The politics of Jesus?

Feast of Christ the King 20. 11. 2022

[Luke 23:35-43]

– Parliament House Canberra –

Jesus was born in a small country occupied by the Roman empire. He would have seen his own people being heavily taxed to support both Rome and Herod, Rome’s decadent puppet-king. He saw much violence too, and frequent crucifixions, Rome’s normal way of keeping control.

A thoughtful young man, Jesus did not join the Zealot revolutionaries who aimed to drive out the Romans by guerilla warfare. Later, when crowds flocked to hear his teaching, he refused to let them appoint him as their king (John 6:15) and in the end, at his trial, he told Pilate “my kingdom is not from here” (John 18:36). But he did announce the Good News that a new kingdom had begun. He often said: “the kingdom of God is among – or possibly within you.” (e.g. Mark 1:14 & Luke 17:21) He promised that this kingdom would change the lives of the exploited Palestinian peasants and labourers, radically.

In a first teaching (Luke 4;18) he declared that he had come to free people trapped in everyday sufferings: the poor, the oppressed, prisoners, and people with a disability. Jesus showed his hearers – including ourselves – that we can each bring about God’s kingdom, by first discovering that God is not a severe judge who will condemn us, but who created us in God’s own image (Genesis 1:27) within a beautiful world. God loves us more than parents could ever love, and God’s Spirit comes into us when we ask. (Luke 11:13) We are made ready to receive God and to build the Kingdom within us by dying to ourselves, loving and forgiving even those who hate and oppose us.

Jesus showed them how to resist, daringly but nonviolently, the Roman soldiers and temple officials who exploited them. If they were struck, as slaves were, with a backhander from a right hand – the “unclean” left hand was never used – Jesus advised them to assert their dignity by turning the left cheek, inviting the bully to use his fist as he might fight an equal. If a Roman soldier demanded, lawfully, that they carry his heavy pack for one mile, the conscript could embarrass him by offering, against army regulations, to carry it for an extra mile. In such ways, poor, desperate people heard the wonderful news that they could draw on God’s infinite power within them, and hope for an eternal future. “”Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 6:20). Jesus compared this Kingdom of God, which we are called to build, to a great wedding banquet where people of all races and social classes will eat together. (Matthew 22:1-10) It is our work now to do away with all divisions.

How did Jesus prepare for teaching us to build this kingdom? With a long, solitary retreat, fasting and confronting within himself the ordinary human desires to misuse power. He resisted the temptation to use power to satisfy himself without regard for others, refusing to turn stones into bread. He fought the temptation to seek political power and rule earthly kingdoms, which control people through violence, the threat of prison or death. Finally he resisted the temptation to abuse spiritual power, to use God’s help or protection to win others’ praise and admiration.

At the end of his life Jesus made a very political but nonviolent demonstration against the heart of his own religion, the corrupt, exploiting temple, which collaborated with the Roman overlords. Symbolically clearing out its traders and dealers, he temporarily blocked access while he preached God’s Kingdom there. He knew that this would lead to torture and execution, but chose to give his whole self in resisting, powerfully but nonviolently, the greatest evils of his time. This king surrendered all human power, to die naked and powerless on a cross. The only recognition of his kingship was the mocking title on his cross: “The king of the Jews”. (Mark 15:26)

Since the death of our king, many others have copied his politics, resisting and overcoming violence nonviolently. Their collaboration has succeeded much more often than has the violence of war. Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu who had studied the gospels, propagated this wisdom of Jesus and forced the British empire to withdraw from India. His example influenced successful nonviolent campaigns in the struggle against Hitler in Denmark (1942) racism in USA’s southern states (1960s), in the Philippines (1986), in South Africa against apartheid and in Poland (1989).

But despite Jesus’ teaching and example of the power of nonviolence, Christian emperors, kings and sometimes bishops have gone to war with dubious motives, under the sign of the cross, the symbol of total non-aggression.

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Why be afraid of the end of the world?

Sunday 33 C 13^th November 2022

[ Luke 21:5-19]

Why have so many movies been made about some disaster that threatens to bring about the end of the world, or destroy all human life on the planet? Why do people eagerly pay to watch this? The end of the world, or of humanity, fascinates us. Will it come by collision with an asteroid? By nuclear war; a plague-virus experiment out of control; or maybe by nasty extra-terrestrial visitors? We are intrigued, but scared to face the real end, for most of these movies end with some heroic persons saving us from disaster at the last minute.

Our fascination and fear is not new. The last book in the Bible, Revelation or Apocalypse, depicts it with spectacular scenes of droughts, floods, plagues, fires and wars. These apocalyptic visions seem almost to be predictions of the current devastating flooding in Pakistan and Eastern Australia, or the world-wide bush-fires and the terrible famines in Africa.

Jesus warned us not to be needlessly alarmed by imagined “prophecies” about our world’s end. He was not concerned with spectacular visions about it, for only God knows the time. In today’s gospel, he implies that wars and revolutions are almost the normal result of the way we treat each other. Since his time, we have learned that earthquakes and plagues are natural, inevitable processes in the evolving world.

Jesus did predict that the grand Jerusalem temple would be destroyed. When Luke wrote his gospel, the Roman armies his had already destroyed it and Jerusalem some decades before. The temple had been a foundation of Jesus’ Jewish education and faith. He was carried there as an infant and went there with his parents for the annual Passover and probably other feasts. When almost an adult, he absconded there to hear and talk about God with the learned scholars. But Jesus knew that the temple’s enormous cost had come from king Herod’s ruthless taxing of the populace – most of them poor – and criticised its officials for “swallowing up the houses of widows” by their taxes and laws. (Mark 12:40) Immediately before Jesus predicted the temple’s destruction, Luke shows him praising one such widow for her generous gift to the temple.

The temple’s terrible fate did not perturb Jesus, for it was no longer needed as symbol of God among us. “Something greater than the temple is here”. (Matthew 12:6) Jesus was condemned to death on a false accusation that he promised to destroy the temple, and replace it with one “not made with hands”; (Mark 14:58) and three of the gospel writers note that when Jesus died, the curtain that closed off the temple’s Holy of Holies was mysteriously torn from top to bottom.

That symbol was replaced by something much deeper. Jesus was showing us that we are equipped to deal with difficulties and conflicts; the misunderstandings and persecutions that will sometimes hit us hard. He told us that under such opposition we are to “bear witness”. Witness to what? To the Good News that the Reign of God has already begun, and consists in the reality that God is within us; that we ourselves are God’s temple.

This amazing truth had been hinted at in the book of Genesis: “God made humans in the image of God’s self… ” (Genesis 1:27) Centuries before Jesus It had been discovered to varying degrees by the Hindu sages and the Buddha, but was clarified and deepened by Jesus’ promise that he would send God’s Spirit, would come as God’s self to dwell in us: “We [The Father and I ] shall come and make a home in you”. (John 14:23). This central Christian truth has transformed countless lives. When everyone understands it, it will bring about Revelation’s promise of a “new heaven and a new earth”. (Revelation21:1)

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How do we look on “the other”?

Sunday 30C 23^rd October 2022

[Sirach 35:12-19, Luke18:9-14]

Would you or I like to live with four other members of our family in a hole dug beneath a pig- sty, cramped there all day, every day, and coming out only at night? One Jewish family lived like this in Poland from 1942 to 1945, eating only the leftover scraps of the farmer who owned the pigs.* Like countless Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe, they were hiding to save themselves from forced labour, torture or death. Millions more were rounded up and murdered, while most of the non-Jewish population watched silently or even actively helped the persecutors.

How could these fearful things come about? The basic reason was that the people being hunted and killed had first been defined as different from other people. For many years, a Nazi propaganda campaign had depicted Jews as social parasites, exploiters, enemies of the nation and even sub-human. The Nazis were building on centuries of a tragic tradition among European Christians, who saw Jews as “the people who had killed Christ” and refused to accept him as Messiah.

It has often happened that peoples of other races or religions have been systematically massacred: the Indigenous in colonised countries; Armenians in 1919; Tutsis in Rwanda; the Rohinga in Myanmar. To commit these mass killings, or to kill just one person, the murderer must go against our natural inclination to accept and treat each other kindly, without discrimination.

Although diverse groups within a population can be stirred up to hate and kill each other, those same groups have until then lived together in peace and harmony for centuries. It is only when some outside agent sows suspicion and fear of “the other”, that conflict can break out. Children play happily together until adults point out that ‘‘we don’t talk to them” because they are Aboriginal, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu etc.

Prejudice and murder are not the result of ignorance; they are provoked by false ‘knowledge’. We can be taught to be suspicious and fearful of people who are different from us, and even to hate them. For their own gain, some journalists, radio “shock jocks” and politicians skillfully feed our fears.

It is good for us, who live in relative prosperity and privilege, to ask ourselves: “How do we see ‘the other’?” We can’t avoid this question when we pray. Like the caricature Pharisee in today’s story from Luke”s gospel, are we tempted to say,: “Thank God I am not like those low-life others.” It is instructive to ask: “How would we treat one of them if they came to our door – or arrived on our national border – asking for help?” If we respond with an adamant rejection, perhaps we have identified the root cause of why the members of one group have ended up massacring people different from themselves, in the genocide that blights our human story. The tax-collector in Luke’s story, a member of a despised social class, did not pray by comparing himself to other people, but faced the raw truth about himself, asking the Holy One: “…be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Can we become more aware of how, perhaps unconsciously, we actively harm groups of “others” today? Are we, for example ,profiting from the labour in overseas sweat-shops, who make our clothing and electronics? Do we recall that our own privileged society is built on the earlier theft of the lands of the Indigenous peoples? When we can accept that we are fundamentally linked and related to all peoples, we will be more able to remove the deadly roots of hostility and war.

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* See: Hiding in Plain Sight, (Pieter van Os,Scribe, 2022) the story of Mala Rivka Kizel, daughter of that family, who survived the war in a different way.