How can we reach “life to the full”?

Easter: Sunday 4 30. 3. 2023

[Acts 2:36-41, John 10: 1-10]

Today, in many countries, people suffer the horrors of war: bombardment, murder, rape and loss. Thousands try to survive by hiding in cellars or fleeing across borders. Do these – or their attackers – have “life to the full”?

There are still prisoners who have been in Guantanamo Bay for twenty years, who have had no trial and may not even be guilty of any crime. Many were taken to “black sites” in other countries, their terrible tortures “outsourced” by the US government. Against international law, Australia too keeps many refugees in prisons where they often despair and kill themselves. Do these people – or the politicians responsible – have “life to the full”?

We who live in calm and prosperity often obey the ceaseless voices of advertisers, and fill our lives with “stuff” we do not need, hoping to make our life more comfortable. Do we have “life to the full”?

Jesus promised the fullness of life to all of us. He used a metaphor based on the pastoral industry common in his land, comparing humanity to a sheep-flock and himself to the shepherd. The shepherd enters the sheep-pen through the gate, whereas thieves break in elsewhere. Jesus also compared himself to the gate itself. His point was that while false teachers come “only to steal and kill and destroy”, Jesus came so that we may have “life… to the full”.

The metaphor has for us lost its original force, in a land where sheep are counted by the thousand and driven by dogs rather than follow a shepherd who calls them by name. But even in the context of the New Testament, have we fully understood the metaphor?

On the day of Pentecost – our first reading tells us – St Peter took on the difficult task of convincing the gathering crowd that Jesus had risen from the dead. Peter succeeded. Because he spoke as a person filled with the Spirit of God, about three thousand joined the Christian group that day. Peter showed his listeners that God, whom Jews had long honoured and worshipped as the Holy One whom they dared not name, would now enter into and “possess” people who would accept the gift.

The first Jewish Christians soon realised that they no longer needed the ancient temple as the centre of their relationship with the Holy One. They met in their homes to thank God, in the simple thanksgiving ritual, the Eucharist that Jesus had given them. They knew that the risen Christ united them in that sharing of bread and wine. The Risen One was no longer their external Shepherd, Leader and Teacher, but was within each of them, closer now than in any love relationship.

This truth, that Christ is within each of us, is the way for anyone, despite their sufferings, to find “life to the full”. It changes radically our understanding of “being saved”. It must shift the structure of our church today, as synodality begins to listen to all, and respect their gifts. As we ponder more deeply, we will see that the Spirit of the Infinite God is not confined by the symbols and customs of Christian culture: the scriptures that prepared the coming of Jesus, or baptism that commits us to him. The Second Vatican Council stated that “we reject nothing that is true and holy in other religions”. * All Truth, Beauty and Goodness are contained in God, and all created beings reflect these in diverse ways. Long before Jesus came, Indigenous peoples, Hindus and Buddhists had deep insights and wisdom which can only have come from the same Holy Spirit by which God is within us. If people who follow the paths of those other traditions may not have the advantage of knowing God’s intimate love as expressed through Jesus Christ, those others may find depths of contemplation that many Christians do not discover.

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* Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions. Par. 2.

Our Christmas Gifts

Advent 4A                                       18. 12. 2022

[Isaiah 7: 10-14,Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-24]

(Getty Images)

It is easy to be distracted from the most important things in life. Months before the day when we celebrate the ancient festival of Christ-Mass, the shops that invite us to buy their goods are gaudily decorated but seldom mention the One whose birthday we are celebrating. Children hope to receive gifts from a man with a white beard, dressed in red suit and cap, but no one reminds them that Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop in Southern Italy who helped poor children with his gifts.

Has the Christian church partly lost focus? When Saint Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome – today’s First Reading – he announced the “Good News”: that the crucified man, Jesus of Nazareth had passed through death and that we have all received amazing gifts because of him. Paul declared that Christ is now God among us, fulfilling the ancient prophecy of Isaiah about a baby called Immanuel, “God with Us”. The sublime gift of the Good News assures us that God is for us, loves us, and that we ourselves are “holy”, like God’s own self. Can we receive any gift more precious than love?

Who, what, is this God who loves us? Every people has formed its own “image” of the unseen Source that made the stars and our world. But when we attempt to describe God or God’s actions we can use only mythological stories, which are not untrue but are always inadequate because we must take images from our limited material world to describe the indescribable infinite.

The gospel writers were looking back from a few decades after Jesus had passed through death. John described him simply as the son of Joseph (John 1:43, 6:42); Mark and Matthew mentioned his brothers and sisters (Mark 4:31, 6:3, Matthew 13:55). Matthew and Luke also tell how his mother Mary was still a virgin when Jesus was conceived in her by the Holy Spirit. We cannot presume that all these precious attempts to describe God’s works in human words, are literally true in every detail.

When trying to give maximum dignity to what we honour most, we sometimes risk destroying the truth by exaggerating. The shocking truth of the Incarnation is that God is deeply joined to our world and our humanness at its most wretched: in the awful humiliation of his tortured death, and in his ordinary birth in a shed. The unimaginable God was born just as we were: weak and fragile, amid blood and pain. Some Christians, perhaps uneasy about their own sexuality, have tried to insist that Jesus was born miraculously, or that his body was not really physical. We find it difficult to accept our awesome dignity, that God is within us, and often miss the point that God’s is in every neighbour too, and within the other species that we so often exploit and destroy.

Scholars * have shown that many early Christian writers like St Augustine and St Jerome, who strongly shaped our Christian tradition, often minimised the value of human love, sexuality and parenthood. But the glorious truth is that we can be co-workers with God’s Spirit especially in these primary human activities.

Not only is God within us as friend. Because we carry “the Son of God in all his power” (Romans 1:4), we can give people around us far greater gifts than tinsel-wrapped chocolates or clothing. We can change our world. While it is important to honour each other with gifts and family celebrations, there are things of greater value than these. Pondering and using the precious divine gifts that are available for the asking, we will find even deeper joy in the Christ-Mass season.

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* E.g. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for Heaven. The Catholic church and Sexuality. 1990.

The gap between rich and poor: What can we do?

Sunday 26C 25. 9. 2022

[Amos 6:1-7, Luke 16:19-31]

This parable about the rich man and the beggar is directed at the greedy Pharisees whom Jesus addressed, several chapters back. What is it telling us?

Lazarus is the only person named in any parable. His name, in Hebrew, means ‘God has helped’. The rich man is not named. ‘Dives’ in some translations, simply means ‘a rich man’. The fact that Lazarus is named, surely reinforces the truth, which the whole bible is telling us, that the Holy One is on the side of people who suffer. “Blessed are the poor”.

Any story about life after death gets our attention. We wonder. We are scared. We are, each of us, going to be dead for eternity. But any story about life after death is metaphorical, for we can have no clear understanding of a state beyond our bodily senses.

The story is surely not claiming that when we die, we can look forward, literally, to resting on Abraham’s bosom. It would be rather crowded! That metaphor is drawn from how, at a banquet, a favoured guest would recline on the chest of the host, as John leaned back on Jesus at the Last Supper. After death, the poor, the suffering, will be honoured guests.

The details about flames and thirst are also metaphorical. This story is one main source of countless later stories about the ‘flames of hell’. Luke calls the placed Hades, and most ancient cultures imagined that in Hades the ghosts of the dead led a pretty dim life, without particular punishments. Some commentators think that the story places both Abraham and Lazarus in Hades, but in different parts.

What about the ‘great gulf’ between the two? Is that also metaphorical? The common belief that God will punish ‘bad people’ with eternal punishment actually proposes a dualist end of the world: God accepting a universe eternally divided between good and evil. This is fundamentally Manichean, like the ancient Persian religion which believed in two Gods, one good and one bad. The “hell solution” has Satan as the god of the evildoers, conquered, yes, but still reigning in his own realm.

How can we reconcile this dualist solution with Jesus saying he will ‘draw all to himself’ (John 12:32); and with St Paul’s vision of God bringing ‘all things together in Christ’ (Ephesians 1:10), and reconciling to himself ‘all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross’? (Colossians 1:20). This story isn’t a panoramic description of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’.

The ancient error of dualism leads people today to believe that there is a gulf between our worship of God in church and “the world” out there with its problems: between our religion and our involvement in politics, justice, and care for the poor. This is a fundamental error that many clerics and lay people are making today.

So the main points of this story seem to be:

# After death, present injustices will be fixed.

# There are serious consequences for us if neglect the poor.

The story challenges us to check on which side we choose to live.

So we need to ask ourselves: “What about the Lazarus at our door?”

We see the homeless begging in our streets, and our hearts are moved. We now see millions more, for our ‘door’ is our television, or the screen by which we access the internet. Lazarus is the 60 million homeless refugees around the world; the 30 million Pakistani flood victims; the Rohinga victims of genocide; the Uighurs, the products of whose slave labour we are possibly buying, using and wearing. What can we do about them, our sisters and brothers? It the situation hopeless, doomed never to change?

Some of us are in a position to analyse and make changes to the economic structures that sustain the gulf between haves and have-nots; some of can provide material help to a few. Some of us, as medical workers, are able to heal the wounds of the modern Lazarus. But we can all use our voice to keep telling the world that we do not accept what is happening. We can all unite with a group, – as we often do – to protest against this or that local legislation or situation that treats people unjustly. We can all keep a closer watch on our consuming.

But most importantly, we can equip ourselves by drawing closerto the author of this parable, the mysterious Holy One, who made us and the poor. Do we realise that our common origin is Infinite Love, from whom we receive abundant gifts, continually? God’s abundance, if only we can share it justly and fairly, is enough for every person to be fed and housed.

We have the huge privilege of being able to grow closer to God by praying, meditating, self-denial, so as to become, personally,a more effective channel of God’s love to the poor, even those we never meet. Can we discover our infinite resources, so as to become more effective channels of love to the poor?

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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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