“It is written that the Christ would suffer…”

Easter Sunday 3 14.4.2024

(Luke 24:35-48)

A few months after I was ordained a priest I was teaching “Bible Studies” to a not-very-interested class in a junior high school. The children became attentive when a young girl asked: “Please Father, if Jesus was so good, why did they kill him?” I could have brushed her off with an easy answer, but my stumbling attempts to get to the deeper truth of the matter failed miserably. Like many people, I have wondered about the question ever since.

Towards the end of Luke’s gospel, on that amazing Easter night when he stood among his friends again, Jesus himself explains why he had died. He told them that the things written about him in the Law, Prophets and Psalms had to be fulfilled. There are indeed fragmentary references in those scriptures to the future messiah who suffers and later triumphs, but their meaning is by no means clear. They would not have satisfied my young pupil.

We can learn much more about why Jesus was murdered if we go back to the beginning of his public ministry. There Luke describes him in his hometown at Nazareth, in an idyllic scene of a local boy now mature enough to be allowed to preach in the synagogue. The congregation admires Jesus for his eloquence and wisdom, but before he finishes, they angrily hustle him out of town and try to throw him off a cliff.

We have read this a thousand times in our churches, without understanding why Jesus’ listeners tried to murder him! How could a simple quote from the prophet Isaiah cause all that fuss? Partly because he claimed that he was the one anointed by God to fulfil that prophecy, starting now. But look what he was proposing to do! Freeing prisoners and oppressed people comes at a cost. When he said he was called to bring “good news to the poor”, Jesus was not just telling the poor that God loved them. God’s jubilee year was about to begin. As described in Leviticus 25, in every 49^th year all fields would remain unplowed and unsown, to let the environment recover. To help the poor, all debts would be cancelled, and everyone enslaved because of unpaid debts must be set free. Most radical of all, property must be redistributed so that the poor and marginalised could have a share.

Even though the Leviticus jubilee was probably never put into practice, and even though the villagers were hardly wealthy, this was intolerable, socialistic stuff! They began objecting, denigrating his family, but he further inflamed them by giving two examples when God helped foreigners in preference to Israelites! They had to stop him.

He made it easy for them. After three years of healing people because they were “more important than the Law”, during the holy passover festival he made a scandalous public protest against the temple itself. No wonder that the religious leaders stirred up a crowd to call for his execution!

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Further reading: André Trocmé: Jesus and the Non-Violent Revolution (1961)

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?

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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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