family. We cannot therefore walk away from these.  I cannot argue with that but I am still left thinking that the call to follow Jesus has contemporary relevance that entails more than caring for family and friends.  Much in the New Testament strongly suggests that following Jesus does entail re-prioritizing our activities and ambitions.  Marcus Borg suggests that what it means to be a follower of Jesus can be expressed in great simplicity in the words of Jesus: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbour as yourself.”  Doing these things may entail bringing about a radical change in our lives: changing what we do with our time, money and energy, and who we seek to care for and love; yes, dying to an old way of being and being reborn into a new way of being.  It is worth reflecting on what it means to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves.    AMEN

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Blessed are the Peacemakers

We are all familiar with the term peacekeeper. The typical peacekeeper is a professional soldier, or policeperson, who goes into one of the world’s trouble spots such as Bosnia in the 1990s or East Timor more recently, and keep rival ethnic groups from killing one another.  Sometimes Australian police are engaged in an ethnic peace keeping operation within this country.  This happened last month when there was a punch up between Croatians and Serbians at the Australian Open tennis tournament. 

So, that is peace keeping between adults who are bent on doing serious damage to one another. I am sure most members of this congregation have engaged in peace keeping activities at one time or another: perhaps as youth club leaders, referees of kid’s football matches, and certainly as parents and probably grandparents.  Who, for instance, has not had to pull warring siblings apart? Yes peacekeeping is a very important function, but it is not what Jesus is talking about in the passage Yvonne read today from the Sermon on the Mount.  In this passage, Jesus is talking about peacemaking. He says, “A blessing on the peacemakers, for they are the children of God”.  Peacemaking goes beyond peacekeeping. It is about ending estrangement between people seriously out of sorts with one another. The goal is to achieve a harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship in the place of the serious resentment and hostility.

Parents, grandparents and friends often engage in peacemaking activities, as I have described them.  Mum says to Johnny, “Please go and say sorry to your sister, you have hurt her a lot”. Johnny retorts: “She started it mum. She was calling me names so I am not going to say sorry!” “But Johnny, you threw mud all over her party dress.  That was a terrible thing to do. I want you to go to her room and tell her you are truly sorry”.

As I said, we have all engaged in such activities at some time in our life.  We may have engaged in peacemaking with adults too. Peacemaking between adults is our main concern today.  For instance, a mutual friend of two people who are seriously out of sorts can put a lot of effort into restoring their previously mutually rewarding relationship that has gone pear-shaped.  The mutual friend may help by getting the friend who is convinced it is all the other person’s fault to face up to the fact that he or she has contributed to the breakdown of the relationship. 

So peacemaking is a vital, indeed indispensable activity in our daily lives.  It is far from easy.  It helps if you are patient, and generous with your time and energy. It also helps to have a thick skin to deal with resentment from those you are trying to help; to possess the ability to see both points of view, to possess good interpersonal skills and a genuine concern for the well being of others.  There are rewards, for engaging in peacemaking. You may help one or more persons get over their pre-occupation with feelings of hurt, anger, and resentment.  You may help ensure that the lives of those you are working with are richer and more rewarding than they would have been if you had not taken on the role of peacemaker between them.

Peacemaking is not always conducted by a third party.  One of the people involved in the dispute may take on the role of peacemaker. Jesus’ teaching makes it clear if we are estranged from another person, or our group is from another group we should initiate peacemaking.  We should do so, even if we are the injured party.  Yes, even if everybody privy to what has gone on says we are blameless and all the responsibility for the breakdown or the continuing hostilities lies with the other person or persons. 

By now you are probably thinking this is a big ask, and you are right.  But, whoever said following in the footsteps of Jesus, making the journey he made was easy.  He certainly did not say so.  On the contrary, he repeatedly stressed that it was tough. He did say: “If anyone would be my disciple let him take up his cross and follow me”.

Why do we followers find it so hard to take the initiative to puts things right if we see ourselves as an injured party?  Perhaps the core reason is that our ego gets in the way and that process clouds our judgment. We may fail to see that we have contributed to the problem that has arisen. Our pride is hurt and we refuse to let go of the hurt.

Most of the excuses we make for not taking the initiative flow from putting our ego centre stage. ‘No, I won’t make the move to patch things up with him, I am far too hurt by what he did.  You know, I will be a long time getting over this. I will probably never get over it.  So please stop talking about him. Nothing would make me happier than to never hear his name again, ever!”  Does any of this sound familiar?

I am not diminishing the significance of such feelings, or belittling them.  The pain is real for it has a tactile quality: it hurts!  Of course, it is hard to take the initiative if we believe we have been done a terrible wrong by another person.  That said, we may eventually reach the point that we recognize we would like harmony restored and we are contemplating making a move but we are nervous less we suffer a rebuff and so have to endure further pain and loss of face. So we hang back. And this is understandable. But should we not be risk takers in this matter? Jesus promises that if we are we shall be blessed.

Here is a further scenario.  We have taken the initiative and we have had the door shut in our face, perhaps literally, or the phone slammed down in our ear, or our mail returned unopened.  So we say to ourselves and to our close friends, “Well I have done my part. All that could possibly be reasonably asked of me. It is over, unless she makes a move.  I would be an idiot to submit myself to further pain by trying again”.

Again, these are understandable responses, but should we leave it there?  What did Jesus say when asked how many times should I forgive someone: seven times? No, seventy times seven.

A common strategy we humans use to avoid taking the peacemaking initiative is to stereotype the other person or group in negative terms: as some kind of ogre. We may something like this: “He is not half the person I thought he was. I had no idea he had this dark side to him.  I do not want to have anymore to do with him now I see him for what he really is”.  Sometimes this strategy amounts to saying the other party is less than human. We saw recently, that this was the strategy the Jews used to justify having nothing to do with their neighbours, the Samaritans.

Jesus put the lie to the lie of the Jews when he told the story of the Good Samaritan. If we listen we will find Jesus puts the lie to our lie when we define another human being or group as some kind of ogre: a person or persons we should avoid in the interests of our well being or purity, and who does not deserve friends like ourselves.

As I said, earlier, friends can play a key role in our lives as effective peacemakers but they can also do the opposite. They can facilitate the breakdown of a relationship or help ensure an estrangement persists rather than is overcome.  So we have to be careful to whom we turn to throw light on the difficult or broken relation in our life that we are endeavouring to deal with. It is so easy to seek out the friend whom we know is likely to reinforce our decision to quit the relationship, or to go on punishing for just a bit longer, the person who has offended us.  Such a friend can encourage us to hang on to our hurt.  ‘That is a terrible thing she has done to you. You poor thing’, the friend says.   ‘I could not forgive her, if I was in your shoes’.  You are well rid of her, forget her’.  But, of course, you cannot forget her, and probably you should not.

So, our pride, our hurt feelings, can get in the way of trying to restore what was a productive and enjoyable relationship, and our friends may also get in the way.  There is something else possibly going on as well as the process of distancing ourselves to protect ourselves from further pain.  We can be engaging in payback. We are hurting so we are going to ensure the person responsible for our pain suffers too.  Lock ourselves into this pattern and are we not drifting a long way from the teaching and example of Jesus?

Up to this point I have spoken as though ending estrangement is always possible and always the best outcome.  But I must acknowledge that it is not always possible to effect reconciliation when people are estranged. This can be so for all kinds of reasons.  To illustrate the point here is one possible reason. Someone may repeatedly resist your overtures to even consider trying to sort out difficulties in a relationship that has broken down.  They may make it clear that the relationship is over for them for good. And they are entitled to do this.  So no we cannot always effect reconciliation.

Having acknowledged that reconciliation is not always possible, what I want to stress is that probably, in most instances, it is desirable and possible to have a go at achieving reconciliation. However, for the kinds of reasons I have been talking about we choose not to follow Jesus’ directive to be peacemakers.  In summary, the real impediment to peacemaking for us as individuals is often an overriding preoccupation with me: with my pain, my feelings, my entitlements, the injury done to me.  So the question then is how do we get past me? 

The first thing we can do is take a step back from the immediate situation in which we are heavily involved emotionally, and try and be objective about ourselves.  It can be a very good idea to confide in a friend whom we think has the capacity to take an objective view and who we know is prepared to be honest with us and ask him or her if they think we are being too precious about the situation.  Are we seeking to hurt the person?

Let us not keep our sad story entirely to ourselves.  We will facilitate the healing occurring more quickly if we can gain an independent perspective on our dilemma.

A second thing we can do is ask ourselves this question? Have I at some time in the past let someone down badly myself, even betrayed that person, in the very way, I believe, I have now been betrayed?  Think about it.  We need to do this because how we assess the situation is going to be influenced by a universal characteristic of human beings which is this: each one of us is much more able and ready to excuse something we have done than we are to excuse similar behaviour in another person.  Yes, this is a universal human trait.  We human beings repeatedly fail to live up to the standards we judge others by, and fail to acknowledge that we do fail to live up to them.  Jesus understood our capacity to delude ourselves in this way.  He said to his disciples and a crowd of listeners:  ‘Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but pay no attention to the log in your own eye?’  How can you say to your brother, “Please, brother, let me take that speck out of your eye’, yet cannot even see the log in your own eye? You hyprocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, then you will be able to see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye”.

Those words of Jesus remind u

s to look to ourselves if we are full of excuses for not taking the first step as peacemakers.  We are highly likely to find we have contributed to the breakdown, or if we have not we have injured some other person in the way we now feel injured. So, let us put our ego and our hurt to one side, and take the first step.  Jesus promises that those who do so will be blessed. Yes, we will release ourselves from the prison we created when we would not let go of our hurt, when we refused to forgive. Instead we will experience a restored sense of wellbeing and hopefully the joy of a once broken relationship restored. Yes, blessed you will be, if you become a peacemaker.  AMEN

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Seeing with the eye of love

Blessed are the peacemakers for they are the children of God, Jesus tells us.  Jesus wants us to be peacemakers.  We saw last week that a peacemaker endeavours to make relationships right between people who have become estranged from one another. 

A peacemaker seeks to heal wounds inflicted by former friends, relatives, members of a faith community, on one another.

Jesus himself often engaged in peacemaking.  In his society, there were people with whom no devout Jew would have anything to do.  They included the poor, the chronically ill, tax collectors, and prostitutes.  Jesus sought to make peace with them, to heal their wounds on behalf of his fellow Jews who were treating them so badly. Generally speaking, his efforts were in vain because he did not manage to restore such marginal people to the heart of Jewish society.  However, he did bring them into a meaningful relationship with some fellow Jews: namely with himself and members of his circle of followers. In Jewish society, you only eat with someone you regard as your equal. Jesus and his followers went so far as to share meals with these marginal people.  As a result, they experienced a level of acceptance they had never known before, or not for a considerable period of time. This was peacemaking of a high order. 

We too can act as peacemakers for people.  We can try to repair badly damaged relationships.  We can encourage and facilitate people overcoming hurt and hostilities.  

Of course, we can be out of sorts with friends, colleagues and relatives ourselves.  And, we can come up with all kind of ways of avoiding engaging in peacemaking with people who have offended us in some way.  For example, we can stereotype the offending person or group in such negative terms that we conclude that we need not bother with them anymore.  Doing this is contrary to the message Jesus gave out.  He calls on us to reach out to the people with whom we have fallen out.  We are to take the initiative even if we feel injured and badly let down by the other person.  So how do we do this?  How do we overcome our preoccupation with our pain?  We have to change our spectacles: take off those spectacles through which we only see the faults of the other person; the spectacles that blind us to our faults; the spectacles that prevent us seeing that we have contributed to the breakdown of the relationship, or at least in seriously harming it.

We have to take these spectacles off because they provide only a biased view of the process of relationship breakdown.  Our present spectacles are biased by such things as hurt pride, feelings of rejection, the prejudices passed on to us by other people, and often by false information.

We need to find a way to replace these spectacles with ones that enable us to take an honest look at ourselves and an impartial look at the others caught up in the situation.  We need spectacles that show us that the people we feel misused by are very much like ourselves.  They are not ogres but human beings with virtues as well as faults, and strengths as well as weaknesses.  They are people who need understanding, forgiveness and love.

Where do we find spectacles that will provide us with a fresh perspective?  A medieval mystic called Hugo of St. Victor provides a vital clue in our search for a fresh perspective.  He says, “Love is the eye!”  By saying this Hugo is alerting us to the fact that we only see things and people accurately and helpfully when we see them through the eyes of love.

If we adopt Hugo’s advice, it entails recognizing that God sees the people we may be partially or completely estranged from with the eyes of love.  God does not bear these people any ill will, even though we do, and even if we hope God will make them suffer for what we allege they have done to us.  God loves the people from whom we are estranged, or with whom we are fighting as much as he loves us.  He yearns for those people we are out of sorts with to have a joyous and fulfilling life.

Recognizing this and meditating upon it is the starting point for making progress towards changing negative attitudes. If I face the fact that God loves the person or persons I find impossible to forgive, it is likely to cause me to ask this question. “How come I am holding on to my hurt, and how come I continue to harbour feelings of ill will toward these persons seeing that God loves and cares for them?  What is more, how can I try to commune with God, whether in private prayer or public worship and, at the same time, leave out of my relation to God this dominant issue in my life?  How can I possibly communicate with God and not bring my problem of my negativity to the meeting?  Rather I need to ask God to help me see the persons concerned with the eyes of Jesus, which means with the eyes of love.

It also helps to commend these people to God’s care and love.  Yes, commend to God someone from whom I am estranged, even if I believe the estrangement was more of their doing than mine.

What I suggest we should avoid is asking God to change these persons in a way that will serve my interests, my needs, my wants.  It will not promote healing for me to pray, “Please God make her see that she is in the wrong, that she has hurt me terribly.” Or to pray, ”God please make her a more loving and less self-centred person so that we can have a better friendship”.  Those prayers do not work!   What works is to ask God to care for the person or persons, no conditions stipulated by me.  If we do this and really mean it, it is highly likely we will find that hurt feelings and anger dissipate.  Our urge to hit back recedes and perhaps disappears.  Instead of negative feelings, we may find ourselves wishing the person or persons well, notwithstanding that they may not want to have anything further to do with us.

A Four Corners programme on the Exclusive Brethren put to air several years ago illustrated the points I have just made.  The program focused on the practice of the brethren of excommunicating a member of their community who had in the eyes of the elders done something that rendered him or her impure.  In order to maintain the purity of the group the elders threw the offender out of the group.

Family breakdown often followed from this action. For instance, the elders would order the impure person to leave the bed of his or her spouse, and for the spouse who was not disgraced and the children, if any, to have nothing to do with the parent who had been excommunicated.  These practices shocked viewers of the program.  From any humanitarian perspective, they are shocking actions.  However, the program was not in this respect providing us with fresh information.  Religious sects frequently practice shunning and excommunication.

The most moving and memorable thing about the program was not the practice of shunning but the love the excommunicated parents sustained for children who had commenced shunning them many years earlier. The ABC interviewed several excommunicated parents for the program.  Notwithstanding the fact that they had experienced incalculable pain because they had lost partner and/or children, they bore no ill will towards those they had lost.  In most cases, they had not heard from the family members for years.  The only communication that they had received, was a letter from partner or child stating they the excommunicated person was unfit for them to associate with. 

The parents or partners who were victims of shunning and excommunication appeared to have moved beyond any feelings of hurt and animosity.  No excommunicated person said that their children or their former spouse should have left the Brethren for their sake.  Indeed more than one excommunicated person empathized with their former spouse and children’s decision to stay with the church community. These excommunicated members acknowledged that the community was caring and supportive and would always help out, materially if necessary.

The shunned former members were ready in mind, heart and spirit for reconciliation.  They were ready even though any overtures they had made had been rejected: they were ready even though they never expected a reconciliation to take place.  They possessed, according to our culture’s standards, an abundance of justifications for being permanently bitter and angry, not only toward their former church but also toward the members of their family who shunned them.  Yet, they did not bear such feelings.  It is the stories of these forgiving people that are so memorable.

Their power to forgive brings us to the next point I want to make which is this: If I am seriously out of sorts with someone, my problem is not what the person has done to me but my inability to let go of the negative attitudes towards this person that are dominating my thoughts and feelings.  This is what the shunned former members of the exclusive Brethren had achieved.  They had let go of any feelings of hurt and any desire for payback they had previously experienced.

Yes, we can change but we have to work at it. Nelson Mandella’s story bears this out.  He experienced a change in his view of his enemies that transformed his life. When Nelson Mandella was imprisoned, he came to the realisation that when he was released he would still be held prisoner by his failure to forgive.  Those who had harmed him may not be giving him a thought but his failure to forgive would keep him imprisoned. 

 We too can be imprisoned by our failure to forgive.  Forgiving is at the heart of peacemaking and we can be rendered powerless as peacemakers it we withhold forgiveness.  Here is the last story I wish to share with you. You may well remember how about five years ago a gunman entered an Amish school and killed several children.  Subsequently, the families of the dead children went to the family of the gunman and embraced the members of that family and reconciled with them.  Money was collected in the community for the Amish families that had lost daughters.  The parents gave half the money to the family of the gunman.

The Christian who told the story of the Amish families’ act of reconciliation on the ABC Encounter program said, “Christians never cease to believe that love can transform human beings and human relationships.  Peacemaking is an act of love.  Blessed are the peace makers, for they are the children of God.  AMEN

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A Tribute to a Remarkable Woman:  Dulcie Elizabeth Vernon.

Dulcie Elizabeth Vernon was a remarkable woman. She knew the truth of St. Paul’s observation that “If God is for us, who is against us?” She knew that because God loved her and God’s love had triumphed on the cross she too was more than a conqueror in all things.

When, thirteen years ago, her leg was amputated to save her life Dulcie’s first concern was not the loss of her leg.  This was a secondary matter.  Her first concern was the fact that the loss of her leg meant she would not be able to drive and that would make it nearly impossible for her to visit the people to whom she was extending pastoral care in the Williamstown area.

Dulcie found a way around the problem for pastoral work the loss of her leg caused and we will come to that. But first, I want to share with you what I learnt about the special qualities of Dulcie Vernon from talking to several people who knew her well.  I asked these people to tell me what impressed them most about her.  All readily talked about her and, in such a way, as to show their lives had been profoundly affected by their relationship with Dulcie It is not possible here to give you a comprehensive account of what they said for we would be here for the remainder of the day.  I do, however, want to share with you three of Dulcie’s qualities that came up frequently in these conversations.

The first quality was Dulcie’s faith. People were impressed with the strength and depth of Dulcie’s faith. Dulcie’s faith was the lynchpin of her life. She trusted God as probably few people trust God. She took risks because of her trust of God. Dulcie an old woman confined to a wheel chair risked being abused by inviting strangers into her home because they were in need of someone to talk to. 

Dulcie believed as possibly few of us believe that God was active in the world and responsive to our intercessions and supplications.  Someone described Dulcie as a prayer warrior.  I am not sure what the term means but I do know that she gave much time every day to communicating with God and particularly to bringing the needs of quite a range of people to God’s attention.  I was a regular beneficiary of Dulcie’s intercessions.  I often visited her prior to driving home to Surrey Hills late on a weekday afternoon. Dulcie would never let me leave without her offering a prayer to God for my protection on what she perceived as a hazardous journey on the Westgate Freeway and Citilink. God was told in detail of the risks: dangerous drivers, me falling to sleep going through the tunnel.  She made certain God was across all the relevant facts.  I was moved by Dulcie’s concern for my wellbeing, and the signs that she thought a great deal about me and made me the regular subject of her prayers. 

The second special quality of Dulcie’s was her love for others. There was also much mention of her generosity, her commitment to caring for others, and her kindness.  I am bracketing them together for this reflection.

One person put it well when she said she marvelled at Dulcie’s uncanny ability to encompass everybody in her circle of love.  She did this in small as well as big ways. Dulcie was childless but she regarded her brothers children and their children and grand children as her children and kept in constant touch with them. She would do anything within her power to assist them.

Dulcie was a passionate person who had an immense amount of love to offer people. Many of you, I am sure, experienced Dulcie’s love in small and in big ways. Notwithstanding her profound health problems and her confinement to a wheel chair Dulcie took it upon herself to make things to sell on the Vanuatu monthly stall.  She made date scones for morning tea following the Sunday service.[? I benefited from her cooking.  As I went down the aisle following the church service Dulcie and I would always fall into conversation.  She often produced a brown paper bag containing two scones. She did this way because she believed I was too busy talking to people in the church to get out to the Meeting Room in time for morning tea.  As she handed over the scones she would say: Love you.  Yes, Dulcie did have an uncanny ability to encompass people in her circle of love  ?].

A third quality of Dulcie’s several people mentioned was her positive outlook on life. People were impressed with her ability to put the best construction on what happened to her. For example, when her leg was amputated she did not become maudlin but rather stressed how lucky she was because she did not lose her life.  She praised and thanked God for her good fortune. One close friend of Dulcie’s observed, “Her glass was never half empty it was always at least half full.”  Dulcie always stressed that there were many people worse off than her.  I was told that her response to the loss of her leg was inspiring to those who lived through this experience with her. 

These were just some of the qualities that people mentioned.  What was clear was that Dulcie had touched the lives of many people in a special and often life changing way.  Dulcie had made a difference.  Her life was a manifestation of her love of God and her commitment to communicate God’s love to others through action as well as words. 

We contemporary Christians make a practice of calling ourselves believers.  Dulcie was a believer but she was more than a believer, she was a disciple.   

Choosing to follow in Jesus’ way as a disciple is to choose a costly path to tread, and probably many church goers baulk at making such a choice: we are reluctant to hand over direction of our life to another, especially to Jesus of  Galilee who chose the more difficult path.

Yet this is what Dulcie did. She took up her cross and joined Jesus on his journey.  To do this effectively she let go of her commitment to the God’s of this world – that is many of the goodies and practices most of us see as indispensable to living a pleasurable life -- and made God the centerpiece of her life. Serving God was the controlling commitment of her daily round of activities. She emulated Jesus by focusing on the needs and problems of others rather than on her own needs and problems. Dulcie gave sacrificially of her money, time and her spiritual resources. Instead of saying how can I get more for me she kept saying I don’t really need this thing, this outing, I’ll let it go, and give the money to someone who has much less than me.

One of her great passions was Christian missionary activities in overseas countries. She supported with money and prayer the work of many missionaries.

Notwithstanding the loss of her leg, Dulcie found a way to go on caring locally. She commenced exercising a ministry by telephone.  She made regular and prayerful contact with all those in her care. She used the phone to alert others who could be of service to anyone who needed services she could not provide.

Dulcie’s Williamstown ministry was not limited to those she phoned. She attended church weekly and the St. Stephens’ Mission Group activities.  In both contexts she brought love and consideration to a variety of people.  Dulcie made it her business to pray regularly and frequently for every member of the St. Stephen’s Congregation, as well as for an extensive list of overseas missionary workers.       

Dulcie’s nephew, Bruce pointed out to me, that when Dulcie could not go out into the world as freely as she had prior to the loss of her leg, the world came to her.

I was one of those who beat a regular path to Dulcie’s door.  I went initially as her Pastor. However, in no time at all Dulcie was providing pastoral care for me.  She did not presume to serve as my Pastoral adviser, it happened when I told her of some of the issues I was dealing with I invited her comment.  Dulcie drew on her years of experience of human beings and her great wisdom to offer me much of value.

Dulcie was a good listener. Dulcie was discreet. Nothing was passed on. Dulcie was non-judgmental.  She had a great understanding of human character and she combined this with a willingness to put the best construction possible on what people did or said. A member of the congregation told me that Dulcie said to her ‘That when I think I might be going to say something nasty, I remember these words’, “A cup of sweet water never stills a bitter drop.”

It is not surprising that in thinking about a person or who appeared to have landed themselves in serious trouble, she took account of the pressures that person was under rather than judging her or him harshly for falling short of the values and goals enunciated by Jesus. Whatever a person’s failings she saw her as the object of God’s love. And, she sought to love that person as God loved her and loved that person.

Dulcie phoned me every now and then. It was never to tell me of her problems it was usually to ask after Rae and myself or to alert me to the needs of someone who was in my pastoral care just in case I was unaware of a fresh dilemma that person had to deal with.  Dulcie had a great ability to put herself into the shoes of another person.  If Dulcie was going to miss church she would put herself in my shoes. She would phone to let me know she would be absent and why so that I would not become concerned about her.  She would tell me there was no need to come around after the service but rather give my time to other people in greater need than herself.

Sometimes she phoned to tell me she was going into hospital and to tell me not to call on her because there were other people more in need of my care.

Many of you would recognize your experience of Dulcie in my account of my relation with her.  Toward the end of Dulcie’s life her body was wearing her down. She was ready to go. However, as long as she was here she assumed that God had more for her to do.  She sought to serve God through caring for others until the last breath in her body was expended.  The last communication I received from Dulcie was a message left on my answering machine; a message to let me know of an issue a parishioner was facing. Dulcie was seriously ill at the time. She left this message just a few days prior to her death.

Dulcie was a humble person. She never ceased to marvel that God had done so much for her. Dulcie asked that the two scripture passages at the top of the first page of our order of service be included in her funeral service. These do not say all there is to say about Dulcie’s approach to life and her Christian commitment.  However, her choice of these passages does highlight the way Dulcie’s life was grounded in her love of God, as a person called by God to service and thankfulness to God for all that God had done for her. AMEN

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Easter Surprises and Transformations*

In Matthew’s account, Jesus suddenly appears and greets the two women. They fall down, touch his feet and worship him. He does not say do not touch me because I have yet to go to my Father as he did to Mary Magdalene in the John account. Moreover, he tells the two women to tell his disciples to go to Galilee where they will see him. The angel had already passed on the same direction from Jesus to the women. I stress this point because in John’s gospel all of Jesus’ appearances to his followers occur in Jerusalem not in Galilee.

Vehicles of God's healing power *

There is great distress among the members of the tiny community of Christians in Joppa.  Why? Because a committed and hard working member of the community, a widow named Tabitha, has taken sick and died. Everyone in the community loved Tabitha. She gave her life over to caring for people, especially the poor.  From the perspective of the widows of the church, Tabitha was irreplaceable. She was not only a wonderful worker but a dear friend. The widows say to one another.  “What are we to do, how can we go on?  Cannot God save us by bringing her back to life?”

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God enables the harvest to happen*

 To the casual onlooker it would have appeared things were going really well for Jesus on the day he told his audience the parable of the sower.  On this day as on every other day a large crowd gathered to hear what he had to say, and gathered in the hope they would witness a miracle.  No wonder people came from town after town whenever the word was out that he was in the district for he had gained a great reputation as a preacher and teacher as well as healer.

On this particular occasion, the crowd must have been pressing in on him to such an extent that he took refuge in a boat.  The boat was moored off shore and it was from there he preached a series of parables to the crowd standing on the shoreline.  Notwithstanding the size of the crowd, Jesus was far from certain that he could win the Hebrew people to the cause he was promoting. This question must have been at the forefront of his mind as he gazed at the large gathering: ‘Will they become faithful followers or will they side with the religious leaders who are now clearly my enemy?’

A further question exercising his mind and his disciples’ minds was this:  ‘Why do not more people get the message I am bringing that the kingdom is near at hand?  Why do they not allow the message into their hearts and change the pattern of their lives so that their lives become a manifestation of the kingdom in the world?

Yes, at the time he spoke this parable, it seems Jesus was living in the midst of conflict and uncertainty about the reception of his ministry.  He too was dealing with criticism and ultimately rejection by the religious leaders of his day.  But, they were not the only source of rejection.  His family had in effect rejected his message and ministry.  This would have been the unkindest cut of all. In today’s reading we hear Jesus announce that he is forming a new community comprised of those who do God’s will. Jesus declares that these faithful followers, not his blood kin comprise his “family”. His immediate circle of disciples provide the core membership of his new “family”. 

So, things do not look that rosy for Jesus when he delivers his parable of the sower. From that time forward he concentrates his ministry on his immediate and closest followers, his so-called “new family”.  The message of the parable is directed principally at this new ‘family’.

The parable of the Sower, like Jesus’ parables generally, takes people from the known to the unknown.  He commences with ordinary life and moves to revealing a new vision of the world: one that challenges his hearers’ view of how things are, what matters most, and how the future will work out.

The sower was a familiar figure to Jesus’ hearers. In Jesus’ day, the sower scattered his seed around in a fairly casual and liberal fashion.  Not all of the seed fell on fertile soil.  Some fell on paths, some on rocky ground with only shallow soil, and some among thorns.

The references to the different kinds of soil in Jesus’ parable are barely veiled references to those sectors of the Jewish population who were failing to recognize that Jesus was an instrument for the realization of God’s reign on earth. For example, the religious leaders would almost certainly be seen by Jesus as among those whose hearts are so hard they will not admit the word he brings.  Those members of the public who initially allow the message into their hearts and display great enthusiasm for Christ’s work but then quickly fall away are referred to in the parable as the rocky soil in which the seed springs up quickly but then dies just as quickly.

As Jesus describes the various infertile places the seed falls, the disciples were probably thinking, “Has all this been worthwhile? Or, “has it been a wasteful procedure? Seed scattered around to no avail”. The disciples, think, “Jesus must be despairing and angry. Has not he  been so generous in giving of himself to others – he has lavished his time, his teaching skills, his energy so widely without counting the cost of his endeavours. But alas, in a great many cases his sowing has suffered a similar fate to that of the farmer’s sowing.  His word has fallen on unresponsive ears: people have failed to open their hearts. Some do open them but the seed eventually dies because they are not prepared to allow it to change the pattern of their lives”.

Jesus is using the story to get his disciples to face up to the fact that, on the one hand, many who hear the gospel prove indifferent to it, or respond to it initially, but fall by the way side, or stick around but are complacent.

However, a parable that is a true parable always provides a surprise: one that causes people to see the familiar in a new way, to see that their expectations are wide of the mark.  This is what happened in this instance.  As well as his message about the rejection or indifference of many to the news of the kingdom, Jesus uses the parable to convey a  message of hope regarding the future. Yes, he offers a positive and uplifting message  as well as a critical one.

The positive message is implicit in his announcement as to just how extraordinarily good the crops are that result from the seed that falls on good soil. In first century Israel, yields of ten fold were excellent. Jesus reported a return that was way over the top: a yield of a hundred fold. This was a fantastic outcome.  So Jesus was offering a message of hope, especially to the disciples.  He says to them. “Do not lose heart. Do not lose your confidence in the generosity and power of God. When the word does find a receptive heart and strikes home the stage is set for the arrival of the kingdom, The ‘harvest’ for the kingdom will be so overwhelmingly great – upwards of a hundredfold”, declares Jesus.

It was not only the disciples, who needed to be reminded that the harvest would ultimately be plentiful, but Jesus himself, and the readers of Luke’s gospel.  Jesus was presenting the parable as much for himself as he was for them. He needed to hope rather than lose heart.  Similarly, Luke included the story of the sower in his gospel because he wanted members of his faith community meeting for worship some 50 years after Jesus’ death not to lose heart when many of their contemporaries proved indifferent to the good news of the kingdom.

We too need to be reminded of the truth of the gospel message. It is so easy to lose heart when we look around and see the ranks of church- goers thinning rapidly, and the absence of young people.  But, let us not assume that the kingdom and the church are the same.  The kingdom may be manifested in and through the church but the kingdom cannot be contained by the church or identified with the church.  No, the kingdom and the church are not exactly the same.  The kingdom is present in the world even though it escapes our gaze.  Clergy and laity alike may get a great shock if they are made aware of some of the ways the kingdom is present in today’s world.  We may indeed be scandalized because the manifestations may prove to be so far from our traditional or biblical conceptions of the kingdom.  

It is God, who breathes life into the world and into the hearts of men and women. The same God breathes love into our hearts too. God calls on us to respond: to live lives that show that the kingdom has come even though it is far from complete.  Ultimately, we and the world are in God’s hands, the kingdom is God’s doing not ours.

God enables the harvest to happen.  

AMEN

Sources used in preparing this sermon, Brendan Byrne, Lifting the Burden, Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Church Today; Eric Franklin, ‘Luke’ in John Barton and John Muddiman (Editors) The Oxford Bible Commentary; Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary

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‘Be merciful and you will live!’

Probably most people in our society are familiar with the expression: the good Samaritan.  They may not know the story that gave rise to that expression but they know what the expression the Good Samaritan has come to mean.  A good Samaritan is a secular saint. For example, a person who takes the trouble to shepherd an old lady across a busy road, even though he needs to get somewhere quickly. To take a further example, a good Samaritan is a person who ensures the food parcels and toys are delivered to needy families at Christmas time. 

So we know what a Good Samaritan is. But, do we?  Because this secular saint image has little to do with the character of the Samaritan in Jesus’ story. It fails to go to the heart of what the story is about.  This is not surprising because the centuries old practice of holding together in the one expression good and Samaritan has obscured the explosive and confronting impact this story must have had on Jesus’ Jewish hearers.

The notion that a Samaritan could be a good person was anathema to Jesus’ fellow Jews.  His hearers would have been as outraged by the claim a Samaritan was good as we would be if we were told a terrorist was good, or a drug dealer was a good person. 

Yes, the story we heard read from Luke’s gospel would have shocked Jesus’ hearers because the Jews despised the Samaritans. The shock value is lost on us because we were not living in that time and experiencing the hatred between these two ethnic groups. The Jews viewed the Samaritans as their social and religious inferiors. Why? Because the Samaritans destroyed their ethnic purity by intermarrying with foreigners. The Jews also despised the Samaritans because they used the wrong scriptures, held heretical beliefs and worshipped at an inferior shrine rather than at God’s designated place of worship, the temple in Jerusalem.

The Jews believed that if they associated with Samaritans they put their relation with God at risk.  Consequently, they had as little as possible to do with them and, as a rule, snubbed them. Yes, Jesus’ Jewish listeners would have been shocked when Jesus described a Samaritan as a good person.  

Let us now take a fresh look at the story which offered a threatening challenge to Jesus’ Jewish hearers, and if properly understood, also offers today’s  Christians a robust challenge.

A lawyer, an expert in religious teaching, asks Jesus a question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? For the Jews, eternal life was not about quantity of time but quality.  To put the question differently, the lawyer is asking what he must do to ensure he participates in the age to come: that is the Kingdom God that will be establish on earth.  

Jesus responds with a question. He says to the lawyer, what is written in the law? (that is in the scriptures).  The lawyer quotes the two greatest commandments in the Bible.  The first is, ‘Love God with your heart, soul, strength and mind’ (Deuteronomy (6:4-6). This means we are to love God with the whole of our life.  We are to give all of our life to God as a grateful and loving response for God’s saving acts.  We are not to divide our life up into (1) religious areas and (2) secular areas, and say to God you can have the religious parts but I will reserve for myself all the other parts, the so-called secular parts.

The Biblical message declares that we cannot withhold from God any part of our life. I wonder how many of us would make to God such an unqualified commitment of ourselves?  

The lawyer also tells Jesus that the scriptures command us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (Leviticus 19:18).  Jesus says to the lawyer, you have given the right answer.  Now go and do these things and you will live, meaning share in God’s coming kingdom.  I note as the way of aside that in the light of Jesus’ response it seems salvation depends not on what we believe, but on what we do.

The lawyer cannot leave the issue of what the law requires there.  He asks a further question, “But who is my neighbour?”  He is not asking Jesus for a definition.  He is asking him to say where the line is drawn between those I have to treat as neighbours and those I don’t.

According to the Hebrew Scriptures, a neighbour is someone living nearby. In a Jewish context, it means one’s fellow Jew or fellow Israelite.  However, in Jesus’ time, some Jewish authorities restricted the meaning of the word to those people within Israel who are like- minded to oneself (Obach and Kirk).  In other words, you do not have to treat all Jews as your neighbours, only people like yourself. This understanding of the law released the righteous people of Israel from the necessity to offer hospitality and compassion to sinners and social nobodies who were living nearby. The righteous only had to extend hospitality and caring to other righteous Jewish people.

It is clear from what I have said so far, that within Jewish society there were differing interpretations concerning where the line of neighboring was to be drawn.  Who is in, who is out? This fact prompts the lawyer to ask Jesus for his view of where the line should be drawn: When it comes to neighbouring, whom does Jesus say is in and who is out?

Jesus does not fall into the trap. He does not answer the lawyer directly. Instead, he tells him a story.  However, his story challenges the conventional views of his day as to where the line should be drawn.

The story goes like this: A lonely traveller was making his way by the desert road from Jericho to Jerusalem.  It was a road that twisted through hills and valleys and it provided many opportunities for bandits to hide and spring a surprise attack on travellers. On this occasion, bandits attacked the lonely traveller and left him half dead: in fact it was not clear to any passerby whether he was still alive or dead.  He was unable to save himself, and he badly needed saving.  Along come three travellers, one after the other. The first is a temple official: a priest. He is returning to his home after service at the temple. He sees the man lying on the road.

The man presents the priest with a moral dilemma. On the one hand, God’s law says that he should show him love.  However, on the other hand, if the injured man turns out to be dead, or near death, and the priest touches him then he makes himself impure and will have to engage in lengthy, time-consuming rituals before he can fulfill his duties at the temple.  The priest’s income depends on him fulfilling his duties, so there is a double impediment to him caring for the injured man lying on the road.

The next traveller who comes across the wounded man is another temple official, a Levite.  The Levite’s job is to oversee rituals in the temple. He too can only carry out his duties if he does not pollute himself in some way.   He too passes by, probably out of fear of debarring himself from doing his temple job by touching a dead or near dead man.

Let us now view the story Jesus is unfolding from the perspective of his Jewish hearers. The hearers know that in telling his story Jesus is not going to leave the fate of the wounded man unresolved, otherwise he would not deliver a satisfactory tale.

They anticipate that to bring the story to a climax at least one more person has to come along and discover the wounded man. Who would it be? Seeing that the first two passersby were temple officials – that is men who were roughly the equivalent of today’s clergy - the listeners are likely to predict that the next traveller Jesus will introduce into his story will be a pious layperson who will care for the wounded man. 

Why would they think the layman would do what the professionals were failing to do? Because pious laymen often excelled where the clergy of the time failed.  That is by showing their love for God by extending love and care to their needy neighbours.

Consequently, the hearers are thinking, the purpose of Jesus’ story is to take the religious elite down a peg or two. They could be thinking that Jesus is engaging in what we would call clergy bashing.  Jesus will diminish the standing of the temple officials by having a good lay Jew behave in a neighbourly way to another Jew who is in serious trouble. 

Try and imagine the surprise they get when the third person to come along is not a Jewish layperson but a Samaritan.  They would be saying to each other, “Well a Samaritan is never going to save an injured Jew, he is more likely to kill him and steal the clothes off his back and run off with his donkey.  There must be a fourth person in this story. Surely, Jesus is not going to end it on such a sour note”. 

Surprise turns to hyper shock for Jesus’ listeners when, instead of ignoring the wounded man, or worse beating him up and stealing from him, the Samaritan extends hospitality and compassion to him.  Yes, the Samaritan places his life at risk by stopping.  He is moved to pity by the state the man is in. He bandages his wounds, pours on oil and wine, puts him on his donkey, takes him to an inn and cares for him.

The next day prior to resuming his journey the Samaritan pays the innkeeper the equivalent of two days wages to look after the man, and says that on his return journey he will pay any additional costs incurred in caring for the man.  The listeners would have been as shell shocked by this outcome as we would be if we were told of a person who has been badly knifed in a night club brawl and left to die in the gutter in King Street but who is rescued by a notorious drug dealer.

Having finished telling his story, Jesus asks the lawyer, whom you will recall is an expert on religion, this question. Which of these three men, do you think, proved neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?

The lawyer cannot bring himself to name the Samaritan but he stammers out this answer, “The man who showed mercy”.  Yes, the lawyer had no choice but to acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, that the Samaritan has been the true neighbour, notwithstanding the fact that in other circumstances the man laying on the ground would have snubbed his Samaritan saviour.

If you combine the answer Jesus gave earlier in the reading with the one he gives after the lawyer’s acknowledgement of the goodness of the Samaritan the combined answers offer this message:  “Go and be merciful as this Samaritan who you count as nothing has been merciful and you too will live”. 

I believe the story confronts us with two issues to think about. The first concerns the fact that sometimes being dutifully religious may prevent us, or excuse us doing the things that matter most, which according to this story are being hospitable and compassionate.  The parable shows that the interpretation of the law that was prevailing in Jesus’ time was deficient in this respect. Meeting the purity requirements associated with their temple responsibilities (not polluting themselves by having contact with a dead or dieing person) caused the Priest and Levite to do something the parable of the Good Samaritan shows is wrong. They fail to extend care and compassion to a man in pain and in risk of dying.

The second issue to think about is this: what boundaries do we put around our acceptance of others as neighbours? If the parable is our guide, Jesus is saying neighbourliness knows no bounds and should be offered in an unconstrained, spontaneous and a self-forgetful way, rather than in a calculated and self-interested way. We should imitate the Samaritan. He cared for the man who in other circumstances would have despised and rejected him, and he did it in a generous way without counting the cost to himself.

Where should we draw the boundaries of neighbourliness? Certainly not by only being neighbourly to people like us: people of our faith and with our outlook on life, our lifestyle, ethnic background and economic resources. The parable calls for an abandonment of all considerations of status, privilege and religious and social exclusiveness.  Our acceptance of people as neighbours should extend even to those our society, or influential sections of it, regard as unworthy of being treated kindly and generously. It should extend to the social nobodies, the drop- outs, the homeless, the refugees.  Geographical locale should not be a consideration. In this global village we should see as our neighbours the thousands of children dying in the Pakistan floods of malnutrition, and their distraught parents endeavoring to save their lives by sacrificing their own. We should also see as our neighbours the millions of other people in this world who are displaced or pauperised by such things as war, famine and racial hatred.

If we can reach the point where we disregard considerations of worthiness, differences of creed and culture, and behave mercifully in a spontaneous and generous way, rather than in a cautious, calculating and self interested way, we too will live. AMEN

Sources used in preparing this sermon. Eugene Boring and Fred B Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary,2004, Brendan Byrne, The Hospitality of God, 2000,  Eric Franklin ‘Luke’ in John Barton and John Muddiman (editors) The Oxford Bible Commentary, 2001, Robert E Obach and Albert Kirk, A Commentary on The Gospel of Luke,1986.

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“Collaborating with God in making his Kingdom a reality”

An American woman writer tells of how when, in her twenties, she was forced to face up to this question: What is it costing me, if anything, to be a follower of Jesus Christ?  At the time she was the member of a singles group at a wealthy Protestant church. She and three other members of the group were given the task to pick up from the airport a well known speaker and to drive him to their church.  The man’s ministry was located on the streets of a city in the state of New Jersey.  He ministered to the poor, the homeless, and the drug dependents of that city.

The woman recounting the story says that on the return journey from the airport she and a couple of her friends prattled on in the back seat about the blessings they enjoyed as Christians, including the wonderful and rewarding fellowship of their church’s singles group.  About halfway home from the airport the guest speaker swiveled around in the front passenger’s seat and said quietly to the three of them seated behind him: “And what has it cost you?”

Is it not a question we should all ask ourselves: What is our discipleship costing us, if anything? In today’s reading Jesus, as it were, takes a megaphone and in a loud and commanding voice gives a message to the large crowd of listeners which amounts to this: Following me costs, and it costs big time.

In an effort to drive home his message Jesus made two seemingly over the top statements. The first was this: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”. That is in your face. You have to hate all the most important people in your life, your closest blood relatives?  How could the Jesus we know or thought we knew say something as shocking as this?   We will come back to this very threatening demand. 

 The second over the top statement was this one: none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.  Does he really mean this? Is he socialist? Is he a communist? Who would be silly enough to do such a thing?

Before we look at both these controversial directives of Jesus by way of an overture we need to answer the question: to whom is Jesus making these demands?  Jesus is in the closing stages of his ministry. He is on the road and traveling with him are two sets of people. One is his inner circle of committed disciples, and the second are the crowds comprised of admirers and interested inquirers.

The crowd travels with him, however, they are not yet on the Way; Way with a capital W.  It is to the crowd he addresses these confronting words. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”

This very worrying statement is not as threatening as it sounds. There are two things to bear in mind in endeavouring to interpret Biblical language. First, in order to make an important point the language used is often extreme. Here’s one example, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”.  Both of the  big statements in today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke are meant to shock.

The second thing to bear in mind is that Jesus is a Semite and when Semites put love and hate together they do so in a different way to us.  We see hate as an extremely negative emotion: the opposite of love.  But when the Semites talk about hate and love in reference to people they are making clear their preference for one person over another, rather than their acceptance of one and total rejection of the other. So in a Semitic society, of Jesus’ time and earlier, when a person says I love Mary but hate Martha, all he is saying is that he prefers one to the other. That is all. In short, there is no positive injunction in Jesus’ speech to hate members of one’s family, at least not in the way we understand what hating means.

So, what is Jesus saying here that is relevant to us?  He is warning potential followers that a committed disciple needs to prioritize working for the kingdom rather than see it as one of a number of things going on in his or her life. It is about setting priorities not totally rejecting one’s kin.  However, you may have some tough decisions to take because the work of the kingdom may conflict with other commitments in your life, including to one’s kin.  That is still a big ask.

However, as I stressed recently, if there is tension between one’s obligations to Jesus and to one’s kin, I do not believe it is the place of us individually or as a church to press people to comply with the expectation to always put one’s commitment to Jesus before other obligations and commitments.   We are not entitled to stipulate the extent to which a person’s discipleship influences other activities and interests, including their family relationships. 

As I said earlier, Jesus is engaging in hyperbole.  He is probably trying to shock his hearers – the potential disciples – so that they will not lightly make the commitment to following him. 

The second extreme statement Jesus makes in this speech is equally alarming.  ‘None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions’.  Does he mean this literally? What would we live on? Our experience teaches us that if a person gives away all she or he possesses God is not going to drop food from heaven to ensure we do not starve.  If we have children or other dependents such as an aged parent relying on our financial help, would it not be morally irresponsible to dispense with all our possessions? 

This week Rae and I attended several days of lectures by a scholar with the reputation of being the world’s leading authority on the historical Jesus. His name is John Dominic Crossan.  There were well in excess of two hundred people present at each lecture.  I knew many of them personally, or by reputation and I knew their knowledge of scripture far exceeded mine. Nevertheless, I was so keen to hear what the great man had to say about this challenging demand to sell all if one wants to be a disciple of Jesus that during the last question time, I mustered up the courage to ask him to say how he believed we should interpret it. Dr. Crossan said without hesitation: “This is a shock tactic, it was never meant to be taken literally.  If it was implemented it would do no good. “Give it all away and you join the ranks of the poor, so who gains by that?”

I know that we have the famous beatitude found in Luke that suggests that God prioritizes the poor. Blessed are the poor for they will inherit the earth. Dominic Crossan says emphatically that the Bible does not prioritize the poor. What the Bible does is prioritize people being treated justly. The justice of God is what is called distributive justice. It is about what it sounds like it is about: the distribution of the things people need to live: land for farming, money, clothing etc

The Bible does not advocate that all people are to have an equal share: it is not advocating socialism or communism. It is advocating that people are treated fairly, that they are treated decently, that they have enough.  Dominic Crossan maintains that the Bible or if you prefer the God of the Bible is not against people being rich, provided everyone is rich.  Similarly, if all are poor, the Bible has nothing to say. What horrifies the scriptures is some people having more than they need whilst others are starving. 

The point of reference for talking about the distribution of resources is the well run eastern household.  Crossan, says, everyone knew what a well run eastern household was like. If you visit, say a farmer’s household, and find the servants are being treated decently and have enough, that all the children are being looked after, rather than some having more than they need and some not enough then you know that things are as they should be.   In such a household, everyone may not get the same share, but everyone gets enough. What horrifies the Biblical God is if in a household – be it a peasant farmer’s household or a king’s household (that is the society over which he rules) -- half the members are starving and half are overfed.

The Biblical God is appalled by people using their power to get someone else’s fair share. Amos is horrified by the rich getting richer principally by making the poor poorer.

In today’s reading and other places in Luke’s gospel Jesus is sending out this shock message about possessions because he knows humans are so often not satisfied with a fair share. Possessions are so seductive. In Jesus’ world, land was capital.  The more land you had the more honour was bestowed on you. The land owner says to himself “How happy I would be, how much higher would be my social standing if I got my hands on my neighbour’s land. God sets rules aimed at ensuring all have enough land.  Humans seek to find ways of subverting the rules.  I have my land, now how can I get the other fellow’s land?  I can lend him money to restock his property because he lost all his stock during the last famine.  The Torah forbids me charging him interest for the money.  However, I could make him pay a penalty of say 50% of what I lent him for failing to repay his debt in the specified time.  I can take him to the courts for defaulting and acquire his land that way.  Yes, humans set out to subvert God’s laws, driven by greed for property and power. The good thing about the Bible is it records the accounts of the law and its implementation and the subversion of that law. 

Jesus is against possessions when an individual’s attachment to his possessions is so strong, that he will pauperize another person to satisfy his own greed.   That is not God’s way.  God’s way is the way of the good householder: everyone has enough. No one should have more than enough at the expense of others.

Yes, the danger of possessions is that they seduce us.   We may become so obsessed with them that we become dehumanized:  we cease to be concerned about caring for others, about sharing the gifts of God with others; with ensuring members of our households have enough. 

The heart of Jesus’ message is the kingdom God. He announces that it is already present. “But, how can that be?” we say, “Look at the mess: the escalating violence, the gross inequality in the distribution of what all humans need. If the kingdom has come, why is there so much evil in the world? What is Jesus’ answer? “God” he says, “is waiting for you to collaborate in the process of making the kingdom a reality: to help clean up the mess”. The kingdom only happens here when we seriously commit to joining him in the process.

However, Jesus is warning those potential disciples among his hearers who may be attracted to joining him in his work that his work costs. Count the cost before committing to joining me in making the kingdom that is already here a reality.

That is why in today’s reading Jesus makes the reference to the building of a tower and a king waging a war.  Jesus says, only a fool starts building a tower without first establishing if he has the money to complete it, and no king worth his salt goes into battle with another king without first assessing if he has the soldiers to win.

The fact of the matter is that the commitment to the kingdom is not envisaged by Jesus as being just one of a number of commitments but the foundation commitment of our lives. And, this means other commitments and interests are to be subordinated to the foundation commitment.   Why is not more progress being made?  After all it is two thousand years since Jesus announced in the synagogue in Nazareth:

 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.  …Then he began to say to them , “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke, 4: 18-19,21.

Yes the Kingdom has come. Well then, why is the world still in such a mess?  Why have followers of Jesus Christ not collaborated in this work? Why? Because engaging in this work is so costly. Consequently, we baulk at joining him in making the kingdom a reality. We do not want to pay the price.

That said, I want to end on a more hopeful note.  If we do commit to joining God in cleaning up the mess, the good news is that we do not have to pursue this commitment by ourselves. God is actually present when we collaborate with cleaning up the world.  We also have with us a surrogate family comprised of those who make the serious commitment to collaborate with Jesus in bringing the kingdom to full fruition.  One important place we find this family is in this faith community. Here we have a good household: people are treated decently and fairly. We are all sustained by this faith community’s collective commitment and loving concern.       AMEN 

Sources used in the preparation of this sermon:

Eugene Boring & Fred Craddock, The Peoples’ New Testament Commentary &

Progressive Christian Network of Victoria lectures delivered by Dr. John Dominic Crossan

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‘Living the Kingdom: healing through forming cords of human kindness and  bonds of love’*

In today’s gospel reading we hear these directives given by Jesus to his disciples.   ‘Sell all your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.  Stop worrying stop worrying about having sufficient food.  If God feeds the birds he will surely feed you’.

 Do Jesus’ proclamations reassure you?   They probably do sound implausible to most westerners.  At this very time, thousands of children are dieing in Pakistan from disease caused by polluted water and malnutrition.  At this time in every major city in the world thousands of people are homeless and destitute.  The same problems prevailed in Jesus’ time.  So, was Jesus just a dreamer; a man out of  touch with reality?   No, that was not the case. Was he simply exaggerating to make a point? That is probably part of what this is about, but that is not the whole story. Crucial to that story is Jesus’ understanding of the presence of the kingdom of God.

I say Jesus was not out of touch with reality because he knew personally, what it meant to be unsure where the next meal would come from. You see Jesus’s family belonged to one of the lower classes of Jewish society.

Depending which gospel you read Jesus was either a carpenter or the son of a carpenter, or maybe both.  If you want to understand Jesus’ economic and social status you need to put out of your mind what you know about the position of carpenters in our society.  Many enjoy Middle class social and economic status. That is not how it was for carpenters in Jewish society.

Jewish society roughly split into two large classes: those who did not work with their hands and those who did.  A “carpenter” belonged to the large bottom half of Jewish society. This may be news to you because Christians shy away from talking about the social or economic class position of Jesus.  Presumably, we do so, because it is embarrassing to draw attention to the fact that the One we declare is, the ‘Word made flesh’, was a member of a class that, at best, lived at subsistence level.  Within that large bottom half of society Jesus was a member of the Artisan Class. Most of the artisans were recruited from the ranks of the Peasants who had been dispossessed of their land. Seeing that the peasants experienced at best a subsistence existence and struggled year in and year out peasants to support their family and animals and find enough seed for next season’s crops, you can imagine just how tough and precarious was the situation of artisan families like Jesus’ family. As the member of a carpenter’s family Jesus certainly knew what it meant to spend one’s days in a constant state of anxiety over whether there would be food on the table that day or the next.

It is possible that Jesus is putting out this seemingly absurd message to shock his hearers into thinking more about the things of the spirit.  Jesus did make a practice of exaggerating in order to make his point. That is a possibility. Another possibility  is Jesus saying you can stop worrying about where your next meal will come from because God will soon fulfil the longed for hope of our people to rectify the injustice and oppression they were experiencing by intervening in a dramatic and decisive way in human affairs.

It is true that many of Jesus’ fellow Jews were expecting God to establish his rule on earth. They had been expecting this event for several hundred years.  They argued it had to happen because the injustice, oppression and economic hardship they were experiencing at the hands of their own royalty and landed elite, and at the hand of a series of foreign invaders was incompatible with God’s choice of them as his chosen people.

The Jewish people believe God owns the world, and it is not how he wants it. God has the power to shape the world according to his intentions and he will do so. When he does God will occupy Caesar’s throne and their exploitation and oppression will cease. All his people will have enough of what they need for life to be fulfilling and joyful and there will be no need for anyone to be preoccupied with the issue of whether they will have food to eat and clothes to wear

Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries were praying daily for God to intervene; to make it happen soon, which means in our lifetime Lord. 

There are those scholars who believe Jesus did share these Jewish apocalyptic hopes.  If he did share them this could explain why he pressed his hearers to stop worrying and prepare themselves for God’s dramatic intervention when all anxieties would cease and justice would be installed.

Scholars do not speak with one mind on this matter. Among their number are those who argue that Jesus did not expect an apocalyptic intervention sometime soon. Rather he believed the kingdom was already present.  This was a radical position to adopt.   Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossin is one who argues this way. 

Jesus expresses his conviction that the kingdom is already here when he preaches in the synagogue in Nazareth. He reads from the Book of Isaiah these words:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.  Then he began to say to them , “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke, 4: 18-19,21).

His hearers would have been dumbfounded by this claim.  ‘The kingdom cannot be here Jesus’ they would be thinking.  ‘If it is here why are we still being robbed by the aristocracy, why are so many people going hungry, and many are homeless.  Why is the Roman Emperor Tiberius still on his throne?  Why did God allow Herod to behead John the Baptist?’  Some of his hearers would have put such questions to Jesus directly.   John Dominic Crossan offers a humorous comment on how some of them would have expressed their disbelief to Jesus. ‘Jesus your sound system is not very good. What did you say ? Did you say the kingdom is here or the kingdom is near?  Which is it Jesus, surely you could not have said the kingdom is here!’

Jesus would have answered this way. ‘I said it is here not near.  My fellow countryman you cannot see that it is here because you are waiting for God to clean all the mess up for you. But, God is not going to do that he is waiting for you to act. The kingdom is here, God has initiated it but it only becomes a reality when you and I collaborate in cleaning up the mess and putting things right in this world. These terrible unfair oppressive things are still happening and will go on happening until we collaborate with God in the process of ringing in the changes.  God will be with us but we have to initiate cleaning up the mess’. 

Jesus would have gone further. He would have said something like this. ‘If you want to see the kingdom in action, come and see how I and my companions live.  Then go and live like us.

So how were Jesus and his companions  living?  They were healing the sick, eating with the healed and proclaiming that the kingdom is present.

Jesus does not set himself up as a kingdom monopolist. He does not settle down in Capernaum and tell his companions to bring people to him as the man who alone can install them in the kingdom.  Rather he tells all who speak to him  to go and do what he and his companions do.  He does not tell enquirers to heal in his name. Nor does he tell them to pray to God before they heal. Nor does Jesus himself pray before he heals. There is no need to because the kingdom is a present reality. Jesus, is in effect saying we are already in union with God.

 Now given this is what he believes and experiences then we can understand why he tells his disciples to stop worrying about food and clothing and concentrate on striving for the kingdom.  There is a touch of hyperbole in what he says. He does want to shock them into action, but he does believe a new era is upon them but it will only come to proper fruition if they collaborate with God in the process and that requires them to trust God rather than rely on their own human resources.

Crossan says that the logic of Jesus’ Kingdom program is to have in place a mutually supportive program of healing and eating.  Healing is the basic spiritual power and eating the basic physical power. That food is the basic physical power is easy to grasp.  We need much more than food but without food there is no life

Healing as a spiritual power is more difficult to grasp. There are two aspects to sickness: disease and illness.  Diseases are cured and illnesses healed.  However, even if a disease is not cured the associated illness may be healed. Let me illustrate by reference to AIDS.

If you contract Aids your disease may not be cured although your illness may be healed. If those around you respond by shunning you, declaring you a sinner in need of salvation healing will not be facilitated.  If you go into a deep depression and isolate yourself from all people in your network you are probably going to worsen your illness.  On the other hand, if you respond to the diagnosis by surrounding yourself with those who will accept and support you this will facilitate healing, even though the disease is not cured.

In the movie Philadelphia Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a gay lawyer who is sacked by his firm because he contract AIDS through homosexual activity.  His disease was not cured but his illness was being healed in the film because his partner and his family supported him. Even when a cure cannot occur healing may still be possible.

To return to Jesus’ kingdom activity.  Clearly, Jesus was a great healer.  It is reported that Jesus and his disciples cured diseases. I am not disputing that. However, what I am confident about is that by establishing an open share community in which people who in the wider society were isolated or shunned because of their disease were welcomed, accepted as equals fed and cared for, healing occurred.  In this open community, anxieties about all kinds of concerns would be diminished.  Perhaps that is why Jesus was saying to his disciples in today’s reading have faith in God, you do not need to concern yourself as you are about matters of food and clothing, you are experiencing God’s care for you through the loving care you experience in our  community.

 Well, it is understandable that they were worrying because when the speech was delivered they were on the road to Jerusalem and their future was uncertain and they were having to rely on the hospitality of some of their wealthier supporters to make the journey. Notwithstanding such concerns Jesus was convinced that the kingdom was a present and positive reality: one which offered a way to clean up much of life’s mess and ensure a more humane society evolved and people lived more fair and rewarding lives.

 What does the story have to say to us? First, we too can become too concerned about what we eat, drink and wear.  These are real concerns but as the leisure sections of our papers and many of the glossy magazines illustrate they can become the meaning of life.  Jesus warns that when this happens the spiritual dimension suffers.  Jesus wants to stress that whilst having adequate material resources is essential for experiencing a good life they are not in themselves sufficient to ensure a person’s life is as rich and fulfilling as it should be. You may die materially rich but a spiritual pauper.  Hence his message that life is more than food and the body more than raiment. Yes, Jesus is saying that a fulfilling life requires that we trust in God instead of relying on our own resources and that we acknowledge that we are answerable to God for what we do with our resources but also how we treat one another. 

The core message though is about the reality and character of the kingdom and the transformation it brings in the lives of people. The Kingdom is not a king it is a community.  Communities are about relationships.  Relationships are the most important things in life.  The program, ‘Messages from the Towers’, which was  telecast on September 11. on the ABC,  conveyed this truth. The overriding concern of people who knew they would not escape was to ensure the most important people in their lives knew how much they loved them and how much they were indebted to them. They left such messages on their loved ones answering machines, if they failed to speak to them directly. The same truth about the overriding importance of relationships was communicated by some of those who lost a loved one on September 11. One mother said, ‘Life is short, you never know when you are going to lose them, so spend every minute showing them you love them’

Relationships were crucial to Jesus’ life. He urges his followers to do as he did. Form communities where love prevails; open communities from which no one is excluded.  Participants in these kingdom communities are to be blind to the differences among people that play such a crucial role in determining  who is in and who is out in  most communities; who gives the orders and who does the dirty work.  In Jesus’ inclusive sharing community, the poor are not given charity but treated the same as the well off. The sick are as much a part of the community as the healthy. Men are not privileged over women; or the members of one ethnic group over another. Such practices promote mutual acceptance and support, enhance people’s sense of belonging and their personal wellbeing.

Anxieties should lessen when there are others ready to share ones concerns and help solve one’s problems.

Jesus’ kingdom community is a place where healing can occur. Jesus said so to those who witnessed the community he shared with his companions. ‘Here you see the kingdom, go and do likewise’.  If we go and do likewise we will facilitate healing, the overcoming of fear and anxiety. By building bonds of kindness and love we will enrich the quality of life of our community and of our companions and ourselves. God will facilitate the enterprise: for it is a collaborative endeavour.

2499 words.  Sorry my love

Sources used in developing this reflection were: Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary;  Bruce Chilton, ‘Friends and Enemies’, in Markus Bockmuehl (Editor) The Cambridge Companion to Jesus;  John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire, and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. 

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Let Love Reign Over Me

Friendship costs! Friendship is demanding! Friendship requires, honest talk, the establishment of trust on both sides, preparedness to care for the other, to be vulnerable and available, to give time – often loads of it - sometimes when it is most inconvenient, and to an extent that may prevent you doing things that matter a lot to you, or put offside important people in your circle.  

Friendship is costly but it is also rewarding. To work, it needs to be a two way street. It is something other than friendship if one person exposes themselves, shares important information, treats the other as an equal, but the other does not reciprocate, does not make himself vulnerable, assumes the role of the superior person , who in response to his friends question “How are you today Bill” always answers I’m great. But, I want to talk about you. How are you Jim really?” That, however, is not how it was in the relationship I am about to tell you about.  In this relationship, friendship proved to be a two way street and a life-line for both partners.

Friendship has an important emotional dimension. We like as well as love our friends. We are stuck with our relatives but we choose our friends. That is an important reason why we often like a friend more than we like a relative.  A friendship is often the most rewarding relationship in our lives.

Sometimes, of course, the best friends are relatives.  That does not appear to have been the case for Jesus.  It seems Jesus’ family were not impressed with his style of ministry, in fact they believed it showed  he was mad.  It is not surprising then, that Jesus established a quasi-kin group: a circle of companions. They shared on a 24/7 basis.  Jesus and his friends provided each other with companionship, love and practical support. Jesus needed them to assist in his ministry of bringing in the kingdom. They shared directly in his work of healing and hospitality.

Jesus and his disciples exercised a ministry of compassionate caring: a loving ministry. Such a ministry requires passion and commitment, the willingness and ability to focus on the needs and wellbeing of others, even to the detriment of one self. In other words, it requires friendship. Now to the movie which is called ‘Reign over me” 

‘Reign over me’ tells the story of Charlie Fineman and his friend Alan Johnson. Charlie roomed in dental school with Alan but they lost touch after graduating.  Alan is a successful and rich cosmetic dentist with a Fifth Avenue New York practice.  Charlie too was a successful dentist, but life has gone very badly for Charlie.

Charlie’s wife and his three daughters were passengers on one of the planes that crashed into the twin towers on 9/11, 2001.  Five years on the two former friends accidentally bump into one another on a Manhattan Street corner. Alan is stunned by the state in which he finds his once gregarious friend.  The friendship is rekindled and it becomes a life-line for the two men, both of whom are in need of a trusted friend.  Charlie, however is in the far greater need.  There is no prospect of him returning to his old profession of dentistry. He is still suffering from post-traumatic stress because of the loss of his family.  Charlie has become a social recluse.  He still lives in the apartment he shared with his family, but no one from his past gains entry to it.

Charlie has become paranoid and, at times, violent. If a stranger comes to his door, or introduces himself on the street, Charlie responds with these or similar words:  ‘They’ve sent you haven’t they. They’ve sent you to spy on me?’   Charlie’s paranoia appears to be the outcome of the uninvited and unwanted intervention in his life of psychiatrists, social workers, and bureaucrats.

Charlie cannot tell anyone about what he is going through. He gives over most of his time to remodeling the kitchen.  No sooner does he complete the job, than he starts doing it all over again.  He has been engaging in this seemingly obsessive practice since the loss of his family. We will learn later in the film why he obsesses about the kitchen.

Charlie engages in a variety of activities aimed at shutting out, or at least diminishing, the emotional and mental torment he is experiencing.  He rides the streets of Manhattan on a motorized child’s scooter, attends all night marathon sessions of Mel Brooks movies, and spends innumerable hours rifling through the vinyl LP collections of music stores searching for the albums of the music he loved from a time well before the tragic events that have derailed his life.  You rarely see Charlie without headphones on: whether he is riding his  scooter, shopping, eating a meal, engaged in a conversation, particularly an unwanted one.  Charlie uses the music from a happier time in his life to shut out unwelcome conversations and enquiries and to try and shut down or at least salve his mental torment. Charlie is grieving but he is also suffering from overwhelming feelings of guilt. 

Charlie is bereft of friends and confidantes.  He has sent them all away because contact with them heightens his suffering.  The problem seems to be that they all knew his wife and his children.   Charlie’s parents in law, the Timplemans, keep coming round to his apartment but he refuses to see them.  They want to diminish their grieving pain by bonding with the person to whom their daughter and grand children mattered so much, but Charlie cannot handle it.  The Timplemans believe Charlie heartless and uncaring. And, they eventually join a psychiatric institution in a court action aimed at having Charlie committed.

Prior to the court case, the potential for Charlie’s life to change for the better comes from his chance meeting with Alan. Alan can see Charlie is in a bad way and in need of help.  Alan presses Charlie to have contact, which does start happening.  Charlie does tell Alan of his terrible loss but he hangs back from confiding to him his paralyzing feelings of guilt.  Charlie only lets Alan back into his life, at all, because Alan never knew Charlie’s wife or children.

For the friendship to be re-kindled, Alan has to allow Charlie to make the running: to initiate most contacts and determine what they do together. This means in practice that Alan commences sharing in Charlie’s bizarre night life: riding around as a passenger on his scooter, eating Chinese in the early hours of the morning, attending all night comic movie marathons, attending late night Jazz club jamming sessions, and being available to Charlie on short notice.  For instance, Charlie repeatedly shows up at Alan’s front door in the middle of the night.  He shows up repeatedly at Alan’s dental surgery.

Alan’s involvement with Charlie threatens Alan’s dental practice, and his marriage. His wife is appalled at her husband’s behaviour, particularly his frequent meetings with Charlie, at odd hours. Alan stresses to his wife that he is putting in the time to help a friend. That is certainly true, but it is also true that Alan needs the friendship too. Alan feels suffocated by his marriage, particularly his wife’s endeavours to monopolise his time away from the office.  He pours out his story to Charlie who proves a good listener.  Allan enjoys being with Charlie much of the time. However, he has to deal with frequent extremely rude and sometimes violent behaviour. In a fit of paranoia Charlie physically attacks Alan and breaks up Alan’s office.  He insults a friend of Alan whom he mistakes as a person sent by authorities to spy on him.

Notwithstanding the hassle and stress hanging out with Charlie brings, Alan does not give up on Charlie.  He commits himself again and again to helping him. Charlie cannot trust people, and until he can trust some people there will be no exodus from his black hole.  However, there is now a dim light of hope, because, at least, some of the time Charlie trusts Alan.  Charlie’s accountant tells Alan, ‘He now has one friend, you. That is great progress for him’.  Charlie trusts Alan enough to finally agree to see a young psychiatrist acquaintance of Alan’s.  She spends several sessions with Charlie and makes no progress.  She tells Charlie and subsequently Alan that Charlie will not commence making a recovery until he tells his story to someone, it does not have to be her but someone needs to hear the story.

Charlie does eventually tell Alan why he is so haunted by the tragedy. Charlie tells Alan how marvellous his wife Doreen was. ‘She never nagged me, like many wives do’. He talked about the wonder of each of his three girls. ‘Doreen and the girls were all so female, Johnson. I was the odd one out but they loved me, I was the man!’

Charlie continues, ‘I was heading to JFK to meet their plane. They had been in Boston visiting family. As I traveled to the airport in a taxi I heard that one of the planes that crashed into the tower was from Boston. When I reached the airport I watched the replay of the plane hitting the tower and I imagined them all burning’.  He sobs as he says this. But, Charlie cannot bring himself to reveal to Alan why he is overburdened with guilt.

In a subsequent conversation, Charlie unburdens his heart to Alan.  What he reveals with great difficulty explains so much.

Charlie says this, ‘The last time I spoke to Doreen was on the phone when she was at the airport in Boston. I was about to run out the door when she rang’.  She said, ‘Charlie I want you to do something about the kitchen for me’.  ‘I frigging snapped at her, O man. I snapped at her, I said, “I hate kitchen talk!” Charlie sobs.  ‘That was the last thing I ever said to her, Johnson’.  Alan the ever-empathetic friend says to Charlie, ‘I think you have got to let that shit go Charlie.  I am sure you said many good things to her before that Charlie. You’ve got to let that shit go. You are going to make it Charlie, aren’t you?’  Charlie replies, ‘I am more worried about you Johnson".

Before Charlie tells Alan why he feels so guilty he deteriorates further mentally. He goes on a drinking binge, takes a revolver from a drawer, it appears with the intention of suiciding. A chance knock on the door stalls this activity.  Charlie pockets the revolver and goes out on the streets. He gets into an altercation with a taxi driver, pulls his revolver and threatens to shoot the driver. A policeman, manages to arrest him before any shots are fired and Charlie ends up in a mental institution and eventually before a judge.

The mental institution authorities combine forces with Charlie’s parents in law, the Timplemans, to try to convince a judge to commit him to spend one year in the mental institution. 

Alan takes time off work to see Charlie through this crisis. Charlie’s psychiatrist, Angela speaks in court on his behalf. She opposes the move to institutionalize him. She tells the court that Charlie is experiencing profound post-traumatic stress and he needs to be allowed to recover in his own time, in his own way. She says, ‘He will gain a circle of friends. It will not be this week or this month, but it will be soon’. 

The prosecuting lawyer deliberately provokes Charlie into making several outbursts during the court hearing. He does this by showing the court several photos of Charlie’s dead children and wife and then dropping them on the desk in front of Charlie. Charlie goes beserk. Charlie only handles living at all by blocking out all reminders of his dead family. The bailiffs escort him from the court.

Charlie’s outbursts seem to confirm that the prosecution got it right when they pressed for Charlie’s institutionalization. However, the judge has taken on board what Charlie’s psychiatrist, Angela, has said. In his chambers, the Judge says this to the lawyers and Charlie’s parents in law, the Timplemans. ‘Anyone can see that something deeply profound is happening to Dr. Fineman. He may need time in an institution.  But he may just need time to deal with his problem in his own way’.   

The judge goes on to say, ‘This is really not a matter for the courts, it’s a family matter’.  Then he addresses Charlie’s parents in law, The Timplemans.   ‘You are the only people Dr. Finemore has who come could be called family. I am going to give you the weekend to decide whether you really want Charlie committed.  I want you to think about what your daughter would want. Would she want her man put away in an institution like this. Mrs. Timpleman, do you understand what power I am giving to you’.  She nods that she does. 

The Timplemans leave the judges’ chambers seemingly determined to press on with the commitment but three things happen that causes them to see Charlie in a different light.  First, Charlie gets up the courage to approach the Timplemans outside the court. This action is prompted by them declaring in court that they believe Charlie is callous and unfeeling because he rejected their attempts to gift him photos of his daughters and his wife.  Charlie says this heart moving thing to them, ‘I don’t need to talk about her or see her pictures, the truth is a lot of the time I see her.  I walk down the street and I see her in someone else’s face clearer than any of the pictures you carry with you. I see the girls in children on the street.  I get that you are in pain. But you’ve got each other.  And, I am the one who has got to see her all the time, everywhere I go. I even see the dog. That is how fucked up I am. I look at a German Shepherd and I see that goddam poodle’.

Charlie goes to Ginger, his mother in law, and gives her a quick kiss on the cheek and leaves. She is visibly affected by Charlie’s story and his kiss and she cries. It is a moving and sad scene, yet there is a hint of hope. Charlie shows he can transcend his own pain sufficiently to see the pain and humanity of his parents in law. Perhaps Alan’s efforts are making a difference.

It is not clear if the Timplemans will still press on with the attempt to have Charlie committed. They certainly continue in their bid to see him. They go to Charlie’s apartment. They arrive to find that Charlie has gone, taken everything with him and left no forwarding address. Well, he has taken everything but one item: a beautiful lamp. Charlie’s landlady says to Charlie’s mother in law. “Ginger, Charlie said he wants you to have this lamp”. We the viewers know its significance because we learnt in the courtroom scene that on the last visit Charlie made to the Timpleman’s home, Charlie broke a beautiful lamp of Ginger’s when his father in law tried to press the photos of his wife and girls on him, and he flew into a rage.  Ginger, is visibly moved by Charlie’s gesture.

Charlie’s friend Alan Johnson shows up at the empty apartment. He plays a further crucial role in achieving his friend’s rehabilitation.  He says to the Timplemans, ‘Don’t you think you should leave him be?’  The father in law replies, ’We only want to be in his life, that is all’.  Alan says, ‘That is not an option at present. He cannot handle it’. Alan continues, ‘What you have to do is go to the court on Monday morning and call the dogs off’.

This must happen because in the last scene Charlie is settled in a new apartment. He has followed through on Alan’s advice to let go of his guilt over his wife at least to the extent that he has changed apartments and in doing so left behind the kitchen he had been incessantly rebuilding everyday since his wife’s death. He has moved on in that sense.  Yet, he still cannot cope with contact with his parents in law. The move to a new apartment has been made, in part, to protect him from unwanted visits from them. Yes, there are signs he is healing, as well as moving on. Charlie has managed to explain himself to his in laws and shown affection to his mother in law. 

Alan visits Charlie in his new apartment.  He joins Charlie in playing Charlie’s favourite video game. Angela the psychiatrist arrives and it is apparent she is most welcome, notwithstanding that she is a professional therapist. He is cautiously admitting another friend to his life.  Donna is her name.  She, like Charlie, has experienced a broken heart and recognizes in Charlie a potential soul mate.

Whilst it is clear, that Charlie has a long way to go.  He is taking the first unsure steps on a redemptive journey.  He will probably never resume his professional life but he may reach a place where he finds a substantial degree of peace; where he experiences the support and companionship of a circle of people who accept and love him notwithstanding his quirky ways; a place where the joy of living exceeds the pain.

Humans are collaborative creatures. We only get by through cooperating with one another.  Charlie is a guy who was rapidly deteriorating because he responded to his heartbreak and his guilt by not collaborating, but, rather by shutting out all the people who had known his wife and children, all the people who could have helped him recover.

He found ways of distracting himself and found a certain amount of pleasure through his distractive activities. But, the strategies he employed left him guilt ridden. He was becoming increasingly dysfunctional, more prone to paranoia and to violent outbursts.  He was also becoming suicidal.

It is difficult to comprehend that Charlie would have commenced his journey back without Alan’s interest, commitment and day in day out tireless practical support.  As I said at the commencement of this reflection, true friendship is a costly and demanding thing. It has an important emotional dimension. We need to like as well as love our friends. These two men liked as well as loved one another. That helped their relationship work.  Friendship requires, honest talk, the establishment of trust on both sides, preparedness to care for the other, to be vulnerable and available; to give time – often loads of it in a crisis, sometimes when it is most inconvenient, and to an extent that may prevent one doing things that matter a lot, or annoys others in our circle.

Alan did such things for Charlie.  He committed the time and energy, he accepted the disruption to his life and the risk to work and family life that was required to get Charlie moving. He understood that Charlie needed to find his way back in his own time. Alan proved a committed and selfless friend.

As I also said earlier, friendship is never a one-way street.  Charlie proved an effective listener to Alan’s account of the issues worrying him in his marriage and work. Alan did resolve the issues with his wife.  Not surprisingly, by helping Alan, Charlie helped himself.

Let us now turn to the subject of God. As I am sure you are aware I have not mentioned God once in today’s reflection. There was no mention of God in the film. It would be presumptuous of me to start inserting God’s name all over the place in this story.  For instance, I am not prepared to say God motivated Alan to commit himself to helping Charlie to the extent he did.  I do, however, believe that love and commitment similar to that which Jesus showed in his relationships with his disciples and with social and religious outcasts was manifested by Alan and several other people towards Charlie. 

The last thing to mention is the title of the film, Reign over me. It probably puzzles you. It is derived from the title of a song, Love Reign Over Me.   In true friendship love reigns over the partners to the relationship.  AMEN

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The Power of Parables I*

Whenever Jesus wanted to say something important, he told a parable. There are many parables in the gospels.  However, Biblical parables are not restricted to the gospels; you find them through the Bible. Today we are going to look at one Old Testament parable.

So, what is a parable? First, it is a metaphorical story: almost certainly a piece of fiction.  Although it is not literally true, it conveys a meaningful message.

Second, the meaningful message of the parable does not reside in the story. To discover the meaning, the story has to take you outside itself.  The parable is story with a purpose. You have to look outside the parable to discover its purpose. 

At a conference, I recently attended, the Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, used the Parable of the Sower to make this point. This is Crossan speaking: A Middle Eastern farmer comes home to his wife with this account of his activities.  “My dear I heard a really wise man speak this morning. He told us that in future when we sow we really have to watch out for birds and pathways, watch for the thorns and what else, oh yes, we have to watch for the rocks.”

His wife retorts, “Benjamin Bahrum you nitwit, you just wasted another morning. Every child who grows up on a farm knows that!”   “Well, that is what he said”, the Husband retorts.

“Well it wasn’t what he meant!” says his wife.

“But, that’s what he said”, the husband insists.

Wife: “It’s a parable dummy, the only thing you are absolutely sure about is that he ain’t talking about sowing”.

Husband: “What is he talking about then?”

Wife: “That is another issue”.

A parable is a metaphorical story that wants you to go outside itself. Where you go is a separate issue. This week and next, I will give several examples of parables pointing us outside themselves.

Crossan identifies three different types of parables in the Biblical tradition. First, there are riddle parables, second, example parables and third challenge parables. Today I will concentrate on example parables; in fact just one from the Old Testament.  Next Sunday I will talk mostly about challenge parables. They are the more difficult and the more important parabolic form.

Example parables often end with the words ‘Go and do likewise’.   They can end negatively.  ‘Don’t go and do likewise’. The classic Old Testament example parable is that told by the Prophet Nathan to King David. It tells of a rich man robbing a poor man of his prize possession. It is an example parable of the negative kind. ‘Don’t, do as David did!’ is the message.

So what did David do? He lusted after a beautiful woman named Bathsheba. He committed adultery with her, and he organized the murder of her husband.  It happened like this:

One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof, he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her. Then she went back home.  The woman conceived and sent word to David, saying, "I am pregnant."

David, in effect, rapes Bathsheba. She falls pregnant. This all happens while her husband Uriah, is away from home fighting one of David’s wars for him in the Transjordan, in the city of Arman.

To avoid the political fall out from this episode David makes things much worse by trying to cover up his adultery.  He sends his general, Joab, who is directing the siege of Arman this directive. “Send me Uriah the Hittite”. 

Uriah returns to Jerusalem. David says to him, “You have been really putting in fighting the Ammonites.  You deserve some rest and recreation.  Go home and take it easy for a few days”. But, Uriah does not go home. When David asks him why he did not spend time with his wife, Uriah says “How could I go home eat drink and sleep with my wife when the men of Israel and Judah are away at war. As surely as you live my Lord, I will not do such a thing!"  It seems that unlike his King, Uriah, the Hittite, is an honourable man.

David implements plan B.  He says to Uriah, “Stay in Jerusalem another day then I will send you back to your post. Join me at the palace for food and wine”.  David gets Uriah drunk.  But he still does not go home. Instead, he sleeps in the servant quarters.

The King is frustrated by Uriah’s failure to fall into his traps. He is becoming increasingly desperate. To his eternal shame, he plots Uriah’s death.  He sends Uriah back to the front carrying a letter addressed to his general, Joab. The letter is, in effect, Uriah’s death sentence.  The letter says, “Put Uriah where the fighting is heaviest, on the front line, then back off and let him be killed.”  This time the cover up plan works.  The Ammonite soldiers kill Uriah along with some of David’s most valiant warriors.

Joab’s servant carries the news to David. David sends this message back to Joab. “Don’t lose any sleep over Uriah’s death. War inevitably results in the sword devouring warriors in this way. Press your attack on the city, and overthrow it”.

David makes it sound as though Uriah’s death is unavoidable collateral damage in the war his troops are waging with the Ammonites. But, of course, it is not unavoidable collateral damage. It is the murder of a faithful soldier by his king.

When Uriah’s wife Bathsheba hears of her husband’s death, she mourns for him. However, when the set period of mourning is over David sends for Bathsheba to come to the palace. She becomes his wife and she bears him a son.

So often in human affairs, power corrupts and renders the power holder insensitive to the humanity of others. David, habituated to using up others in the service of his greed and lust, seems untouched by his murder of Uriah.

However, the Bible reports that the Lord is far from happy with David’s action. The Lord sends Nathan the prophet to David.  Now we come to the parable.

Nathan says to David, “There were two men in a certain city one rich and the other poor. The rich man had many flocks and herds but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. It grew up in his home with his children. He would feed it with some of his own food, let it drink from his cup. He carried the lamb in his bosom and it was like a daughter to him.

There came a traveler to the rich man. He was loath to take one of his own flock to prepare for the wayfarer to whom he had to extend hospitality. So, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared that for the guest. 

David becomes very angry toward the rich man.   He says to Nathan, “I swear by the living God that the man who did this deserves to die. For doing such a cruel thing he must pay back four times as much as he took”.

“You are that man”, says Nathan to David.

Any king should be smart enough to say to himself, “When a prophet comes visiting watch out” (Crossan). If you read through the Books of Samuel and Kings you will see that all the kings had at least one prophet.  Prophets were viewed as men with a direct line to God. God communicated with them through dream, vision, or audition.

If a prophet was believed to be in an intimate relation with God he was feared, even by a King of David’s stature. Nathan was one such prophet. He played a very influential role during David’s rule.  Yes when Nathan came visiting, David should have been smart enough to say to himself, “Watch out”.  But David did not. He walked into Nathan’s trap.

As I said at the outset there are three main types of parables: riddle, challenge and example.  Nathan’s famous parable is an example parable. In the New Testament, example parables of a positive kind end with the instruction “Go and do likewise!”  In contrast, Nathan’s parable is of the negative kind.  Its implicit message is: “Don’t go and do likewise” “Don’t go and do as David did.”

I also said earlier that the meaning of a parable does not reside in its story. You have to look outside the story for the meaning.  In the case of Nathan’s parable, you can decode Bathsheba as the lamb, the King as the rich land owner, and so on.

The last comment I want to make concerning example parables is this: they are simple moral stories.  Generally speaking, example parables do not call into question conventional beliefs about God or the taken for granted moral rules of the society.  Rather they affirm one or more of the society’s core moral rules or beliefs. Nathan’s parable affirms the belief that no man, not even a king, can put himself above God’s law. Not even a king of David’s stature is allowed to steal another man’s wife, or to murder her husband, to cover his wrong doing.

The gospels contain numerous example parables attributed to Jesus.  It is Crossan’s contention, that Jesus presented these as challenge parables and the gospel writers turned them into example parables.  Challenge parables are the most difficult form of parable and the most important.

Next week we will turn our attention to challenge parables. The purpose of a challenge parable is to shock. It is to make you feel not so sure about what you are sure about, to shake your foundations, and by so doing raise your consciousness. Only if this process occurs will significant change in outlook and behaviour occur.

Jesus presented his challenge parables orally. For a challenge parable to succeed the presenter must provoke his audience into responding; provoke them to argue and debate.  Crossan says that, if after Jesus presented one of his challenge parables, all those present file past him and say, “Lovely parable this morning, Rabbi”, the parable is a total failure. Yes, the parable must sufficiently shake the foundations to provoke discussion and debate if change is to occur. It is only if this happens that people will be stirred from their routine way of looking at things and doing things.  AMEN

* The main concepts used in this reflection and some of the content is drawn from a lecture on Biblical parables John Dominic Crossan gave during a recent visit to Melbourne.  Crossan is a prolific author and internationally recognized Biblical scholar. 

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The Power of Parables II *

The Book of Ruth: a challenge parable

Today’s sermon is the second in a series exploring the power of the parables. Last week we concentrated on example parables. Today we look at one challenge parable from the Old Testament. You will recall an example parable conveys a simple moral message. It may be of a positive kind, such as love your enemies. It may be followed by the directive “Go and do likewise.”  Last week the message was of a negative kind: “Don’t go and do what King David did, namely, steal another man’s wife and murder her husband”.

By way of contrast, a challenge parable is more complex and more confronting than an example parable. The purpose of a challenge parable is to shock by calling into question a conventional belief or behaviour. It is a consciousness raising exercise aimed at bringing about change.

The Book of Ruth challenges the Biblical message that God requires the Israelites to base their life as a nation on their ethnicity, and therefore to avoid contaminating themselves by marrying foreigners.

The Book of Ruth is a story about a couple and their two sons. This family leaves Bethlehem in a time of famine to live in the foreign country of Moab. Naomi’s husband dies. Then her two sons who are married to Moabite women also die.  In short, the opening scene of this book portrays a tragic situation. Three women grieve for three dead husbands. They appear to be women without a future for they have no means of support. A woman could only access her society’s economic resources through a man. Without a husband or a male kin to provide, these three are destitute.  What are they to do? 

Naomi tells Ruth, her daughter-in-law that she is bitter. She believes God has abandoned her.  Naomi, decides to return to Israel where she has relatives. She goes in the hope her relatives will offer her some assistance.  She urges her daughters-in-law to return to their families and to remarry, but this time to marry men of their own people, Moabites. Ruth, however, insists on accompanying Naomi back to her home town, Bethlehem in Judea.

Ruth speaks these famous lines to her mother-in-law. “Do not press me to leave you or turn back from following you. Wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge. Your people will be my people and your God, will be my God. Where you die, I will die. There will I be buried.  And so forth (*May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!’ *)  (Ch 1 : 16-18)

So, Naomi returns to Bethlehem in the hope her relatives will take care of her. They don’t! Naomi only survives because Ruth labours daily in some of the wheat fields around Bethlehem gleaning what the regular harvesters leave behind.  Ruth happens to glean in the fields of a distant relative of Naomi’s: a man named Boaz.  A middle-aged kind fellow, Boaz is attracted to Ruth. He tells his harvesters to leave her more than the usual gleanings, and he tells Ruth he has ordered his men not to molest her.

Boaz, a Jewish man praises Ruth – a Moabite woman - for her generous care of her mother in law Naomi. Boaz speaking,”I have heard about everything that you have done for your mother-in-law since your husband died. … May the Lord reward you for what you have done”

Ruth and Boaz eventually marry and have a child.   It seems like a beautiful example parable.  The teller could have ended the story by saying Go and do as Ruth did.  Be a faithful and loyal daughter in law, a good wife, a committed devotee of God. Do that and everything will work out fine for you.   However, would his hearers have accepted the direction to imitate Ruth?  Well probably not because they knew that Ruth was not one of their own, not an Israelite but a Moabite, and Jews are ordered by God to have nothing to do with Moabites.

The writer makes sure the reader know that Ruth is a Moabite because he repeatedly reminds us of the fact. The references to her ethnicity sound out like a drum beat through the text: Ruth the Moabite, Ruth the Moabite, Ruth the Moabite. Moab as a place is emphasized. For instance, Ruth is identified as the wife who came back from the country of Moab. She is called Ruth A Moabite wife, the Moabite who came back with Naomi from the country of Moab.

Why does the writer place such a heavy emphasis on Ruth’s ethnicity? It becomes apparent why he does so in the closing lines of the story. They contain a real shock. The story ends with a double emphasis on the descent of David the once and future king of Israel from Ruth – a Moabite.  This startling revelation starts in an innocent enough way.

The women of the neighbourhood gave Ruth and Boaz’s son a name. They said a son has been born to Naomi (we would say grandchild) They named him Obid. He became the father of Jesse, the father of David.  And, just to make sure the reader got the message this information is provided a second time in a slightly different form.

These are the descendents of Perez dum te dum dum te dum, Salmon of Boaz, Boaz of Obed, Obed of Jesse and Jesse of David. There the Book of Ruth ends. For an Israelite with a real clanger. Now we see why the writer has repeatedly reminded us that Ruth was a Moabite.

To fully appreciate the significance of what is declared in the Book of Ruth we need to put it into its historic and cultural context. It was written sometime after the Israelites returned from their exile in Babylon. The book’s story is set around the time of 1000 years because Christ. However, it was not put into a written form until some time after the Israelites came back to Israel from Babylon: That is late in the 6^th C BCE.

Other writings from this period offer a picture of the status of Moabites that conflicts with the picture presented in the Book of Ruth. Most crucially, you find written in the Book of Deuteronomy -- which dates from roughly the same period of history as the Book of Ruth -- these words.  “No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord even to the 10th generation. None of their descendents will be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. In short, they could not convert ever to Judaism.  Why?  “Because they did not meet you with food and water on your journey out of Egypt”.  It is a punitive declaration the Bible says, made by God.  The Lord goes on to say, “You shall never promote the welfare or the prosperity of the Moabites and Ammonites as long as you live”  How does one reconcile this with the story of Ruth a Moabite, who takes responsibility for her mother-in-law when her Israelite kin refuse to do so?

The reality is that the Israelites and the Moabites and Ammonites are traditional enemies. The animosity between them dates back to the time of the Exodus when the Israelites crossed the Jordan near Jericho. Understandably, the Moabites and Ammonites did not want the Israelites moving through their territory and they got in the way of the Israelites. So, the Moabites and the Ammonites are the classical ‘baddies’.  And by the time the Book of Ruth was written the enmity has lasted for centuries.

When the exiles returned from Babylon they found the temple destroyed and most of Jerusalem destroyed.  They thought they were returning to a land where they would live like heroes but it turned out to be a land where one had to possess hero qualities to just survive.

At this time, the Jewish leaders were preoccupied with this question. Why is God not delivering us the prosperity he promised us? Leaders such as Ezra and Nehemiah did not blame God they blamed the people for their plight.  We have sinned that has to be the explanation. How have the people sinned?  It was self evident to a priest as steeped in the law as Ezra.  When he arrived back in Jerusalem some years after the first exiles returned and found that the restoration of the prosperity of the people was hardly progressing he was dismayed.  He learnt that many of the people had married foreign women.  Worst of all so had many of the religious leaders – the Priests and Levites.

Ezra declares that on hearing this news: “I tore my clothes in despair, tore my hair and my beard, and sat down crushed with grief.”

 “Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, (that includes Moabites) and in this faithlessness the leaders have led the way” (Ezra:ch 9)  Here was the explanation for their sorry situation.

In this state Ezra prays to God, “O God because of our sins, we, our kings, and our priests have fallen into the hands of foreign kings, and we have been slaughtered, robbed, and carried away as prisoners”.

He declares to the Israelite people that God will not progress our cause until we rectify the situation our sin has created. Yes, God is punishing us for contaminating our ethnic purity by marrying foreign wives.

This is Ezra speaking: “We have broken faith with our God and married foreign women from the people of the land. We have married foreign women and so increased the guilt of Israel”. “Separate yourselves from foreign wives”.  “All the men who have married foreign women divorce them.”  This message of sin sounded like a drum beat through much of the Book of Ezra but a different drum beat to that we heard in the Book of Ruth.

As I said, these events occurred immediately after the return from the exile when the Israelites are trying to reconstitute themselves as a people, and they are attempting to do it along ethnic lines, that is by insisting that Jews marry only Jews. This is understandable, they are trying to save their nation. They could disappear not because the Persians are killing them off but because they are swept up, along with many other peoples, into the gene pool of the Great Persian Empire. They could disappear as the Moabites and Ammonites eventually disappeared, and they are desperate to avoid that fate. 

Ezra instigates an investigation to reveal all the men who have taken foreign wives. It takes three months to complete. The offenders are publicly shamed. They divorce their wives and send them and their children away. 

There is a similar story presented in the Book of Nehemiah. “They separated from Israel all those of foreign descent”. Then this is written, “On that day they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people, and it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God because they did not meet the Israelites with bread and water”. When the people heard the law they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent.

What a strong and all encompassing tradition we have here.  How could anyone refute these absolute beliefs and the demands they give rise to? After all God has laid down the rule. Moabites can never ever be admitted to the number of God’s people.

So, on the one hand, we have a demand for ethnic purity backed with all the might of the Jewish law: that is God’s law. And on the other hand we have this simple, tender little story about one woman belonging to one of the named enemies of the people of Israel: the Moabites. 

However, this little story is not only about one good woman it is ultimately about David, Israel’s beloved King from whom will descend the Messiah (Jewish view). So, you are kind of caught, says Biblical Scholar John Dominic Crossan, like a grain of sand in an oyster, this fact keeps irritating you.  The law says, “No Moabite can ever come into the people of God”, yet but, but, this Ruth -- a Moabite -- is the ancestor of David our greatest king? We do not know if the story is historically true.  But, what if David is the great grand son of a Moabite woman?  If that is so, how sure can one be in the absolute rightness of the law which says you must not associate with the Moabites? If David is a great grandson of a Moabite woman where is our stand on ethnic purity? Rather than being God’s enemy and our people’s enemy may be a Moabite is indispensable to God’s plan.

I know the Book of Ruth is commonly presented as an example story. I have done this. But, for the Jewish people it was not so much an example parable as a challenge parable. It shakes the foundations of the taken for granted truth that God will only relate to and prosper the Israelite people. It puts the case that God may choose to work through one of the declared enemies of the Israelites, to achieve his ends.

Crossan says the Ruth story is like a little pin prick residing alongside a mighty balloon. Yet, it does spell danger for the balloon.

The final point I wish to make is this. Today’s story still has contemporary relevance.  Absolute claims of the kind the Israelites were making are dangerous things to make, and they are still being made. These include the claim that God has chosen us and only us for special privileges. They are dangerous whether they are made by contemporary Israelite settlers to justify annexing land from Palestinians that the settlers claim God gave to their forefathers, or by Christians who say God has entrusted to us and us alone the message of salvation. Get with our program or face the dire consequences.

Absolute claims breed arrogance, intolerance and insensitivity to the rights and needs of others. They justify treating those of a different ilk inhumanely and unfairly. In my view, we should eschew all absolute claims, notwithstanding that both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures appear to offer justification for making them. AMEN

* Acknowledgement

I indebted to Biblical Scholar John Dominic Crossan for many of the concepts and information contained in this reflection.

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The Power of Parables III*

This is the third reflection in the series on The Power of Parables. The first week we talked about example parables, and the second: challenge parables. I’ll come back to that distinction.

What does the word parable mean? To answer this question we need to know that a basic distinction in the Biblical tradition is between something literally true and something that is metaphorical.  A parable is metaphorical. The terms that are translated from Hebrew or Greek by the term parable would be more accurately translated by the wider term ‘metaphor’. Although it may have a grounding in fact, a parable should be regarded as fiction, rather than a story that is literally true. That is the first point I want to make about parables.

The second point is this: parables are short stories with a double meaning. There is a surface meaning and a deeper meaning.  The deeper meaning is the real meaning. Some commentators say a parable has one main meaning. They are talking about the deeper meaning.

The distinction between the surface and deeper meaning was transparent in the parable I talked about in the first week of this series: the parable Nathan presented to King David.  On the surface, it was simply a story of a rich man who owned large flocks of sheep stealing from a poor man his one prized possession: a ewe lamb. That was the surface meaning.  At a deeper level this story proved to be code for the king’s wickedness.  David is the rich man who steals from one of his soldiers his prized possession, his beautiful wife, and then arranges the murder of her husband to cover his tracks.

The Nathan story is what the Biblical Scholar Dominic Crossan calls an example parable. The message is this: do not do what King David did. Do not use people up in the pursuit of your own passions and interests.   

Ross read for us a second Old Testament example parable. It also has a surface and a deeper meaning.  It is called ‘The Song of the Vineyard’.  Listen while I sing you this song, a song of my friend and his vineyard: My friend had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.  He dug the soil and cleared it of stones; he planted the finest vines. He built a tower to guard them, dug a pit for treading the grapes. He waited for the grapes to ripen, but every grape was sour.

On the surface of things, this is a story of a human being doing everything possible to create a successful vineyard. However, despite all his loving care and diligent protection the vines fail to produce one good grape. Faced with total failure he plans to destroy the vineyard by giving it over to the forces of nature and wild animals. So, that is what, on the surface, the parable is about.  But, the purpose of telling this story was to convey a deeper meaning. At the deeper level this story is a metaphor for the abysmal failure of God’s people – the Hebrews – to keep their side of their contract with God notwithstanding God, the vigneron, doing everything possible to make the Hebrew people a ‘good vineyard’. 

Rather than treating one another decently, and carefully husbanding God’s wonderful resources, the Hebrew people have been wasting their days in drunkenness. They have been behaving unjustly: murdering and stealing. Yes, it is clear that the text has a surface and deeper meaning, and that we have to go outside the surface meaning to discover the true message of the parable. 

Like the Nathan story this is an example parable of the negative kind. Do not do what this present generation of Hebrews is doing is God’s command, says the story teller.  If you do you will experience God’s wrath.  God will withdraw his protection of Israel, and allow her enemies to destroy the land and the people.  This message is communicated metaphorically. God talking, “I will take away the hedge around the vineyard, break down the wall that protects it and let wild animals eat it and trample it down, and so on.  It is an example parable with a double meaning and it carries a clear message.

In the second week of this series on the ‘Power of Parables’ we concentrated on the more difficult and complex parable form: the challenge parable. Like example parables, they have both a surface and a deeper meaning.  What distinguishes them from example parables is the message they convey concerning traditional beliefs and rules.

The example parable affirms something that everyone knows is right in the sight of God.  Nathan’s denunciation of King David, conveyed in parable form, is prompted by David breaking two of God’s crucial laws: the laws forbidding adultery and murder.

By contrast, rather than affirm a key belief or rule, the challenge parable calls that rule or belief into question. ‘Are you so sure that this is what God commands?  Are you so sure God says we must believe this?’

I used the ‘Book of Ruth’ to illustrate the character of a challenge parable.  On the surface, it is a story of a Moabite woman, Ruth, turning her life upside down to care for her widowed mother-in-law the Israelite woman, Naomi.  She proves to be the proverbial good guy, when Naomi’s Israelite blood relatives - refuse any help. 

To comprehend the significance of this reversal of ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ you need to know that the Moabites were traditional enemies of the Israelites. The last thing an Israelite expected from a Moabite was assistance.  The Moabites were, in fact, the declared enemies of God. In the Book of Deuteronomy God says, “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendents even in the tenth generation may be included among the Lord’s people.  In other words they can never convert to Judaism.  God explicitly forbids the Israelites to do anything to help the Moabite people.  “As long as you are a nation never do anything to help these nations or to make them prosperous.” 

If you did not know about the enmity between Israelites and Moabites and God’s alleged declaration of them as His enemies then you could read Ruth’s story as an example parable, and that is how preachers often present it.  However, if it was meant to be an example parable, the writer would have ended his story by calling on his readers or hearers to go and be a faithful and loyal daughter in law, as Ruth had proved to be to Naomi.  But, he did not do that.  We will see he ended it with a shocking and threatening declaration.  Furthermore, if the storyteller was speaking to an ancient Jewish audience the members would have been totally unimpressed with the call. Imitate a Moabite! To the Israelites, it would be roughly the equivalent to us hearing the directive to imitate a terrorist.  For the Israelites, a good Moabite was an oxymoron: a contradiction in terms.  No Moabite could be good. God had declared them his enemies.

No, the purpose of the parable went beyond calling on the Israelites to imitate Ruth’s loving ways. It was meant to challenge one of their core convictions, namely that at all costs they must maintain their ethnic purity by not marrying or associating with any of the ethnic groups the Bible declared to be God’s enemies.

Ruth’s loving behaviour challenged that view but what especially challenged it was the information provided in the last couple of verses of the parable. Here it is revealed that Ruth is the ancestor of the Hebrew people’s greatest king, David. This certainly shocked. How could this be true?

The story we heard today about Jonah also constitutes a challenge to the belief that God demands his people sustain their ethnic purity. Nineveh, where God is sending Jonah, is the capital of Assyria and the Assyrians have been harassing the Jews for the best part of two centuries. The Jews, including Jonah, hate the Ninevites. Jonah disobeys God because he does not want God to save Israel’s enemies.  Jonah, however, eventually makes it to Nineveh, preaches the shortest sermon in the Bible, just seven words. “Forty days hence Nineveh will be destroyed”. The people believe the message Jonah brings from God, they proclaim a fast, no-one ate or drank. Nor was any animal given food or water. 

A great conversion occurred. Everyone in Nineveh put on sackcloth and ashes, and all the animals cover themselves with sackcloth. The Ninevites reason, “If we do these things, God may change his mind and we will not perish”. According to the parable, God did change his mind, showing mercy to the sinful Ninevites.

So, two parables both challenging the Israelite practice of setting up a ‘them and us’ division between themselves and numerous other ethnic groups, and doing so in the Name of God. There is a pattern developing here which is further manifested in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.

The next point that I want to make about parables  - whether they are example parables or challenge parables - is that to achieve their goal of being provocative and hopefully promoting of change - they must draw their hearers into the drama. The audience needs to respond to what is being put before them orally or in written form. They are more likely to be drawn into the story if the parable is heard, rather than read.  An oral presentation is more likely to be engaging than a written one. More importantly, it provides the opportunity for interjection and interaction to occur.

We are so used to having a written text in front of us that we tend to forget that the Old Testament circulated orally for centuries before it was written down. Jesus did not leave a written word, he told his stories to groups of people - often large ones.  It is most unlikely that either those who heard Jesus’ parables, or heard a story teller deliver the stories that were eventually included in the Jewish Scriptures (Our Old Testament) sat meekly nodding their heads. They would interject to question or disagree with what the story teller was saying.

‘The Song of the Vineyard’, which I talked about earlier, includes an explicit invitation to the audience to comment. Verse three says: And now You people who live in Jerusalem and Judah, judge between my vineyard and me.  In verse 4 the speaker asks his audience: ‘Is there anything I failed to do for it?’  ‘Then why did it produce sour grapes and not the good grapes I expected?’  This story was delivered orally and probably the audience responded to the invitation to comment on the story and became part of the process.

‘The Book of Ruth’ circulated orally for centuries prior to being committed to paper.  The typical Israelite audience hearing this story from the mouth of a storyteller would not have been as well behaved as you people present this morning.  On hearing what Ruth did, that is give up her life in Moab to journey to Bethlehem and care for her Jewish mother-in-law – someone would yell out, ‘That just could not happen. Whoever met a good Moabite; certainly not one as good as you are making this Ruth out to be’.

What would have certainly provoked an Israelite audience into an angry outburst was the story’s surprise ending: the announcement that Ruth the Moabite is the ancestor of King David.  “That’s impossible!” “Story teller, have you ever read what is written in the Scriptures?  ‘God says, no Moabite must ever be admitted to the assembly of the people of God, never, ever!’ So how is it possible that God would allow David to be a direct descendent of a Moabite woman?  That’s rubbish!”

Those are the kind of responses the story teller would hope to draw from this audience. He is telling a little tale which is coming up against what seems to his hearers to be an iron clad irrefutable truth: the Moabites are God’s enemies.  We do not know if any Israelites changed their attitude to Moabites because of the Ruth story.  But, we know this is what the story teller is trying to bring about. By saying that God could allow David to be a descendent of a Moabite, he is raising the possibility that the Moabites are not God’s enemies.  If just one of his listeners interjected and said, “Well may be David is a descendent of a Moabite.  In another town I heard a similar claim from a good story teller” then the story is making some kind of dint in the armour of tradition. However, if all the hearers say to the story teller at the end of his presentation, “Lovely story about Ruth, thanks for sharing it with us today, Joshua” then the parable has failed.

So, parables are stories with double meanings - stories with a purpose. The more complex and difficult are challenge parables.  For a parable to work – especially a challenge parable - the audience must become part of the process; become engaged. If that happens the ground is prepared for change, but, of course, it does not guarantee change occurs.  Jesus presented his parables verbally. 

On the next occasion I will look at the parables of Jesus. If Jesus had something important to say he told a parable. He was out to effect change in belief and behaviour in transforming ways and telling parables played a major role in his programme.

* I am indebted to Biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan for many of the ideas contained in this reflection.  He presented the material in a series of lectures he delivered in Melbourne earlier this year. I have also made use of Robert Stein’s entry on Parables in the Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan. 

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The Power of Riddle Parables*

Today we continue exploring the power of parables.  Biblical scholar, Dominic Crossan, says there are three types of parables that he can see clearly in the Biblical tradition: example parables, challenge parables and riddle parables. We have already met the first two: example parables and challenge parables. Today we talk about the third type: riddle parables.

We are used to children telling riddles: they are a fun thing. We adults play along with the child putting forward the riddle. Even if we know the solution, we don’t spoil it for the child by revealing what we know to the child.  In contrast to children’s riddles, adult riddle are serious stuff and they can be lethal. Do you know the plot of Puccini’s opera Turandot? If you want the hand of the princess you must solve three riddles.  If you fail to solve any one of the three you lose your head.  Yes, lethal stuff.

The most famous riddle parable in the Christian Old Testament is a story featuring Samson as the hero.  Samson is the man ordained by God even before his birth to overthrow God’s enemies the Philistines. One day Samson visits a neighbouring Philistine village. He spies a pretty Philistine girl.  It is love at first sight. He races home to his parents with his good news. “Dad, mum I saw a Philistine woman at Timnah. She is beautiful. Now get her for me as my wife”.    Dad and mum plead with Samson to change his mind.  “Samson, why not choose one of your own clan to be your wife, or some other beautiful woman from among all our people – why take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines? Choose a beautiful Hebrew girl” Samson retorts, “No, it her I want, get her for me”. Quite a display of hubris.  It appears that being chosen as God’s champion has given Samson a big head. Samson is obviously given to ordering mum and dad about.  Samson also turns out to be far from discerning when it comes to choosing a wife.

Samson and his parents set off for the Philistine girl’s home to arrange the marriage.

On the way, Samson comes across a lion. Drawing on the strength God gives him, he tears the lion apart with his bare hands.  That job done, he continues his journey to the girl’s family home. Once the arrangements are made for the wedding Samson and his parents, return to their home.

 Some time later, Samson makes a second journey, this time to marry his betrothed. On the way, he checks out the carcase of the lion he killed. He finds its swarming with bees. There is honey inside the carcase.  He eats a portion and gives the remainder of what he took to his parents. However, he does not tell them that he got it from the carcase of the lion. 

The custom at the time was to hold a wedding feast that lasted seven days. The feast was held at the bride’s home.  The groom and his kin footed the bill. Thirty young Philistine men were chosen as Samson’s companions during the seven-day wedding feast.  Samson says to these young men. “I will tell you a riddle and I wager that you cannot tell me what it means. However, if by the end of the seven days of feasting, you solve the puzzle, I will give each of you a piece of fine linen and a change of clothes.

This is the riddle,

“Out of the eater came something to eat;

Out of the strong came something sweet”

I repeat,

“Out of the eater came something to eat;

Out of the strong came something sweet”

Now Samson is not really playing fair. This is a private riddle. No one can possibly work out the answer.  Yet, for three days, the thirty Philistine men worry themselves silly trying to find the solution. However, they fail to solve the puzzle. Frustrated and angry they go to Samson’s wife and terrify her.  They say, “You must trick your husband into telling you the solution to his riddle and then tell us.  If you don’t we will burn your father’s house down and burn you with it.” She goes to Samson in tears saying, “You hate me, you don’t love me. You ask a riddle of my people but you have not told me what the riddle means”.  Samson says, “I haven’t even told my parents why would I tell you?”

She persists in nagging Samson for the entire period of the wedding feast. On the seventh day, he caves in and tells her what the riddle means. She immediately tells his thirty companions its meaning.  They go to Samson as quickly as their legs will carry them because in order to claim their prize from him they must present the solution on that day: the seventh day. They give him the solution to the riddle:

 “What could be sweeter than honey?

  What could be stronger than a lion?” (Repeat)

Samson replies: “if you hadn’t been ploughing with my cow, you wouldn’t know the answer now”.  Samson’s answer has sexual overtones. It would have been more accurate for Samson to say, “If you had not been playing with my sweetheart. You wouldn’t know the answer now”.

Not only is Samson an arrogant man, he also has an anger management problem. Overcome with anger and made strong by God’s power, Samson goes to a nearby Philistine settlement where he kills thirty men. He strips them and gives their fine clothes to his thirty Philistine companions.  Furious with his wife he gives her away, in fact he hands over to the best man at his wedding. Yes, Samson has an anger management problem and yes, riddles can be lethal.

Let us now turn to the New Testament. Which kind of parable did Jesus tell? Example parables, challenge parables or riddle parables?  Mark says Jesus used riddle parables as vehicles for teaching.  According to Mark, people divide into two groups: the insiders and the outsiders.  Mark says Jesus speaks in riddles in order to hide from the outsiders the good news concerning the kingdom.  This information is communicated to Jesus’ disciples immediately after he tells the parable of the sower to the crowd. They obviously do not understand the parable so when they are alone with Jesus some of his followers ask him to explain his parables to them.  According to Mark, he says to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of God’s kingdom. But, to those who are outside, everything is in parables, in order that they may look and look, yet perceive nothing;

They may listen and listen, yet understand nothing.

Otherwise they might turn and be forgiven”

Let me repeat those words.

“To those who are outside, everything is in parables, in order that they may look and look, yet perceive nothing;

They may listen and listen, yet understand nothing.

Otherwise they might turn and be forgiven”

Yes, you heard correctly. According to Mark, Jesus declares that he talks in parables so that the outsiders, that is those not among God’s chosen, will fail to understand the secret of God’s kingdom.  Jesus works this way because if the outsiders do understand they may repent and then God would be obliged to forgive them. To prevent this happening Jesus talks in riddles.

The two verses I just read to you are the most difficult and the most discussed verses in Mark’s entire gospel.  From the beginning, interpreters have tried to soften them.  The first interpreters were Matthew and Luke.  They both ‘borrowed’ this passage from Mark and inserted it in their gospels. In an effort to protect Jesus’ reputation as God’s divine son, Matthew and Luke toned down the offensive message they had borrowed from Mark.  For example, Luke does two things to tone down the message: first, he omits the most offensive part of Mark’s passage - the words saying that Jesus talks in riddles in order to prevent the outsiders understanding, because if they understand they can repent and be forgiven. Yes, Luke omits those words. The second thing he does is declare that it is not Jesus but the devil that prevents people hearing and seeing.  In Chapter 8 Luke writes, “He, (the devil) comes and takes away every word”

Subsequent commentators on Mark’s text have made innumerable attempts to tone down the more offensive parts of the passage.   Presumably, they have done so, and many commentators continue to do so because the message about Jesus the harsh words convey is ‘out of sync’ with the Jesus they have come to know and follow. 

The verses we heard read today probably worry us too, and for a similar reason. They do not ring true to our understanding of Jesus, our experience of Jesus.  We believe Jesus invites all people to become his followers and to commit to working for and being part of God’s kingdom.

The view that the harsh words in today’s reading do not sound like Jesus and were probably never said by Jesus is corroborated by the fact that there is much in Mark’s gospel that strongly suggests that there is not a rigid division of the populace into two groups: the insiders and the outsiders.  For instance, Mark reports a number of instances in which faith is declared by outsiders, These outsiders include two non-Jews: The Syro-Phoenician woman, and the most surprising of all, the Roman centurion at the cross. When Jesus breathed his last, the centurion declares his faith in this way, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”  So, yes flying in the face of the apparent message of today’s gospel reading is the fact that Mark reports that a number of outsiders proclaimed their faith in Jesus.  At that point they join the ranks of the insiders. 

It is also the case that a number of things Mark reports in the fourth chapter of his gospel Jesus saying convey the message that Jesus is offering the good news to all, not just to the so called insiders. For example, when Jesus recounts the parable of the sower to the crowd Mark says Jesus offers a general invitation to all present, not just his followers, to listen to what he has to say. Jesus says, if you have ears to hear, pay attention to what I say. That is an invitation to outsiders as well as insiders.  Jesus also urges listeners generally to bring a light so that they may see. 

Yes, it seems that in many of the stories Mark presents in his gospel the line between the insiders and outsiders is not rigid in the way described in today’s reading.  Further evidence of this is the fact that the twelve disciples, repeatedly fail to understand Jesus’ even though they are, figuratively speaking, in the front row of the ranks of insiders.

In summary, Mark’s text offers a good deal of material that calls into question the claim that Jesus talks in riddles in order to prevent the outsiders understanding, repenting and being forgiven. All but one of the commentators I consulted report they do not believe Jesus said the harsh words we have been discussing.  Rather, Jesus used parables to enhance people’s understanding, not hide the truth from them. What is likely is that Mark put the harsh message of rejection into Jesus’ mouth.  Why Mark would do that is the subject for another time.**

The last main point I want to make is this.  Although it seems that it is most likely Jesus was putting out a message aimed at encouraging as many people as possible to become members of God’s kingdom, he was not offering a soft message.  He was not declaring that all comers are welcome on their own terms.  Rather, he proclaimed that taking up with him was a costly thing to do.  It could cost you family, friends, and livelihood; it could cost you your life.  Committing to following Jesus required the prospective disciple to turn upside down many of his or her taken for granted convictions about God and what God wanted of his people.

No, the last word on Jesus’ teaching practice is not Mark’s claim that Jesus talks in riddles so that the outsiders cannot understand. Rather, as we will see on another occasion, it is that Jesus presents parables aimed at provoking hearers – so called insiders and outsiders alike - into questioning many of the values and ways of behaving they take for granted.  Yes, Jesus’ parables are usually challenge parables. Ultimately, they only work if they cause hearers to collaborate with God to make the world a more compassionate and fairer place to live. 

* In preparing this reflection, I have found the following sources most useful.  Eugene Boring, Mark; John Dominic Crossan, ‘The Power of Parables’ a public lecture delivered in Melbourne in July 2010; and Morna Hooker, The Gospel According to Mark

** Some commentators point out that Mark wrote his gospel at a time (in the 70’s CE) when many of Jesus’ followers were puzzling over the fact that the great majority of Jews had rejected the message that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah. They may have also had trouble comprehending many of Jesus’ parables themselves.

Mark believed God was sovereign Lord, and that accordingly everything that happened must be an expression of God’s will.  In the face of the refusal of the great majority of Jews to become followers of Jesus, Mark reasoned that God must have chosen -- for reasons still to be revealed -- to exclude many people from hearing the message and being admitted to the kingdom.  However, Mark did see admission to the kingdom as God’s gift: an act of grace rather than a matter of playing favourites.

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Jesus talks in Parables*

Biblical Scholar John Dominic Crossan delineates three kinds of parables in the Biblical tradition: riddle parables, example parables and challenge parables.  Which type did Jesus teach? Mark claims he taught riddle parables, and he did so to prevent outsiders understanding the message of the kingdom. Jesus does not like certain people and he is punishing them by excluding them from the kingdom Mark seems to claim. However, Mark’s assertion is not very persuasive.

You can find much in the four gospels that contradicts the view that Jesus taught in riddles to prevent some people comprehending the good news.  You can drawing on the gospels make a good case out for saying that the aim of Jesus’ teaching was not to impede people becoming followers but to give everyone an opportunity to hear the good news and, if they so choose, to commit to following Jesus, and becoming part of the kingdom program. Yes, Jesus’ aim was to reach the marginal and rejected members of his society – the so-called outsiders as well as those people who were viewed as worthy and righteous. Yes, Jesus taught an inclusive message. Yet his message always packs a punch: it was challenging.

 If Jesus had something important to communicate, he usually told a parable. So, what type of parable did he teach? Jesus usually presented challenge parables. The purpose of a challenge parable is to shake your foundations: to be subversive. Its purpose is to make you feel not so sure about what you are sure about!

 However, the gospel writers frequently blunted Jesus’ message by turning his challenge parables into example parables.  An example parable does not try to be subversive. It reaffirms existing values and beliefs.  It says go and do likewise, or if it is holding up an example of bad behaviour, its message is don’t do likewise. For example, don’t behave like David did when he, committed adultery with Bathsheba, and murdered her husband to protect himself when Bathsheba became pregnant. That is an example parable of a negative kind.

 Let us now look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. Is this an example parable, or a challenge parable? On one hand, the answer seems very obvious for at the conclusion of the story, Luke’s Jesus says “Go and do likewise”.  That is the classic thrust message of an example parable.

 However, Dominic Crossan, believes Jesus never intended the Good Samaritan to be an example parable.  He says if you really wanted to give an example parable why not put the Samaritan in the ditch and the Jew doing the helping.  Why does he say that? Because in the eyes of the Jews the Samaritans were bad guys.  They were long standing enemies of the Jewish people.  So, to give your own people an example to follow you would put the Samaritan in the ditch and have the Jew pull him out and patch him up and ensure he recovers. 

 Let us imagine for a moment Jesus is conversing with some of his fellow Jews.  He says there is a Samaritan going down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Robbers beat him up and leave him for dead. Two Jews, a priest and Levite come along and just pass him by. Then a Jewish layperson stops and helps.  That would be an example parable.  It is meant to convey the message to Jewish hearers to emulate the good Jewish layperson and extend care to a person in trouble even when he is an ethnic enemy. If Jesus had put the Samaritan in the ditch in his parable, some of the listeners may have said to themselves, “Well I suppose we should do that, help the injured Samaritan out. I don’t know if I would, would you Joshua would you?” Joshua says to Joseph, “Well may be I would, Joseph. It is a nice idea if you find your enemy beaten up and left for dead in a ditch that you help him. Joshua is saying probably he would do it.  That is an example parable. If Jesus had put his parable across in this way his aim would have been to prick the conscience of his Jewish listeners sufficiently for them to imagine they would help. Whether they would we don’t know. But, told this way it is an example parable.

 But, that is not how Jesus tells it. He puts the Jew in the ditch and makes the Samaritan the good guy. Why does he do this and then tell you to do likewise?  Because it is a challenge parable. It aims to shake his Jewish colleagues foundations, to cause them to question their conviction about the absolute dichotomy existing between themselves and the Samaritans. To cause them to say, “Well are the Samaritan truly our ethnic enemies?” 

 The notion that they are ethnic enemies goes back to the time when the Northern tribes of Israel were destroyed by the Assyrians and the Assyrians leaders settled some of their own people on the land the Northern tribes had previously occupied. The Assyrians intermarried with the Samaritans.

 The religious leaders of Judea (the Southern Jewish Kingdom) condemned the Samaritans for marrying outsiders and said that as a result they were unclean in the sight of God. As I mentioned in another context, a couple of years ago, the Samaritans offered to help the Judeans rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple after the Babylonians destroyed them in the 6^th century BCE.  The Jewish leadership refused their assistance on the ground that they were unholy in God’s sight in part for intermarrying with non-Jewish people.  So, the two groups were ancient ethnic enemies.

 Take the story of the Samaritan, as it is told, and we have a situation then where the good guys: the Jewish religious leaders (the priest and Levite) do bad and the bad guy, the Samaritan, does good. That is what we have. It is meant to shock. Having the story told in that way makes his hearers think. Jesus takes what would be the revered leaders of his people and they don’t do what most people think they should do, and the Samaritan does. That is a challenge parable.

 Remember we are in an oral situation in this Jesus story. Jesus never wrote a word. He is talking to a crowd comprised of fellow Jews. Jewish hearers are predisposed to get into the story. To interrupt: to make a comment, or put a question.  If Jesus did say “Go and do likewise” a Jewish hearer may well reply, “I am not a Samaritan, so how do I go and do likewise”. Someone else could interrupt Jesus and say, “What do you mean?”  The guy who went down the road by himself is an idiot. Everyone knows you don’t travel down that road alone. He should have waited for a little caravan and gone with them – safety in numbers. It is a stupid story.

 Crossan says, “If Jesus’ hearers responded to his story in this kind of way then Jesus is making some progress. If, however, in an oral situation the audience listens respectfully and no one says anything, and at the end they file past Jesus and say, ‘Lovely parable this morning, Rabbi’.  Then it is a failure; a total failure. What Jesus wants is someone to say, ‘No Samaritan would act like that’. Or, ‘Why are you always picking on the clergy? My brother is a Levite and he wouldn’t have left him to die”.

 In interpreting this parable in the way I have just described, Crossan is trying to emphasize that the purpose of a parable is to make you think, and then for an oral audience to argue, debate and raise your consciousness a bit.  For someone perhaps to say ‘Well don’t you think just one Samaritan might?’ The first man replies, ‘But how would you know that one?” Jesus wants to get people involved.

The function of a challenge parable is to provoke. We often do not pick up on this message because when written down on the pages of the Bible the parable of Samaritan does not look particularly provocative, especially when Luke dresses it up as a non-threatening example parable. But, in an oral situation it may well prove to be rhetorical dynamite.

 When we hear the story of the Good Samaritan it may fail to hit home, to provoke us. Why doesn’t it reach us? The problem for us is that the Good Samaritan has become a cliché. The expression has passed into our lingua franca. We hear it often. We say Tom is really a good Samaritan, he is always doing good deeds for others. But, in the case of Jesus’ fellow Jews the expression good Samaritan was anything but a cliché. It was a contradiction in terms. To say a Samaritan was good, would be comparable in Jesus’ day to an Australian saying during World War II that a Nazi was good.  In this story Jesus is declaring that one of the people whom are sworn enemies of the Jewish people is good. That is why we call this a challenge parable.

The next point I want to stress is that over the course of these reflections on the power of parables we have had two other examples of parables that turn an ethnic enemy of the Jewish people into a hero. The first of these was Ruth the Moabite who put her life at the disposal of her Hebrew mother-in-law Naomi.  The notion that any Moabite was a good person was for Jews just as much a contradiction in terms as the notion that a Samaritan could be a good person.

 We heard God’s condemnation of Moabites as his enemies in today’s reading from the 23^rd chapter of Deuteronomy. No Moabite, not even to the tenth generation may be included among the Lord’s people .. because they did not provide you with food and water when you were making your way out of Egypt”. In the light of that condemnation the announcement at the end of the Book of Ruth that their greatest King, David, was a descendent of a Moabite woman must have rocked the Jewish hearers and later readers of this book. How can this be?  This story is saying to the Hebrews how sure are you in the absolute rightness of the law which says you must not associate with the Moabites?

 The Assyrians were also the declared enemies of the Hebrew people and of Yahweh. Yet God sends Jonah to warn the people of Ninevah the capital of Assyria that their city is to be destroyed in six days. They are told just in time to repent and escape destruction.  It raises a similar problem for the Jewish people.  How sure can we be that the Ninevites are our ethnic enemies if God intervenes in this way, and they respond by repenting?

 So the list of challenges to the taken for granted truth about the identity and reality of the Jewish people’s ethnic enemies grows: Good Moabites, Good Ninevites, and now a Good Samaritan. There is too much consistency here.  These stories should shake the foundations of Hebrew certainty concerning who are their enemies and God’s enemies. 

 Crossan suggests than we Australians take our contemporary equivalent of the Samaritan (the bad guy) and put out a news story casting that person in a good light and see what response we get. Whom would we pick for the role? Does anyone spring to mind? Two generations ago Protestants may have chosen a Catholic as the bad guy, and Catholics may well have chosen a Protestant. I say this because there was such enmity existing between these two religious groups.  This enmity manifested itself in politics, education, community activities and marriage and family life. Bigotry was rife on both sides.  That bigotry is now largely gone. Increasingly strong bonds are established across the old divide and people from both sides stress the things they have in common rather than their differences. Nevertheless, bigotry is still an intrinsic part of Australian life. Recently, a Catholic friend expressed to me great satisfaction over the growing affinity between Catholics and Protestants. She then went onto to say: “We need to be together if we are going to stop the Muslims taking this country over. They are the real enemy”. How many Australians of Anglo Celtic descent would have trouble saying Good Muslim? For how many would that expression be an oxymoron: a contradiction in terms? I leave us all with that question to ponder. AMEN

  * Much of the material in today’s reflection was drawn from a lecture Biblical Scholar, John Dominic Crossan, gave in Melbourne in September this year. 

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A Different Kind of King*

 Matthew 2: ‘In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews?”’

Today we gather to celebrate the birth of a different kind of King.  What a surprise announcement: Jesus a baby whose family hailed from the province of Galilee is the King of the Jews.  It was a subversive announcement too because there was already a King of the Jews, Herod the Great!

According to the Gospel of Matthew once Herod heard the news, in an effort to eliminate any rival claim to his throne, he launched a massacre of all the children two years and under living in the Bethlehem region. He was known as a brutal killer, who did murder several people to protect his throne. However, there is no independent evidence of what has been called the massacre of the innocents.  In presenting his story, some 80 years after Jesus’ birth, Matthew is not trying to give an accurate, historical account of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. Rather he is making a confession of the church’s faith. He is saying we believe that God participated in the birth and preservation of the one we have come to regard as Messiah.

Is it likely that Herod would have known of Jesus’ birth, or viewed Jesus as a threat to his throne?  No!  Probably nobody living in the Greco-Roman world of that time would have viewed this baby as potential kingship material.

Why was that? For a start, Jesus had the wrong dad, both socially and politically.  His father, Joseph, was a carpenter and nowhere in the first century did kings come from the carpenter class.

Joseph was not a member of a royal family, of the landed aristocracy, nor of one of the families of the religious elite.  No, Jesus’ father was an artisan.  We do not know how Joseph and his family joined the ranks of artisans. Often artisans were failed peasants, forced to take up a trade because they had lost their land. We do know that Joseph was a member of the lower classes and that in itself put any dreams of kingship beyond a person in the Greco-Roman world of that time.

Yes, Jesus had humble origins.  He may have been illiterate because between 95 and 97 percent of the Jewish state was illiterate at that time. The reality of his situation does not sit comfortably with the exalted image of Jesus the church subsequently developed. 

Luke signaled the humble and lowly character of Jesus’ origins by placing his birth in a feeding trough in a winter shelter for animals. It was also evidenced by the wrong persons showing up to celebrate the birth. No princes nor priests, no members of the upper classes.   Instead, shepherds showed up: the dirty, smelly, mangy shepherds. They were located below the artisans in the social structure of Jesus’ time. They certainly did not have the iconic status they came to have for Christians because the church portrayed Jesus as the good shepherd.  No, any claim that baby Jesus was a future king would have been dismissed as nonsense by the Jews of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, as well as by the citizens and rulers of the empire. 

We know that Jesus never attained kingship on earth, at least not of the kind that would be recognized as such.  What Matthew presents us with is a new kind of King.  One sent to the lowly and the social outcasts, not one exclusively for the wealthy and powerful.  If God’s action had been in keeping with the values and practices of the culture of the time then shepherds would have been amongst the last rather than the first people to serve as witnesses of this glorious event: the coming of the man born to be a new kind of King.

The Jewish people were looking and longing for God to intervene in a  dramatic way- using force to destroy their enemies.  They dreamed of the Messiah as a Deliverer who would be their Warrior King in the way that David had been the Warrior King for their ancestors hundreds of years ago.  This was not how Jesus perceived God’s plans nor his role in those plans.  He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey not on a warrior’s stallion.  He learnt by watching the oppressive and violent occupancy of his country that violence ultimately fails to deliver true peace to a society, or harmony and joy in human relationships.  He came with his message of love for all, even for one’s enemies.

Alas, things have not worked out as Jesus hoped, or the gospel writers’ hoped.  They looked for Jesus to return to earth as triumphant king and judge to destroy the forces of evil, and incorporate the faithful in God’s kingdom on earth.  Two thousand years have elapsed.  Jesus has not returned in the hoped-for apocalyptic way and there is still so much suffering and darkness in this world.

Many people today say that the hope of those first Christians of a new order was a false hope. On the other hand, there are still many Christians who believe that Jesus will return some day soon, to establish God’s rule on earth.  If you are not one of those holding such a belief, you may, nevertheless, still be holding on to the dream that one day all people will live in a fairer, more just, peaceful and caring world than we experience at the present time.  And, one can hope that one day human societies will be transformed to become places of peace, mutual acceptance, and joyful living rather than contexts of perpetual strife and oppression of the weak by the strong.

Perhaps the longed-for transformation of the world has been so long coming because God is waiting for us to collaborate in the process of cleaning up this world – to make the promised kingdom a reality.  I would suggest it becomes a reality insofar as each one of us endeavours to make peace happen in our relationships; it happens if and when we endeavour to make life decent for people who are not receiving a fair go.  It happens insofar as we each seek to make life more rewarding and joyful for other people by being more generous and less judgmental, more understanding and less ready to take offence.

If we are of serious intent when we sing of our joy and thankfulness over the birth of the baby Jesus, we will commit ourselves to trying to achieve such changes.  That can be our contribution to making the kingdom a reality.  Yes, each of us needs to make our distinctive and costly journey to Bethlehem -- to the birthplace of the one whom we say is Lord and Saviour.  AMEN 

* I have made use of the following publications in preparing this paper: John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography; Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas.

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Are you the one or should we look for another?*

You have to feel sorry for John the Baptist.   He is in jail and undoubtedly in a state of high anxiety.  He knows his chances of leaving jail alive are zero. You see John has been threatening public order and engaging in what the Romans view as treasonable and blasphemous action. John has emerged from the desert announcing that God is soon to intervene in human affairs in an apocalyptic and conclusive way. He is going to clean up the mess in the world. This entails, among other things, destroying the Romans. John’s message is blasphemous as well as treasonable because the Romans have their own Gods. The Emperor himself is called God from God, Savior of the World.  Consequently, John’s championing of Yahweh constitutes a blasphemous assault on the Emperor.  Is it surprising the Emperor’s local man, Herod Antipas, has jailed John and will soon execute him?

From John’s point of view, there is an ironical twist to this outcome. He has ended up in this predicament, not because he has murdered someone, or robbed someone, but because he has conscientiously carried out the role he believes God has given him to carry out.

John has spent the better part of his adult life preparing himself for his prophetic role: living alone in the desert subsisting on bush tucker – locusts and wild honey – while he communed with God. He emerged from the desert determined to ensure nothing stood in the way of God intervening to establish his kingdom on earth.  He believes that what is stopping God bringing in his kingdom is the people’s sin. Stop sinning and God will remake the world and in the process eliminate Israel’s enemies, and punish unrepentant Jews.  He says to the Jewish people, “Join me at the Jordan River, repent of your sins, and your souls will be cleansed as your bodies are washed in the waters of the river”. The Jews come in their thousands to be cleansed and forgiven, and by so doing seek to avoid God’s terrible punishment.

One of those who came was Jesus the Galilean. Surely, he does not need to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.  John does not seem to think so. He is very reluctant to baptize Jesus but he eventually acquiesces to Jesus’ persistent demands for baptism.  John declares to all present that Jesus is the long awaited Messiah, and that he is not worthy to carry Jesus’ sandals.

Fast forward six months and how John’s attitude and situation has changed.  Life has gone badly for John.  Not only is he in prison awaiting execution, but, he is experiencing a crisis of faith!  He has heard reports of Jesus’ activities that cause him to seriously doubt that Jesus is the Messiah. Perhaps he has heard that Jesus is associating with sinners and tax collectors, something John would never do.  He has probably heard that Jesus is proclaiming the message that God is a God of love, whereas John has been proclaiming that God is a God who judges and punishes the wicked.  

John sends some of his disciples to put this question to Jesus:  “Tell us, are you the one who was to come, or should we look for another?”  Jesus does not give a direct answer to John’s question, but, instead, points to his teaching and healing activity.  ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor’. In summary: John, judge me by my results: not by my words but by my deeds!  

Was John convinced by Jesus’ answer, or did he remain conflicted as to whether Jesus was the long awaited Messiah? We are not told.  But, he may well not have been convinced because Jesus’ message of mercy and compassionate action was in conflict with John’s uncompromising portrayal of God as a judgmental and vengeful divine.

Let us now take up this question: does John’s crisis of faith have relevance to you and to me?   Many of us have probably had, at one time or another, serious doubts about the value of being a follower of Jesus. Such doubts may have been prompted by a bad down turn in our personal fortunes; probably not as dramatic as John’s, but for us, serious and perhaps cataclysmic in their impact. Anyone of a number of things may have brought us low: perhaps the loss of a secure and well-paid job, dementia developing in a partner or parent, an accident to a child that is life changing for the child and you, news that you or a member of your immediate family has contracted cancer.  You may have prayed for God to intervene and fix things for you, but it has not happened.  Your experience may have left you feeling alienated from God.  It may have left you doubting that there is a God.

Such responses to crushing problems and losses are fairly common. They are understandable, especially given that we have all heard the message from the church that God answers your prayers. Someone said recently, “For years I have been in the habit of asking God to play an active part in my life, but when things started to go badly wrong, and I prayed and prayed about them: nothing happened!  Where was God?”

Your doubts or disbelief may have quite different sources. You may not have suffered some great loss, but perhaps been worn down and depressed by the ordinariness of life.  You may be thinking, “Where is all the joy and happiness one expects life to deliver?”  Instead of experiencing a sense of well being, a sense of purpose in life, you are bored witless by an endless daily round of tedious tasks. You find yourself saying, “Is this all there is?  Is there not something more life can offer me? My faith in God, my weekly worship, my praying does not bring me joy; these things do not even relieve my weariness and boredom.  Is it worth the effort? This God thing does not work, at least not for me.

Maybe this very day you are wrestling with much the same question John posed:  ‘Are you the one Jesus to stake my life on?  You may be experiencing the sense of abandonment by God that John the Baptist probably experienced.  John is imprisoned and God has done nothing to save the situation.  Maybe, you feel that God has abandoned you.

Here is another issue that may be creating a crisis of faith for you. You may have been attracted to Jesus initially because of his message of gentleness and non-retaliation.  But now, you have lived longer and experienced the world with its present woes you may be thinking that this message just does not fit this modern era.

Current dilemmas that produce so much uncertainty for many people include the threat of terrorism, the prevalence of pedophilia, endless stories of large-scale fraud by ruthless financial operators that robs battlers of their life savings; wars that cost numerous women, men and children their lives. 

Consequently, the message so often heard from the pulpit calling on worshippers to forgive their enemies, and turn the other cheek, no longer rings true for you.  You cannot square it with your experience.  You may find yourself putting this question to yourself: “Am I wasting my time sticking with the church and Jesus.  Maybe Jesus’ ethical code and message of the kingdom are impotent and irrelevant in a world in which power and greed are the driving forces?” Would I be better off giving up on God and directing my resources and energies to myself: to my pleasure, my happiness, my success?”

I could say to someone experiencing such thoughts and feelings, “No, it is not wasted effort: hang on in there. God will not abandon you.”  I might add, “Perhaps you are not praying hard enough or trusting God enough. Maybe you are holding onto things you know God wants you to give up”.

I am not going to say any of those things.  Nor am I going to say, “In your moments of doubt do not lose sight of the fact that down the centuries millions upon millions of people have found that following Jesus did give their lives meaning, and often much joy and fulfillment”.  That advice probably would not work either. A second hand religion does not work. No one can believe and commit on your behalf.  Nor can one, as it were, assume the position of God, and promise you that everything will eventually work out for the best.  It is palpably obvious that for hundreds of millions, probably billions of people in this world, life does not work out for the best in the sense that it fails to deliver the basic resources and emotional support any human needs to lead a reasonably decent life.  Millions of people living at present below the subsistence line, could engage in ceaseless prayer day after day year after year and it would not improve their situation one jot: they would still go to sleep hungry.

When John asked Jesus if he was the one, Jesus responded by saying, “Judge for yourself, John, the blind see, the poor receive a new life”. I do not know if John was convinced. What I do know is that not all the poor of Israel or Galilee received a new life from Jesus. I doubt all the blind received their sight. Nor did the longed for direct intervention by God to put matters right for Israel’s faithful occur. Two thousand years have past and it still has not occurred.  Most of the poor of Jesus’ country went on being poor after Jesus left this earth. Most of the world’s current poor will die prematurely, often unnecessarily painfully and yes, in a state of poverty. These are empirical realities. 

So can we only derive a pessimistic message from the Jesus story? No. What Jesus’ ministry of hospitality, healing, preaching and praying showed was that it was possible to improve the lives of at least some people, including some on the margins of society. He showed the amount of happiness and joy in the world could grow if humans join in Jesus’ program to make things better than they are.  Following Jesus’ humanitarian and spiritual program can make a significant difference to the wellbeing of individuals and of a society. If we build or assist others to build open communities in which bonds of love and friendship prevail, the lost, the lonely, and hungry can find acceptance as equals, rather than treated as charity cases, we will transform lives.  Doing such things will not only benefit others, it will enrich the lives of those who extend the love, friendship, spiritual and practical help.  Yes, altruism works. Scientific research shows it even improves the functioning of your immune system. 

The job of bringing a better life to some of the world’s, needy, is far too big for us to attempt relying exclusively on our own resources. We need God’s input. John the Baptist was right about that.  But, he was wrong in his conviction that God would single handedly make the world a better place.  The hoped for transformations only happen if humans engage in costly collaboration with God.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu expressed it brilliantly with this aphorism:  God without you will not, you without God cannot. We Christians have sometimes lost sight of that fact.

Advent is the season for watching and waiting.  If we are to take advantage of it, let us, as far as possible, draw aside from the distracting lunacy that this season so often becomes: and reflect on some big questions:  Does Jesus’ life encourage us to trust that there is a God who cares? Does he show us a way to live that makes sense—that we can commit to?  Jesus, are you the one or should we look for another?  AMEN 

Reference: John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire

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Let Love Be Our Word, Let Love Be Our Way

Christmas day has become very much a family day.   The fact that we start this service of worship an hour earlier than usual testifies to the importance of our family activities on this particular day.  The nativity scene, showing Jesus with his earthly family gathered in the stable, makes it seem natural and right that we should regard today as a family day. Doing it in this time honoured way has much going for it.  We celebrate the birth of our Lord around the meal table with those people who matter so much to us – our closest relatives; and whom we see as God’s great gift to us. 

Yet, family kinship ties are not what the birth of Jesus was principally about. The babe in the manger became the man Jesus.  Jesus did not come to establish a religious movement founded on kinship ties.  On the contrary, he insisted that his followers prioritize their commitment to him over their commitment to their kin. 

When, on one occasion, Jesus was told that his mother and brothers wanted to talk to him, Jesus replied: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing at his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” 

For what purpose did Jesus want his followers to prioritize their commitment to him over their commitment to their kin?  What other commitment could possibly rival one’s commitment to one’s kin at s time in human history when one’s kin were indispensable to one’s survival? There was no social security system in ancient Israel. Kin were one’s first port of call in any crisis. They were also an indispensable labour resource for acquiring one’s daily bread. Families farmed together.   

What could be more important than caring for one’s blood relatives? As Jesus saw it, it was getting out the great news that God had commenced his program of transforming the world. Letting people know that the long awaited arrival of the kingdom was upon them. What was more important than attending to kinship obligations?  Jesus declared it was doing everything in your power to facilitate the growth of God’s rule on earth.  Consequently, Jesus required that his disciples to prioritize getting the good news out over caring for their kin.

Membership in the kingdom would not depend on having the right blood relatives, but on one’s response to God’s invitation! There was a strong note of urgency to the message. There was no time to waste. Not time to bury your father.

Unlike John the Baptist, who implemented single handedly his program of baptism for the repentance of sins, Jesus chose not to work single handedly at implementing God’s program for putting the world right. Jesus knew he needed a group approach to ensure the enterprise continued if he lost his life. He also needed a group approach because humans are social animals.  We humans cannot survive, let alone lead enjoyable and purposeful lives, if we try to go it alone.  This was as true for Jesus as for us: he needed the disciples to spread the good news, but he also needed them to share his worries, his plans, and be a source of companionship.

It is often said that Jesus shows us what a life filled with God is like. Well the life in which he showed us what God was like was not a life lived in isolation but a life lived in community.  It was in the life of what we would call a faith community – comprised of Jesus and his inner circle of followers -- that people saw revealed that God was love. They also saw revealed in the life of Jesus, God’s hopes for human beings:  that is for them to live joyful and meaningful lives.

The subsequent missionary activity of Jesus’ followers resulted in many faith communities springing up in the Mediterranean world of the first century.  Each community saw itself charged by God to show that God was love by manifesting the quality of love in their relationships with one another, and by caring for people in need who were not part of the inner circle of Jesus’ followers.

James addressed his letter, to one such faith community; John sent his letter to another faith community, and Luke’s gospel was addressed to several faith communities.

We gather this morning as a modern faith community committed to revealing the love of God in our collective lives. James, Luke, John, and Matthew all offer us invaluable insights into what this entails.  By joining this faith community we commit to revealing that God is love through the way we relate to and care for each other, and the way we relate to non- members.

In his Letter, James says, and I paraphrase, Christians cannot pass muster simply by saying I believe in Jesus. Their deeds as well as their profession of faith must distinguish them from non- believers.  Matthew spells out for us what these deeds are:  they amount to caring for the bodies and minds as well as the souls of people.  Matthew’s Jesus says, when you feed the hungry, give the thirsty water, take into your home the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned, you, in effect, do these things for me, that is Jesus. 

John’s letter also emphasizes that action rather than words distinguishes Christians. John says in his letter, “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action… Dear friends let us love one another because love comes from God.  Whoever loves is a child of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love’ (1 John 3: 18; 4:7-8).  John did not beat about the bush in delivering this message to members of his faith community.

And how are you and I to love?  The Jesus of the 4^th Gospel, puts it this way:  “And now I give you a new commandment: love one another, as I have loved you: (John 13:34-35 )  And how did Jesus love his followers: Passionately, compassionately, selflessly and forgivingly.  Jesus offers a demanding model for all faith families to emulate. When as a community, we live by Jesus’ commandment to love as he loves us, we are helping make God’s kingdom a reality in this world.

Well, was Jesus’ directive to love as he loved, acted upon by those first century faith families?  Certainly sometimes. This is borne out by the comment first century non-believers made about Jesus’ followers. They said, ‘See how these Christians love one another.’ This comment tells us that Christians did distinguish themselves, at least some of the time, by displaying the quality of mutual love.

However, first century Christians were human beings, and so it is not surprising that the work of the kingdom was sometimes impeded, because the quality of mutual love was sometimes absent from the life of those early faith communities.

James’ letter does strongly suggest that mutual love was, at times, absent from the life of his particular faith community. For instance, he complains that people in his faith community are passing judgment on one another. He says: “There is far too much grumbling occurring”. 

Christmas time is the appropriate time to reflect on the fact that the Christian vocation is to love others as Jesus loves us.  Yet, it is so hard to live up to the standard Jesus sets.  The reality is that there are no quick fixes for our predisposition to find fault with one another rather than to love one another and build one another up.  Consequently, you and I will go on needing to confess our shortcomings, and seek and receive God’s forgiveness.  We are going to need God’s enabling grace if we are to do just a little better in the days, weeks, months and hopefully years ahead for each one of us.