Mercy, not sacrifice

St Matthew’s Day, 21-9-2021

[Ephesians 4:1-7, Matthew 9:9-13]

When he invited Matthew, a tax-collector, to follow him, Jesus was subverting the social order of the empire and beginning to build the Reign of God. When he heard his name called, Matthew was busy collecting tolls from the passing traffic: taxes that helped to sustain the Roman empire by maintaining the excellent roads that supplied affluent Romans with luxury goods, and made it easier for Rome’s armies to continue cruelly oppressing the peoples they had conquered.

Like many people who are stuck working within large institutions, Matthew might not have wanted to contribute to the oppression, but his fellow Jews nevertheless despised him for doing it. His position may have given him a little power and wealth, but he had no reputation. The ordinary folk – and the gospels – lumped him with prostitutes and the detested pagans. It is astonishing that Jesus called Matthew by name, and he responded at once. Matthew’s conversion was radical: both the call and his response were a step towards disrupting the order of the ‘empire’, for Jesus had come to dismantle, to deconstruct the world of human selfishness and separateness, and show us how to replace it with the Reign of God.

The text continues: ‘And behold..!’ something surprising is about to happen. Jesus defied convention again by attending a banquet – possibly in Matthew’s house – with the ‘unworthy’ and the ‘unclean’. Then as now ‘respectable’ society used dinners to make social statements: slaves and servants had their roles to cook and serve; every guest had their allocated rank, or fought to get a higher place. Once again, Jesus defies the conventions – rooted in selfish ego – which divide us, and need to be dismantled.

At meals Jesus met people, understood them, taught and converted them. He was building true community, which isthe Reign of God. Just by being among the rejected, he is showing us that no one is beyond God’s mercy… except maybe [for a time, until they see the light] those who deny God’s mercy to others. Jesus calls himself our physician. In the paragraphs just before this, he had healed a paralysed man by forgiving his sins, showing that both sickness and sin can and will be cured, as we become forgiving communities, building the Reign of God. Sickness – or any other misfortune – is not God punishing us for sin. Jesus, God among us, is showing us to deal with and overcome both sickness and sin in our lives.

Jesus told his scholarly critics: ‘Go and learn…’ what God meant in the prophecy of Hosea [6:6]: ‘I want mercy, not sacrifice’. Mercy is not just pity for those who are unfortunate or suffering. It means to give them justice; to free them.

What do Christian preachers, we Dominicans, offer people? Do we stay in our sanctuary and say: ‘Yes, we have a ‘preference for the poor’… we preach about their condition, and give them charity’? Or do we want, and work with all our heart and strength to analyse and explain why people are kept poor, then help them to get the same protections and privileges that we enjoy?

We live in comfort today because in the past our ancestors committed huge injustices. Most of Australia was stolen from its First Peoples. Europeans with superior technology colonised and exploited Papua New Guinea and other Pacific nations, including China. Do we reflect, and admit our recent sins of invading and smashing Iraq and Afghanistan for profit, then refusing to help manyof the refugees who flee from the chaos there? Don’t these deeds in our past, from which we still profit today, make us ‘sinners’ who need God’s mercy, just as the world’s exploited peoples today need our mercy?

What is sacrifice? It comes from sacrum facere: ‘whatever makes us holy’. Out main ritual, celebrating Eucharist, can make us holy if we ‘share Jesus’ sacrifice’… which was not to be slaughtered like a sheep to ‘please God’, but to live fully in love to bring about the Reign of God.

So for us to ‘offer the sacrifice of the Mass’ means to give ourselves totally, as a community joined in Christ, unselfishly doing all we can to build up the community of humanity. Sacrifice means being merciful to the people in our own house, and to our Uighur sisters and brothers as far away as Xinjiang; and all the refugees stuck today on the banks of the Rio Grande; the shores of the English Channel; and in Australia’s own ‘detention centres’.

Many structures in our society and our church are not merciful. Our church still calls gay people ‘intrinsically disordered’; it still drags the victims of sexual abuse through the law courts, ‘strenuously defending’ the church’s money and the reputation of clerics, instead of treating the victims with real mercy and pastoral care. And our Canon Law itself is still biased against victims.

But we just read from Ephesians that the risen Christ calls us together into amazing unity: us and the people just mentioned. We all have God’s Spirit in us, so we each need to use our different gifts

to challenge and to tear down these real barriers, especially the barriers of prejudice in our hearts.

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The Women Disciples of Jesus

Friday 24B 19^th September 2021

[Luke 8:1-3]

A film has just been made exposing the savage and cruel ways in which many people publicly insulted Julia Gillard when she was our Prime Minister: not just criticising her for her politics – that is to be expected – but vile insults, solely because she was a woman. Today’s gospel shows us the complete opposite of that sad and immature public behaviour. In just three verses of Luke’s gospel, we learn much about how Jesus respected and treated women. Whereas the twelve apostles followed Jesus because he had called them; the women became loyal disciples following a deeper experience: Jesus had healed them.

This does not mean that the women were sicker or weaker than the men… it means perhaps that the women did not need to be called; they saw directly, from personal experience, that Jesus was a powerful healer… the men had yet to digest this. All the gospels show how the male disciples often failed to understand Jesus’ teaching that we can only become more alive by the losses we suffer? Perhaps women come to know this more readily, through their unique life-experiences as women.

Peter was not healed and forgiven for his terrible betrayal of Jesus until the last chapter of John’s gospel; it was Mary of Magdala who first saw that Jesus had passed through death, and tried – with great difficulty – to convince the men that he was risen. The gospels remind us – I’m sure she was not ashamed of it – that Jesus had freed her from ‘seven devils’. Having been healed, her link to Jesus was profound and unbreakable.

There were many women disciples: we know the names of only six. And there was a core group of three. Just as we often hear ‘Peter, James and John’, so we hear Mary of Magdala, Mary, the mother of James and Joset, and Johanna. Some of the women were moderately wealthy. They are described as ‘providing for’ Jesus and his group, from their own resources. Only with their help could Jesus have easily wandered from village to village with twenty or more followers. Joanna was the wife of one of King Herod’s managers. Was she a widow, or had she left him?

Another of the women following Jesus was surely the unnamed woman we heard about in the verses immediately before today’s passage. This woman ‘had a bad name in the town’, but defiantly came into the public dining room to kiss and anoint Jesus’ feet. He responded by telling her publicly that her sins were forgiven. Wouldn’t she follow Jesus from that day on? She would gladly use the rest of her wealth to provide for him. Jesus was not wandering from town to town aimlessly: he was teaching the amazing Good News that God’s Reign was coming, teaching the core message of the Old and New Testaments: that God is with the poor; with every one of us, to heal our brokenness.

And the women were not only serving Jesus with meals: the word ‘serving’ that Luke uses has wide meanings. Just by being there, the women were witnessing to God’s all-inclusive healing compassion. Just by following Jesus the women were being revolutionary. It wasn’t done, for women to leave the household to follow a prophet. By their close friendship with Jesus, these women were teaching the world that in God’s plan for humanity – God’s coming Reign – we are all equal and can be bonded in relationship; in love. By the day of Pentecost, the women and men assembled to receive the Holy Spirit were described as ‘of one mind, of one accord’.

But Mary of Magdala’s role as Apostle to the apostles, and the role of all women in the church, has been constantly minimised and denied,even in the New Testament writings. Patriarchal society could not easily allow to continue what Jesus had begun.

Paul told us in Galatians: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, …slave or free, …male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ [Galatians 3:28] But as Julia Gillard painfully learned, women’s equality can produce a violent reaction. A generation later, Christian women were being told that they were not allowed to speak in the assembly, at Eucharist. They were told to conform, to wear a veil. Does this remind us of Afghanistan today?

Whatever the apostles and the seventy-two preached by words, the women taught by their faithful loyalty; their unbreakable relationship with Jesus. This is not to say that women cannot and do not preach in words too, all through the history of the church. Think of Hildegarde of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, other great foundresses and countless others. Think of Ludmila Javorova, who during the communist persecution in Czechoslovakia was properly ordained priest and ministered in secret for years.

But from the earliest days, prejudice has made it difficult for women to challenge males imagined ‘superiority’. And prejudice can reach fanatical proportions: 21^st century women leaders still face hateful abuse. We hardly dare think of what women in Afghanistan are suffering. But Christians can become just as fanatical as any Muslims. Can we can take heart from these short three verses, which tell us how Jesus, who calls everyone, has shown us a truer way?

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Good and evil fruits of the heart

Saturday Week 23 11/9/21                                  11th September 2021

[1 Timothy 1:15-17, Luke 6:43-49]              [Dominican Friars’ community Mass]

Jesus speaks of how our words and deeds flow out from our heart. Could there ever be worse actions coming from human hearts, than those actions on this very day 20 years ago, when someone flew two large aircraft into New York skyscraper towers, killing nearly 3000 people? The whole world knows about that action, and most of the world has watched it, in thousands of replays. The whole world knows about it, but not how it happened or why.

Yes, we know that planes flew into those buildings. It is claimed that they were flown by [mostly] Saudi Arabians. But for 20 years now, several thousand architects and engineers have joined to demand answers from the US government to many unanswered questions. The engineers ask how those three skyscrapers – yes, a third one came down seven hours later without any plane hitting it – how they fell exactly as buildings fall when demolished by controlled explosions. Many kinds of evidence, and eye-witnesses, suggest that special explosives were used; and that the following Government Inquiry concealed the truth. At least one member of that Government Inquiry resigned, and its chairman publicly announced afterwards that it was set up to fail.

Other questions remain unanswered about the billions of dollars of insurance paid out for the World Trade Centre buildings, which were full of asbestos that needed to be removed, and would cost the owners more than the buildings were worth. Certainly, some people knew knew beforehand that a terrorist attack was coming, and a powerful government group called the Neo-conservatives was longing to go to war with Iraq. We also know that there have been far worse human actions than the killing of those 3000 poor people who died that day. In the wars of revenge that the US, Australia and other countries began immediately in Afghanistan and soon in Iraq, more than 7000 US soldiers died; and more than a million civilians died, and millions more were made homeless refugees.

We often ask ‘where does such evil come from?’ Jesus tells us, simply, that the source of good and evil is the human heart. He compares it to the unstoppable processes of nature: good fruit can only come from healthy plants; and each plant species produces only the kind of fruit that it has evolved to produce: figs or thistle-heads; grapes or thorns.

But what makes a heart evil? We do evil when we try to get some thing for ourselves that we have no right to. When we give way to our passions: in the case perhaps of the Saudi Arabian terrorists, the mad desire to humiliate ‘The West’ and seek revenge for its past cruelties. But also in the case of the US Neo-cons, which included their Vice-President, the lust for profits from the oil-rich countries , after they had destroyed them. A few privileged people profit from every war.

So these colossal evils sprang from the greedy hearts of individuals who love profit more than the ‘foreigners’ whose bodies they smashed and whose lives they destroyed with bombs and rockets; calling them ‘towel-heads’ and much more demeaning names.

Words and deeds come from what fills our heart. Is there any way to prevent future evils of the kind that happened 20 years ago and have been going on ever since, in wars in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia and other places? Yes, we must turn our own hearts against war. We need to see that war is not a solution, but causes more violence. Even the so-called ‘war against terror’. We must teach each other this truth, and elect politicians who believe it.

It may seem curious, but this conversion of heart begins with forgiving ourselves. Doesn’t our lust to possess, to fight others, come from our hungry, unhappy hearts? If we don’t have peace there, we will angrily seek to hurt or even destroy neighbours who harm us.

Today’s reading from the Letter to Timothy has a wonderful teaching from St Paul, who saw and admitted that he had once been on a wrong and destructive path: he was persecuting the followers of Jesus. As a fervent Jew, he hated Christ. But then he saw the Risen Christ, and learned to admit that he, Paul, was doing wrong: that Christ’s life on earth had been to save people like him. When he heard the Good News that he was forgiven, Paul forgave himself and tells us about it. When we know that we are saved, we can begin to do our part to build the Reign of God.

Jesus spoke about buildings that collapse. He was not just describing mud-brick houses that were built without first digging strong, sound foundations, and which floods could wash away. He is talking about you and me. What sort of foundation are we building our life on, every day? With what are we filling our heart? Because what we choose to put into our heart will make us happy or angry or envious; will enable us to build a happy community or destroy it. We each play our part in turning this world into the Kingdom of God, the Reign of Love.

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We have been called

Thursday week 21 2^nd September 2021

[Dominican Friars Community Mass in lock-down.]

[Luke 5:1-11]

In our schooldays, when the team was being picked for junior sports, how pleasing it was when they called our name! It was even better to hear our name when they were announcing prizewinners.

All the gospels describe scenes where Jesus selected apostles to be his inner group of helpers. We still know their names. In Luke’s version of the story, Jesus had first asked a favour from the fishermen brothers James and John: would they lend him their boat as a safe pulpit from which he could teach the crowd?

Then he impressed them, mightily, by the gift of a boatload of fish, showing that he was master of the sea and wind which they struggled with every night, trying to feed their families and pay their taxes. They were overwhelmed, amazed at his power, and when he made the outrageous request that they quit their trade to follow him, they instantly responded.

It might not have happened quite like that: different versions have been handed down. But we know that they did become helpers and friends of this divine person, whose life, and whose passing-through-death was to become the turning point of our human history.

These stories are precious, for they allow us to see ourselves in them. The work that Jesus gave Simon, James and John was to tell people the Good News that every one of us in the human family is called. We are offered the enormous gift, not just a boatload of fish to pay off a year’s taxes in one hit, but the gift of a relationship, friendship with the now-risen Christ that those Galilean fishermen were discovering.

Those fishermen were used to hard work, so were not too surprised when they found that the work Jesus was asking of them was going to be tough, although in a different way from fishing. When you try to tell people that the Creator is their friend, they don’t always welcome the news. It challenges them to forgive and love all the people around them: not just their own group or class. We actually resist the Good News, for we like to stay in our small, selfish location, and we prefer to look away, for instance, from the sufferings and probable famine that will soon hit the people of Afghanistan, or have already hit Syria, Iraq, Yemen etc etc.

We don’t like to look far beyond our own immediate pleasures. We don’t work very hard for the much deeper satisfaction of becoming unselfish, so that we can face deeper truths and love everyone, without exception.

Everywhere our collective behaviour shows this. We know that a colossal climate crisis is rapidly approaching: and many species are already becoming extinction. We know that this is largely caused by our over-consuming and our addiction to an ‘economy’ that we believe must continually ‘grow’.

For example our increasing appetite for eating meat is causing cattle-ranchers to rip down the Amazon rain-forest, and damage Australia too; and the massive profits from the palm oil that we consume is doing the same in Indonesia. The fossil fuels burned by our cars, delivery trucks, power-stations and air-travel is warming the planet.

We can each be part of the solution. But like the apostles, we will find that it costs us! We will be mocked by those who do not yet see; who believe the lies told by media that are controlled by the enormously wealthy.

But each of us can decide, today, to begin making less waste. But – I look at myself – are we prepared to do this? Are we determined enough? Our friendship with God demands it, for God is in every person who suffers because of our actions; and is in the natural world which each of us helps to destroy.

But! The Good News is also that this whole glorious environment, and the network of our collective lives, is held in existence by the love of the One who spoke through Jesus. He calls us ‘friend’, and shares with us, every day, the power of his love.

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