When we reject another, we deny the truth

Easter, Sunday 5B 28. 4. 2024

(Acts 9:26-31, John 15:1-18)

The First Nations actor Jack Charles reached a degree of peace, contentment and acceptance by the end of his life. This was despite being terribly rejected many times during the course of it. When he was a toddler, government agencies took him from his mother; in a Salvation Army boys’ home he was often sexually abused, and at the age of seventeen, the police locked him in a reformatory for – illegally! – trying to find and connect with his family members. But despite twenty years of heroin addiction, and working as a frequently jailed cat burglar to support his habit, he became an excellent artist and a respected elder.

But Jack Charles’ mother suffered profound three-fold rejection all her life. She suffered the racist, universal rejection of all First Nations people; she was rejected as a mother by having the nine surviving children of the eleven to whom she gave birth stolen from her by the government; and he was rejected even by her own people, who believed she was somehow connected with the death of a tribal elder.

We see people being rejected by others in every area of life. Sadly, we often ourselves “write them off”. But the answer to this terrible, unnecessary abuse of human beings seems to lie in what we find in today’s reading from the Gospel of John. Its author recorded many things about Jesus of Nazareth, whom he saw as God living among us, the Logos become human, “the word made flesh”. This author reports that in his parting message, Jesus told us that we – the human race – are all included in an amazing web of life similar to the organic unity found in living plants. This web has a divine source, and in it every human person is intimately joined, as the countless cells of a vine are given life and made fruitful by the sap flowing through it.

If only people – we ourselves – could begin to see this truth. Even if we no longer see much benefit in formal religion as it is presented, and struggl to find a “spirituality” to replace it. For in the understanding Joh’s gospel, the vine of which we are all part is an almost incomprehensible Person who “In the beginning…” made “everything that was made”. And that Person loves us.

If only we could look at each other, especially at people who are different in race, politics or in any other way, and see that we literally share the same lifeblood, and come from the same creator!

if only we could unlock this amazing truth from the pages of the bible and from the pulpits of our churches, and apply it in our lives, would not the world be very different?

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Autobiography: Jack Charles, Born Again Blackfella, Penguin 2020.