Who is a hypocrite?

Sunday 32B3 7th November 2021

[Mark 12:38-44]

In this passage Jesus points to a poor widow giving her gift to the Jerusalem temple. She is one of those whom the bible is always defending: the poor, the helpless, the children. ‘Blessed are the poor’. God is on their side and promises them ultimate fulfilment. God asks us to help them. We are also recommended to be like the widow: to give all of our self in seeking to build up the Reign of God.

But just before we met this widow, we heard Jesus attacking the scribes for being hypocrites. Did Mark record these memories of Jesus so that we, reading his gospel, could check ourselves; asking if we are hypocrites in any way? Jesus criticised the Scribes for arrogantly wearing their graceful long gowns; and enjoying the honour and privileges that their education gave them. He condemned them for being dishonest: overcharging people for handling legal documents; swindling poor people; seizing a widow’s house, the only property she owned. Their penalties would be severe.

Could there be hypocrites in our own society? Our news has been full of the story of the little girl Cleo, missing for 18 days. We could feel the deep pain of her mother as she tried to cope with the terrible loss. And then, wonderfully, Cleo was recovered, unharmed. She had been kidnapped by a confused young Aboriginal man, Terence Kelly. But as we watched Cleo’s joyful reunion with her mother, did we think of the thousands of little girls and boys that our Australian government kidnapped, often violently, in broad daylight, from their Aboriginal mothers? Our governments did this during eight generations, taking ‘half-caste’ children from their parents, to ‘assimilate’ them into white society.

If we are greatly concerned for some children, but not for others… isn’t this hypocrisy? We can read some of the Indigenous children’s heart-breaking stories in the government report Bringing Them Home, released twenty-four years ago, in 1997. Can we even begin to feel the pain of those families? It was not uncommon to hear people express the shocking racist attitude, that Aboriginal mothers do not feel for their children in the same way that white mothers do.

So before people condemn Cleo’s abductor, Terence Kelly, we need to investigate how his family has been affected by our stealing of aboriginal children from their parents. We can be sure that little Cleo will be helped to cope with any after-effects she might suffer from being kidnapped. But. who is helping the children and grandchildren of those thousands of kidnapped Aboriginal children? The trauma of having children stolen continues to affect future generations.

Worst of all, do we realise that First Nations children are still being removed from their families? The documentary Incarceration Nation, on SBS last week, showed that, unbelievably, Indigenous children are being removed from their parents by the ‘Child Welfare’ system and the juvenile prisons at a greater rate now then ever before. The public rallied generously to help little Cleo – and I am sure each of us would have helped if we could. But will we press our government to change what they are still doing, now, in our name? Or does racism pervade our community so deeply, that we do not mind?

If we make no combined effort to stop this, doesn’t it look like hypocrisy on a huge scale: national concern for Cleo’s family, but no effort to prevent the breaking up of hundreds of other Australian families? Why is this happening? One major reason is that we will not give Aboriginal people themselves the power to care for their own. It is shameful that the Howard government refused to listen to the Statement from Uluru, which Aboriginal peoples from across Australia had carefully agreed upon. So it still happens that if an Aboriginal child is declared ‘neglected’, instead of allowing their extended family to care for them, they are fed into the ‘welfare’ system and almost always end up in children’s homes, then adult prisons. And they are treated cruelly, and die there. Since the Royal Commission to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody, nearly 500 prisoners have died in jail. Although Indigenous are only 3% of the population, more than half of the children in juvenile prisons are Indigenous. And the Indigenous women whom we are jailing more and more, are mostly mothers, separated from their children, to weaken the family structure even more.

If this were not bad enough, our governments are building private prisons, run by trans-national companies, who make profits by keeping more people in jail. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry. If we used even half of the money it costs to keep people in prisons, to house and educate Australia’s poorer families and individuals, we would heal society, rather than make it worse. Like the widow praised by Jesus, probably all of us have in the past given generously to pay for God to be worshipped in our churches and temples. Isn’t it more important to help re-build the temple of God that is every person of the First Nations who lived in this land for thousands of years? They are God’s temple, as much as we are. Will we ponder deeply, now, what words and actions we can use to help overcome our hypocrisy and bring about the Reign of God?

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