What can we learn from the wheat grain?

5th Sunday of Lent          17.3.2024

(John 12:20-33)

The Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert has for many years practised and taught medicine in Gaza and the West Bank, among Palestinians who at the hands of Israel have suffered the theft of their land, bombing raids, arbitrary imprisonment and torture, and now face starvation. In a recent interview, the doctor remarked how he was impressed by the impressive dignity and patience with which Palestinians endured suffering. Palestinians themselves call this quality of steadfastness, endurance and nonviolent resistance sumud. More than a passive virtue, sumud takes active form when people willingly help each other in the most distressing situations.

We might suspect that sumud is actually enhanced and strengthened by injustice and suffering such as Palestinians have endured since 1947. We know how, in difficult and even catastrophic situations our own human qualities can grow stronger. Think of floods, bushfires, and our parents’ or grandparents’ wartime experiences. There are parallels too, at the bodily level: athletes need to undergo arduous training to strengthen muscles and develop their sporting skills.

Jesus seems to refer to this same principle when in today’s reading from John’s gospel he speaks of the wheat grain which has to be destroyed to make the future harvest possible. This idea is central to all four gospels, although expressed in slightly different ways. They tell us that “those who wish to save their life will destroy it”; “those who seek to gain their life will lose it”, and “the one who finds their life will lose it”. To emphasise its importance, the gospels repeat this principle in reverse, saying that only by losing or destroying our life can we save it.

These are not self contradicting statements. The “life” that is destroyed and the life that is saved must refer to different levels of our being. Two millennia after Jesus, psychologists would say that it is our ego that must be put aside, to reveal and develop something much deeper within us. There is in us a shadow self – the ego – and a deeper Self. A mature person learns to put aside their feelings, their comfort, and their less urgent preferences for more important things, like helping or loving someone else. The instinct to help others can be seen in many animals species, but reaches sublime heights in human love.

In the same gospel passage, Jesus said: “when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all to myself”. He knew he would soon be crucified: that terrible torture by which the Roman empire killed anyone who opposed it. Being “lifted up” was similar to the crude expression “strung up”, by which not long ago we described hanging, our own empire’s method of killing offenders.

Jesus was predicting that for promoting God’s rule of love and peace he would be killed by the empire of human greed and power. His powerful act of self-giving love would, through the ages, draw countless people to see that our Creator loves us infinitely and forgives us. When Jesus said: “…I will draw all people to myself” was he telling us that all of us – even those who cause others to suffer – will eventually be “saved”, brought to fulfilment by the love of Christ, who is not separate from the One who sent him?

                                                                            * * * * *

Thinking about temples

Lent Sunday 3 3.3.2024

(John 2:13-25)

In every city and town of Europe, and wherever Europeans made colonies around the world, churches and cathedrals are a common sight. In Australia, Christian places of worship are scattered in every town, sometimes on adjacent corners of our main streets. Likewise, in parts of the world where populations practice Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, temples, pagodas and mosques are a common sight.

Archaeologists have found the remains of temples that date back to at least 9500 years BC, and we know that even earlier, people who left no buildings of brick or stone had their sacred places. For uncounted millennia, Australia’s First Nations peoples performed their religious rituals at corroboree grounds and bora rings.

Why have people always set aside spaces as “holy” or “sacred”? Surely it is because they have always had genuine experience of reality far beyond what we can see or touch. Although we have extended our knowledge of the physical world so that we can explain earthquakes, thunderstorms and even the orbits of planets and the decay of stars, our minds cannot comprehend “why there is something rather than nothing”. Wise people in every culture on earth have concluded that we and our world – which we now know is part of more than a trillion galaxies – must derive from a conscious Mind. Can this be merely ignorant superstition?

And so people have built temples, spaces marked out and adorned, where they try to honour and communicate with the gods or God responsible for our existence and for our endless future. In this matter too, human thought and experience have grown and evolved.

The ancient Hebrew peoples’ experience of God taught them to make a temple at whose centre was an empty space, representing the One who is nameless and unknowable. This temple played an important part in the formation of Jesus, who was raised in the Jewish culture and faith. But he was a turning point. At his baptism he realised that he was filled with the Spirit. He later challenged those who ruled his people from the temple precinct, particularly because they exploited the poor.

It went deeper: Jesus taught that a new Reign of God was beginning with himself. Humanity had reached a new stage, when people would worship “in spirit and in truth” as Jesus told the Samaritan woman (John 4:23). Jesus even promised that “this temple” was soon to be destroyed – ambiguously referring to Jerusalem’s prestigious icon and to his own body. With great daring he symbolically cleansed the temple of corruption and temporarily shut it down. The gospel writers point out that when Jesus died the curtain concealing the Holy of Holies was symbolically torn apart, (Mark 15:38) because the risen Christ can now directly give us God’s Spirit. Christians well know that “…you are God’s temple, and the Spirit Of God is living in you” (1 Cor 3:16, 2 Cor 6:16, Eph 2:21)

Nevertheless we are social beings, and we need to meet together to praise God, as well as to build our community. We need a worthy meeting place in which to gather, and naturally we like to make this place beautiful. But there is an ever-present danger that we will focus too much on the “temple” – its beauty, its cost, or the prestige and power assumed by those who administer it – while we neglect or even lose contact with the Infinite Mystery within each of us that the physical building represents.

Tragically, Christians have even sometimes shut out from their temple people whom they consider “unworthy”, forgetting that the persons they reject are of infinitely more worth than the building from which they are excluded.

* * * * *

Massive floods of water, and of faithful love

Lent 1B 18. 2. 2024

(Genesis 9:8-15, Mark 1:12-15)

Among the kinds of damage we might sometimes have to cope with, having our house flooded is surely one of the worst. Some people in Queensland have been flooded three times within twelve months, in the abnormal storms that global warming is causing in that part of our world. Scarcely had those unfortunate householders finished the difficult and depressing work of cleaning up, when another ferocious storm destroyed all their efforts.

Probably every culture on earth has in its collective memory a mythical story of a great flood. Scripture scholars show us that the flood story in Genesis is of this kind. We were ignorant to have accepted it as literally true. Was the entire earth flooded? Could a hand-built wooden boat carry two each of the millions of species of creatures? Who could provide, for forty days, the enormous variety of foods that they needed? It is hard enough to feed our pets. As with Jonah and his “great fish”, it is a waste of time trying to explain these powerful mythical stories as if they were literally true.

Through billions of years of evolution, we humans have developed remarkable brains with which we handle consciousness. Every culture has some awareness that we come from the infinite consciousness of what we call “God”. Many individuals try communicate with this Source of all that is, and it is these “listeners” who have given us these “inspired” stories which fill the bible. Taken together they gradually inform us that despite the natural tragedies that trouble humanity, which we are inclined to imagine are caused by our own guilt, God has made a covenant with us and will always care for us. “The universe is friendly”, although by our negligence and greed we are damaging this planet so badly that the natural world is becoming more difficult to live in. But the ancients interpreted the beautiful phenomenon of the rainbow as a symbol of God’s covenant, a faithful promise to be always “on our side”.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus was “driven by the Spirit” to spend a long time in the desert so as to better encounter God, from whom he had just heard- at his baptism – “you are my beloved son”. In his forty days of solitude he was tempted by all the negative forces that exist in ourselves and in the world. He overcame them, preparing himself to announce to the world the Good News of the Reign of God.

When we deliberately enter into silence, whether for minutes or days, we find not only that our Creator’s promise is infinitely more powerful than any planetary disasters – after all, our planet is a tiny fragment among God’s trillion galaxies – nor is the Creator merely our friend. The unimaginable Holy Spirit, Infinite Love, lives within us and all other people. It is our privilege to be able to develop this friendship, this love.

* * * * *

Whom do we call lepers today?

Sunday 6b     11.2.2024

(Mark 1:40-45)

       Refugees: some of today’s lepers

During a schoolboy football match, after jumping unsuccessfully for the ball, I was shocked to see that the two end joints of my finger were bent back at a sharp angle. At the sight of the dislocated digit I felt sick, as we do whenever we see something “unnatural”. How horrible must be the sight of dismembered bodies and limbs, which every child in Gaza must have seen by now, in the terrible genocide that is being inflicted on its people.

When a person has power over others – prisoners captured in war, slaves, poorer classes forced to become servants – those who hold power are often tempted to demean and mock, or even treat their “inferiors” violently. England’s centuries-long colonisation of Ireland produced the demeaning “Irish joke”. And after slavery was abolished in North America, when impoverished Negroes survived by developing their wonderful musical skills, the wealthier White classes mocked and imitated them with “Black and White Minstrel” shows.

In the 1930s the Nazis, aiming to expel or destroy all Jews, demand them with propaganda containing cruel caricatures. When we remember this, it deepens the tragedy that in Israel today its political and military leaders, and ordinary soldiers, describe and treat Palestinians as subhuman, and that school children are taught to sing about the destruction of Gaza.

But it is not only other people far away who are tempted to do these things. When we ourselves encounter people who are in some way damaged or deformed, or even strangers in our country, we may feel at first a natural, momentary revulsion. It is urgent then that we see beyond the person’s “difference”, to recognise that they are actually our sister or brother.

In fact the future of our world may depend on us learning to rise above our natural instinct to fear the “other”. We need instead, in all circumstances, to discover that “others” images of God just as we are. The core of Jesus’ Good News is that all people are equally children of the infinite, sharing the same profound dignity.

When the leper in today’s gospel approached Jesus, he began to grovel, begging Jesus to heal him. At first Jesus would have felt the same natural reaction that we do, but his deep compassion quickly moved him to say: “Of course I want to” as he healed the man’s “incurable” disease.

When Jesus reached out to heal outcasts, he disturbed the leaders of his own Jewish religion. By touching the “unclean” and healing them, even on the sabbath, he broke regulations and laws which originally had a good purpose – to prevent infection; to give workers rest; to remind people of the Transcendent. But such laws were often abused to wield power over others. When Jesus challenged the corrupt authorities who did this, they turned him into an outcast. Forbidden to enter towns or villages, Jesus began to share the fate of the rejected, and eventually died in solidarity with them.

* * * * *

Is God compassionate, or violent?

Sunday 3B    21 January 2024

[Jonah, Mark 1:14-20]

This Sunday’s first reading from the book of Jonah fits well with the gospel, which shows Jesus calling disciples and beginning publicly to proclaim: “The Reign of God is close at hand: repent and believe the Good News.”

It would be interesting to ask a range of Christians what they think is this Good News. All four gospels tell us how Jesus showed by words and actions that God has deep compassion for us all. Jesus’ first sermon summed it up: “Blessed are the poor; those who mourn…”. In our most difficult times, God embraces us.

When Jesus was challenged to prove his authority by giving a sign, he would give no sign “except the sign of Jonah” (Matthew 16:4), the prophet who was swallowed by a fish. Jesus was quoting a book in the bible which is actually fiction: a fable. There was a real prophet Jonah (2 Kings 14:25), but he had nothing to do with Assyria. It was another prophet, Nahum, who threatened that God would take wrathful revenge against the Assyrian empire.

So how was Jonah a sign, prefiguring Jesus? The story was written for the Jewish people when they were in exile and believed, as many parts of the bible taught, that God had turned against them because they had sinned. Like the Book of Job, the Book of Jonah challenges that theology of divine retribution. It uses humour and irony to teach that God is not vengeful, but would have compassion even on the terrible Assyrians.

The fictional Jonah, like the real prophet Nahum, hated the Assyrians, renowned for their violence and cruelty. When God orders Jonah to go and warn them so that they would change their ways, he refuses. He runs away in the opposite direction, taking ship for Tashish, the most remote place known to the ancient world. God of course sees this and sends a huge storm, which is about to smash the ship, when Jonah admits to the crew that he is the cause of the storm and asks to be thrown overboard. The storm abates, and God carefully saves Jonah by sending a big fish that eventually places him on dry land.

There is deeper meaning in all this. As happens when we turn against the Power that made us, it is Jonah’s disobedience and conflict with God that causes the violent storm; and God’s vast compassion which calms the storm and even controls great sea monsters. When Jesus chose the sign of Jonah, was he foretelling how God’s powerful love would save him too from the darkness of death, three days after the leaders of Religion and State had murdered him?

But there’s more. Jonah does get to preach to the Assyrian capital: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed.” But their king commands everyone to refrain from violence; to fast and wear sackcloth, even (ridiculously) the animals. So the city is spared from destruction, as Jonah himself had been.

But Jonah still wants God be violent. He camps outside the city, hoping to see it destroyed. The sun scorches him but God kindly provides a vine for shade. Later, when God lets the vine wither and die, Jonah complains that he is exposed to the fierce east wind. God gently asks him why he is concerned about the loss of his vine, but has no compassion for the thousands of Ninevites or their animals. Then Jonah grudgingly admits what he suspected all along: “that you were a tender and compassionate God, slow to anger, rich in faithful love.”

Jonah is quoting from Exodus 34:6, but significantly leaves out the harsh end of the sentence: “…by no means excusing the guilty”. The fable of Jonah was a shift in the bible’s theology, a fitting preparation for Jesus who showed us the all-compassionate, non-violent God, whose Reign will be established when we realise God is within us, renounce violence and love even our enemies.

With thanks to Anthony Bartlett, Signs Of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Non-Violence, Cascade Books, 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?

========================================

* 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.

* * * * *

Gaza… and the Law of God

Sunday 30A 29^th October 2023

[Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:34-40]

The Warsaw ghetto

After the Nazi forces invaded Poland in 1940 they herded nearly half a million Jews – adults and children – into the Warsaw ghetto. They locked them into a few hectares, behind a three-metre wall, starving them and depriving them of medical supplies, although diseases were breaking out. In 1943, when the Nazis began sending tens of thousands from the ghetto to extermination camps, the Jews rose up against their persecutors. The German army then destroyed the ghetto, burning it down and capturing or killing “Jews, bandits and sub-humans”. Very few escaped.

Two thousand years before that, a young Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, had gone about teaching people how to become free, to live in ways that would bring about the Reign of God. His simple teaching challenged the established religious leaders. In this excerpt from chapter 22 of Matthew’s gospel the Pharisees tried to trick Jesus by asking him what was the greatest commandment in their law.

Jesus pointed out: “You shall love God with all your heart, soul and strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5) and “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). He was summarising what many prophets had pointed out: that God expects us to treat every person justly: “Do not oppress the orphan, the widow, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another…” (Zechariah 7:9)

The Nazi’s inhuman cruelty was the complete opposite of this teaching. The same can be said of the murder and kidnapping committed by Hamas when they emerged from Gaza to kill or capture nearly 2000 people on October 7^th 2023.

But the Israeli government is now retaliating more violently against the innocent people of Gaza. Bombing that densely populated area it has already killed four times more non-combatants than Hamas killed. It has blockaded Gaza for many years, but now cuts off its water, food and the fuel needed for electric power to pump water and sewage. Hospitals have almost no medical supplies, so that operations are performed without anaesthetic and many more people die. In addition to these horrors, Israel commanded a million people to move from the northern half of Gaza to the already overcrowded southern half, but continues to bomb them there.

When the Secretary-General of the United Nations dared to say that Hamas’ actions “did not happen in a vacuum”, the Israeli ambassador exploded in anger. He attacked Antonio Gutteres for daring to point to what many Jewish historians admit: since Israel was founded seventy-five ago, its government has committed grave injustice against the Palestinians. When the United Nations gave Israel 52% of the land, Israel’s leaders from the beginning intended to acquire it all, by driving out the Palestinians. In 1948 – just four years after the Warsaw ghetto – Israel destroyed 500 Palestinian villages, massacred hundreds of Palestinians and expelled 700,000.

Today the Israeli army has occupied most Palestinian territory for more than fifty years. It destroys Palestinian homes, schools and olive-orchards. Its soldiers conduct brutal night raids and imprisons people – even children – indefinitely. Against international law, nearly a million Israeli “settlers” have built homes on stolen Palestinian land, and are now being armed and encouraged to attack the Palestinians around them. The UN Secretary-General was saying that these decades of inhuman treatment have driven Hamas to seek liberty for their people.

These tragic happenings, are completely opposed to Jesus’ teaching and to the Jewish Law. They challenge us to ask what we can do to bring about the Reign of God, a world of peace, the foretaste of eternal life. Since Jesus also taught that “The truth will set you free”…

Can we cut through the lies that always accompany war, to learn what is actually happening?

Can we speak the truth that all people are of equal value?

Can we demand that our government act to consider all the most vulnerable “orphans and widows”: those massacred by Hamas and the many more killed by Israel’s bombs in Gaza?

Can we remind ourselves and others that colonising other peoples’ lands is unjust?

Can we pray, not foolishly trying to get God on our side, but to let the Spirit of the Holy One empower all of us to heal our broken world?

* * * * *

Did Jesus separate politics from religion?

Sunday 29A 22^nd October 2023

[Matthew 22:15-21]

When two opposing teams compete on the football field, we enjoy an exciting afternoon. It’s a game. But what happens when we divide the world, or our local part of it, into two competing sides? The world we are born into is divided like this: our family may be Christian – either Catholic or Protestant; or maybe Muslim – either Sunni or Shia; or perhaps Jewish – orthodox or liberal – or then again, Hindu or Sikh… or anything else.

One of the harshest and most destructive divisions is between a colonising power and the people it has conquered, when the newcomers profit from the resources, land and labour of the original inhabitants. Jesus was born into such a conquered land. For nearly a century the Roman empire had controlled Palestine by allowing puppet kings and Jewish religious leaders to manage and tax the population.

But Jesus did not teach people to rise up in revolt against the Roman oppressors. He invited the burdened peasants – and the Romans and us later generations – to “Repent, get a new mind, see the bigger picture and believe the Good News.” This News is that every person is loved by the Infinite One who created us. We are all equally valuable to this mysterious Parent/God, who calls us to love our enemies. If we can do this, we no longer need to find our identity, dignity or pride in belonging to any nation or group.

But Jesus’ teaching, then and now, hugely threatens leaders who exercise power by dominating a majority. So the leaders of Jesus’ own religion joined with the State to murder him. Matthew’s gospel shows the build-up to his death: Jesus challenging the religious leaders by symbolically cleansing the House of Prayer by driving out commercial and financial interests; then warning them in parables that they would be stripped of their leadership and excluded from the coming Reign of God.

Then the priests and King Herod’s agents tried to trap Jesus into speaking against the Emperor: “Should we pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” If Jesus agrees to pay taxes, he will lose credibility with the populace whom Rome is oppressing. If he refuses, he will show himself a rebel against Rome. But Jesus refuses to divide the world into either-or. He sees it as profoundly one. Caesar’s power is real enough, so give him what his violent conquest lets him demand, for now. But Caesar is only a tiny part of God’s empire – the whole world and every person – so “…give to God what belongs to God”.

Jesus is not teaching: “keep your religion separate from politics”. The task of politics is to run states justly, to be fair to everyone, to negotiate peace… how different from our dominant capitalist system, based largely on arms-dealing and the profits of war!

Don’t we need, urgently, to bring prayer and Christian/Muslim/Jewish action into the heart of politics, and to see all war’s’ victims – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine and Israel as images of the living God?

Jesus skilfully avoided dualism, “us” against “them”, Jews against Romans. Can we follow him by refusing to oppose Arabs against Jews, Russians against Ukrainians? Can we each help to bring peace to the present terrible conflicts by prayer, by emptying ourselves of anger and thoughts of revenge for long-standing injustices, and in helpless waiting allow God to work from within us? “Blessed are the poor”.

* * * * *

Jesus challenges the temple and its managers

Sunday 27A 8^th October 2023

[Matthew 21:33-43]

We are approaching the climax of Matthew’s gospel, but when we read only a short section each Sunday, we tend to miss the overall picture. The crowds have brought Jesus into the city in a triumphal procession which takes him up to the temple. He does not take part in any worship ritual, but radically challenges the temple itself. First he rejects its corrupt economic system by driving out the traders. He then confronts its purity system, which excluded “imperfect” people like the blind and lame, by healing these people in the temple itself.

Jesus then retires to Bethany for the night, and on the way curses a fig tree, which withers. It is a prophetic symbol of what is happening to the temple and its priest-administrators. He then assures his disciples that even “this mountain” (the temple mount) will be moved, if they pray with faith.

Jesus follows these three symbolic prophecies with stories about the temple leaders’ failure: one parable is about the son who obeyed his father after first delaying; and the son who disobeyed, after having promised. The next story – today’s gospel – is about the wicked tenants who abuse their trust, mismanaging the vineyard and killing the vineyard owner’s son. They too represent the corrupt leaders of God’s people.

In today’s world, managers of government departments, banks and huge corporations often succumb to the temptation to seek their own profit rather than serve honestly and faithfully. Parliamentary enquiries are set up – often unsuccessfully – to uncover this corruption and bring the “unfaithful stewards” to justice. For ordinary tax-payers it is painful to watch leaders abusing power and funds for their own profit, rather than for the common good. It is even more painful when the leaders of our church show themselves to be unworthy.

But at this crescendo of the gospel story, when Jesus life is under dire threat, he quotes Psalm 118, which fully sums up the gospels’ Good News:

The stone which the builders rejected

has become the corner stone;

this is the Lord’s doing

and it is amazing in our eyes.

This enigmatic but profound statement declares that God restores people who seem to be destroyed by human injustice and cruelty. It echoes Jesus’ fundamental teaching – at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel – “Blessed are the poor… those who mourn… for theirs is the Reign of God”. We are greatly helped if we apply it at this time when our church is at a point of change and growth; when war rages distressingly in various parts of the world and breaks out afresh in Palestine, whose people have been so unjustly oppressed for the past seventy-five years.

* * * * *