“The last shall be first…”

Sunday 21C 21^st August 2022

[Isaiah 66:18-21, Luke 13:22-30]

As a child, I did not have many books, for our family’s limited income was needed for more urgent things. But I delighted in a treasured Christmas present: a picture book of Aesop’s Fables.

Each fable was summed up in a one-line “moral”. In the story of the fox and the stork, it was: “the one who laughs last, laughs longest.” I carried this wisdom to school, but the teacher’s unequal distribution of favours, and a bully’s torments soon taught me that the moral did not work in my life. Like a juvenile Job, I lamented that rosy formulas about how the world worked, did not always apply.

But we can learn from Aesop, and other people of every culture, long before our bible was written, that everyone asks how life works: “Who set this up?” “Are there Gods? What are they like? Will they reward or punish us after we die?”

When we ponder the Bible’s writers’ rich thoughts and emotions, and listen to the best scholars’ interpretations, we see that its wide range of stories and poems is telling us that oppressed peoples – the majority of earth’s population – will “laugh last”, because there is a Transcendent Reality who described itself to the Hebrews as YHWH, the One Who Is. And this Source of all creatures, including us whom it has helped to evolve into consciousness, is on our side.

Jesus came from this Source, telling us the Good News that God’s Reign had begun; that the promises glimpsed by Isaiah – today’s First Reading – and other prophets were true: that one day all peoples will come together in peace, to see and share God’s glory. And the Infinite One is infinitely good, so we are safe… saved.

In today’s reading from Luke, an anonymous “someone” asks Jesus: “…will there be only a few saved?” Jesus doesn’t answer, but instead points out that our life is always a struggle, a narrow path. But in the Beatitudes he had said that whether we struggle against unjust rulers, or famine, or the climate crisis, or loss of our family or home through the madness of war, all our travail is temporary and limited, and can be solved through team-work and the love of others, and of God.

Many of us do not handle the struggle well, living mainly for ourselves, and failing to love others enough. So the gospels are full of warning stories which end in the “good” being separated from the “bad”. But these stories describe our efforts: they don’t necessarily include God’s. God is not detached from our struggle, like the impartial judge of a sporting contest, with no stake in our success or failure. Jesus shows God to be the devoted shepherd; the woman who searches desperately for the small, lost coin; the loving father who forgives his child’s outrageous rudeness and folly. God is the fragile, human Jesus who speaks the truth to the unjust leaders of his religion and of the state, until they torture him to death.

Jesus’ scary fables about punishment warn us what our own selfishness will produce, not what God is capable of. Jesus’ own life shows us God’s infinite love, inextricably involved in our struggle: God living within us, our intimate partner.

According to Isaiah, Jesus and other prophets, the final outcome will be a great feast, to which all are invited. Unlike Aesop’s fable, in which the stork punishes the fox by preventing him from sharing the food, God invites everyone. But Jesus also warned his Jewish contemporaries that the privileges they treasured as the Chosen People did not guarantee them priority. Those who imagine themselves to be first may well come last. The moral? We are not saved by our appearance or religious performance, but only by love. Many will be saved by their love for others, even if they never go near a temple or a church.

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To cast fire on the earth?

Sunday 20C 14^th September 2022

[Jeremiah 38:4-10, Luke 12:49-53]

The statement by Jesus that he has come “to cast fire on the earth” is both puzzling and shocking. Especially so, when we recall the August anniversaries of the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagaski by nuclear bombs that our allies used at the end of the Second World War. These bombs caused such terrible “crimes against humanity” that the US military tried to prevent people from seeing the destruction they had caused.

Military authorities forbade all war correspondents from entering Japan, and more than 200 obeyed the ban: except one, the Australian Wilfred Burchett. Carrying his own rations and his typewriter, he travelled secretly for thirty hours by train to Hiroshima, and saw what was left of the once-beautiful city. Only ashes and rubble remained, and thousands of traumatised people doomed to die in agony from radiation poisoning. This is what happens when, for selfish purposes, we try to “cast fire upon the earth”. And it might easily happen again, for thousands of much bigger nuclear weapons are today in the hands of untrustworthy people.

Jesus’ alarming words meant something quite different, of course. More like Wilfred Burchett’s truth-telling, when he sat on a slab of broken concrete and typed his headline story: “I write this as a warning to the world…” The prophet-journalist Burchett disobeyed the army’s attempt to conceal the truth, and this, and for other acts of truth-telling, he was punished by being exiled from his homeland for seventeen years.

It was the same with the prophet Jeremiah, in today’s first reading. Inspired by God, he warned the king that following his counsellors’ advice would lead to national tragedy. Those counsellors tried to kill the prophet, plunging him into a muddy well where he would starve to death. Prophets and whistle-blowers who challenge the corrupt status quo in any institution usually meet with murderous opposition like this. Institutions in government, religion and commerce often try to suppress the truth. Jesus was murdered for challenging the exploiting religious system of his day.

He, the ultimate truth-teller and prophet, made another shocking statement when he said he came to bring division, not peace. Since we know that his ultimate purpose is to “bring a peace which he world cannot give” (John 14:27), and to unite all things in himself (Ephesians 1:10), this division must be only a stage on the way to this goal.

Jesus was trying to show us that we have access to the limitless love that is the Source of all. We can base our lives on it. But he warns us that when some persons try to share the truth they can see, but others cannot see yet, families and communities can be divided. As when a person declares the truth that they are gay, lesbian or different in some other way; or understands scientists’ clear warnings that a huge ecological crisis is coming; that the planet is warming and many species are becoming extinct.

Whenever people are not facing the truth in human affairs, for them the flow of life has become stagnant. It is only by speaking the truth, with as much love as possible that we can help each other to move towards wholeness, which is another word for salvation. The recent Australian Plenary Council – and the Second Vatican Council – were such opportunities for our church.

Our body and mind must be free to move and flow, because since the first basic life-forms began several billion years ago, each individual and species is in a ceaseless process of evolution and development. The question challenges each of us: “Am I open to accepting and living the changes the truth demands of me?” Life-giving change is what forms us, as individuals, families and as a church. When we hear of this fire that Jesus brings, do we “wish that it were blazing already”?

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Are we more than “consumers”?

Sunday 18C 31^st July 2022

[Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21]

Across Melbourne’s vast suburbia, many houses that were once smaller and simpler have been expanded as their owners became more prosperous. Some have added a larger room or a deck where the children can play or the adults enjoy the sun. Many homes have added extra bathrooms, or an extra storey.

These extensions surely made life more comfortable for the family and added value to the house, but there are disadvantages: one is that houses now occupy much more of the land, leaving less space for things that live and grow. Another is that when the children move out after a few short years, the house is too big for the ageing couple or remaining single person. Our suburbs are now full of costly houses much too large for the few people living in them, while isolation and loneliness is all too common.

Most of all, enlarging houses – or building them bigger than needed in the first place – greatly increases the total consumption of materials in every city of our affluent country. The unthinking choices by which we have done this are part of the same processes by which our industries pollute the land, seas and atmosphere.

Nothing in our complex world is bad or ugly in itself. That song captured it perfectly: “Everything is beautiful, in its own way…” It has all evolved – is given – for us to enjoy and love. The mythical creation story of Genesis says the same: looking at God’s handiwork, God “saw that it was good”. But problems arise when we fail to share justly the gifts that earth gives us and which we labour to produce. It is instructive to compare Melbourne suburbia with the vast refugee camps. Just a few of these house as many people – five million – as now live in Melbourne.

Today’s gospel is a powerful story that Jesus told to illustrate the Good News. It is about consumption and the reality beyond the things we consume. We hear of a man who “had a good harvest from his land”. What to do with it? He decided to keep it for himself, and took much trouble to build bigger storage barns, but then his sudden death showed the folly of such selfish and short-sighted planning.

If we face the truths of our own story, we who live in prosperous Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand or the Americas will recognise that the land which gives us such great wealth from agriculture and mining, was taken violently, without the agreement of the peoples who once lived on it as their own.

Those peoples and their cultures were almost destroyed in the process.

We will also recognise that still, today, our wealthy, over-consuming countries prevent many other countries from prospering because – although they have broken free from colonial masters – our more powerful “Western” nations and trans-national corporations mine their resources and control their markets. Our countries’ greed affects many African nations, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor, to name just a few.

Although it is governments that make the larger decisions affecting the world’s economy, every one of us makes smaller choices about how we use and share resources. Do we hear the wisdom of the prophet who penned today’s reading from Ecclesiastes? The poetry reminds us that everything is passing; that we cannot truly possess anything material. Then Jesus’ story reminds us that death will soon ensure that all our goods go to others.

The deeper truth is that we are meant for more than just consuming and enjoying material goods. When we focus mainly on these, greed and avarice tempt us to want and take more and more. When fixated on our consuming, we are less able to see that there is something beyond, on “the other side”. Parents, hospitable friends, and workers who help the world’s poor are not surprised when denying their own desires, choosing to consume less and to share with others, they glimpse the “other dimension”, the Reign of God, which begins now with our love.

When we help others and share what we have, we glimpse again the same non-material reality that has already surprised us when we have unexpectedly met beauty in our lives. When we live generously, we discover that everything and everyone is beautiful. Mechtilde of Magdeburg was not the only mystic to discover that “God is in everything, and everything is in God”. But as St Paul said in our second reading, as long as we worship the false God of greed, this realm remains hidden from us.

Refugee Camp, Syria

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