Baby Jesus and the patriarch Job

Christmas 2023   25.12.2023

The Bible is a collection of books describing humanity’s attempts to understand God. It’s authors were somehow inspired by God but could only imagine and talk about God in images and words of their time and culture.

The book of Deuteronomy is a book of laws about morality, worship, and even hygiene. It claims if people break those laws, God will severely punish them and their descendants. God was seen to be like people in early cultures who depend on “pay-back” to obtain justice. The God described in Deuteronomy was like a tyrannical ruler, or an alcoholic father who loves his wife and children, but around whom they sometimes must tiptoe, lest they stir him to wrath and violence.

The book Exodus shows us a God who wanted to free Abraham’s and Jacob’s descendants from slavery in Egypt. In doing this God was extremely violent towards Pharaoh and the Egyptians, and then to the tribes who occupied the land promised to God’s people. God commanded these to be massacred, using genocide to bring about violent colonisation.

Despite these images of God as violent, the Bible also contains a very different thread of truth. The book Genesis, written about the same time as Deuteronomy, strongly hints that God is different from Deuteronomy’s God. Although Genesis describes God punishing the first human beings by driving them from the garden, it also tells how God provided them with warm garments to protect them. Although God exiled Cain for killing his brother Abel, God also promised to protect Cain from further violence. If Genesis describes God cruelly destroying nearly all humanity – and most other creatures – in the flood, it also has God repenting and promising not to do it again! Although in the story, God demanded that Abraham slaughter his only son Isaac as a sacrifice, it does have God withdrawing the terrible command at the last moment.

There are many more mysterious hints that God is enormously loving and compassionate. In a strange story, Abraham’s grandson Jacob wrestles with a mysterious stranger, who is actually God. Jacob overcomes and extracts a promise from God. Genesis then proceeds to tell how Jacob is reconciled with his brother Esau, whom he had cheated, and how Jacob’s youngest son Joseph, who suffered much violence from his own brothers, who sold him into slavery, was able to save those same brothers from famine. God is introducing us to the idea of forgiving enemies, instead of seeking violent retaliation.

It is the Book of Job which most clearly challenges and contradicts Deuteronomy’s view of a violent, vengeful God. Job is a rich man, but God tests him by stripping him of his wealth, then his family, then his bodily health. Job’s friends point to the traditional law, saying that Job must have grievously sinned and that his suffering is God’s punishment. But Job knows that this is wrong, and knows that “my redeemer liveth”; that God will save him. God eventually admits that Job has spoken correctly, and in a rather fairy-tale ending, restores Job to health and wealth.

And what about the baby Jesus? During Advent we read a lot from the prophet Isaiah, who told us about a mysterious “Servant of God” who – by his suffering – would heal the human race from its addiction to vengeance and violence. It is the Summit of God’s revelation, and of our Christian faith, to believe that the helpless infant born in poverty in Bethlehem was God come among us. He came not to seek vengeance or to punish; and much less to pay some kind of “price” or be a “sacrifice” to an angry God. No, when the people who opposed Jesus’ teaching about justice and love killed him with the worst of human violence, Jesus showed us how to forgive even our enemies. From his birth and his life, we now know how to unite the human race in peace.

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To read more on this theme, see:

Anthony Bartlett, Signs of change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Non-Violence. Cascade, 2022.

Real Good News

Advent 2B 10. 12. 2023

[Mark 1:1-28]

The Jordan Valley

Some time around the year 70 CE a man we know as Mark began to write down stories about Jesus of Nazareth, which he had heard from others or had witnessed himself. His short book – we can read it in less than ninety minutes – was not just a record of what Jesus said and did. Mark called it the Euangelion, the Good News, because it was a proclamation that a new age had begun: the Reign or Rule of God.

People in Mark’s time would recognise that this Good News challenged the Roman empire that ruled the entire Mediterranean world. The emperor and his generalsused the same word euangelion to announce some new conquest adding more gold, slaves and territory to the vast empire that Rome’s power had already seized. Mark’s little scroll dared to announce that here, now, was the true Good News: God’s Reign has begun, for the Transcendent One has come, showing that God loves us. This prophet Jesus, who is in some unique way is Son of God, brings the good news that we can change the world by loving and being compassionate to others, even our enemies. We can do this if we are prepared to imitate Jesus by “losing our life” in order to gain it at the deepest level.

Mark’s announcement and Jesus’ teaching presents us with immediate, practical questions: what must we do, now, to help bring about the Rule or Reign of God? Among many evils that challenge us in the world today, on the West Bank of the same river Jordan in which Jesus was baptised, enormous injustice is being done to our Palestinian sisters and brothers. The United Nations has many times condemned the systematic, government-sponsored theft of the Palestinian’s land, accompanied by the destruction of their homes and farms and the terrorising of the population by Israeli “settlers”. It condemns the fifty-six years of occupation by the army; the night raids leading to hundreds being jailed without reason, indefinitely. All this is intimately linked to the genocide being carried out in Gaza, 140 kilometres to the South West, where in response to Hamas’ recent terrorist attack, Israel has killed 17,000 people, mostly non-combatants and almost half of them children.

Some people find it difficult that I refer to such things in these reflections on the scriptures, but it is necessary to refer to contemporary injustices, because the Reign of God involves our real life, and each of us has a role to play in bringing about peace in our world. The essential first step is to know the truth – in this case to counter the systematic falsehoods being spread through powerful world-wide media, such as Murdoch press and tv. It is essential that we hear the many Jewish historians and commentators who expose the actions of their own Zionist government. A few of these authorities are Gabor Maté, Ilan Pappe, Norm Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Anna Balzer * who point out that the founders of the state of Israel intended and declared from its beginning in 1948 to drive all Palestinians from the land and refuse them their right to return.

This plan – it is documented – was put into effect during the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) when 750,000 Palestinians were terrorised by massacres and violently expelled. The Israeli army then destroyed 531 of their villages. The United Nations has in vain protested against these crimes, as it has tried in vain to stop the genocide in Gaza. Its Secretary General correctly pointed out that the terrorist attack of October 7^th did not happen in a vacuum.

Mark’s gospel, in its very first line, challenges every one of us to recognise that God has come among us in Jesus. Before himself dying in the struggle to bring about the Rule of God, Jesus would tell us that “The truth will make you free.” (John 8:32) So while hundreds of thousands around the world march in the streets to plead for those who suffer in the world’s current wars, can we at least respond with deep compassion and prayer, acknowledging that because God is within every person, we are actually connected with all persons on every side? Seeing this, may we then join in love to bring the madness to an end?

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* My question is: if you were more shaken by the Israeli lives lost in one day than in 75 years of killing Palestinians, why is that? – Anna Balzer.

Hope during suffering

Adv1B 3.12.2023

[Isaiah 63:16 – 64:8, Mark 13: 33-37]

Sometimes life seems unbearable, not just because we are suffering ourselves, but because we see others suffering and can do nothing about it. We all realise the terrible agony of several million people of Gaza – including nearly a million children who will now all suffer lifetime PTSD – and we feel helpless to stop this evil genocide. We suffer with them, and also with the frightened people of Israel, who are made so insecure by their Zionist government’s stated policy to drive the Palestinians from the lands that Palestinians have occupied from time immemorial.

Immense numbers of people have suffered in other wars, but now we can see, close up, daily samples of this suffering through electronic media. The suffering does not seem to have an end, and we feel unable to do anything about it.

But we can! It is essential that we Christians do not turn away from this suffering. True, we must take care not to become so immersed in it that we suffer damage ourselves. However the core of our Christian faith is found in the words of Jesus, who commands that we must not turn away from any suffering people, for he identifies them all with himself. (Matthew 25:40)

Our sadness is increased by the fact that we tend to blame ourselves; we feel less worthy, and even feel that our world is an incurable mess. “We have all withered like leaves… all that integrity of hours like filthy clothing” (to quote the prophet Isaiah, in today’s first reading.) What on earth can we do about this? Do we feel like saying, again with the prophet Isaiah “O that you would tear the heavens open and come down”.

It is in this real and desperate situation that we turn to the immense treasure of the Good News, which is that we, every human person, is waiting for a meeting, an encounter. An encounter with whom? With the One who came among us, who went to the depths of our suffering and has gone through death before us. From him we get the strength to keep all suffering people in our hearts, praying for them daily.

The time of Advent is not just to prepare for Christmas. These four weeks are like a ladder by which we can climb up in hope, and even to some degree reach a much greater event than the birth of a baby in Bethlehem long ago. We are looking forward to the return of the Transcendent One, who is our father, but because transcendent, much greater than a father.

Groping for a metaphor to describe our human situation, the prophet Isaiah said that we, the entire human race, are like clay in the hands of a potter. The deeds of every person on earth, whether we are loving another person or stealing the land of another nation, are somehow under the complete control of the One who made us.

So we are waiting, really, not just for Christ to return, but for the moment when we meet the Infinite Trinity who made our cosmos of a trillion galaxies. For the risen Christ cannot be separated from the Trinity, and each of us is waiting to merge with this Trinity, living in timeless, everlasting consciousness and love.

So as the gospel writer Mark says: “stay awake, be prepared”. Although the present moment may be horrible for many, the Good News is that by we can use our love to understand and speak the truth, building a future in time and eternity, where the good of everyone is assured.

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