Can rebukes be good for us?

Sunday 22A 3^rd September 2023

[Jeremiah 20:7-9, Matthew 16:21-27]

We feel good when someone thanks us. Last week we read how Jesus praised Peter for finding and stating that Jesus was the messiah. To be rebuked by someone is the opposite of being thanked. Soon after Jesus had thanked Peter, he severely rebuked him for not understanding that the Good News, the way to deeper life and to changing the world, inevitably includes suffering.

We don’t like to be rebuked. It goes against our ego, our image of self. It’s embarrassing to be shown up as not understanding. Yet when the person rebuking us knows what they are talking about – such as wise parents? – their rebuke can help us to grow. They break open our small circle of experience – which we think is the whole world – and show us that there are infinitely vast spaces beyond our knowledge.

A wise rebuke is the mental equivalent of lifting weights or riding up hills to strengthen our muscles. Perhaps it has the same effect as being attacked by bacteria or viruses, which strengthen our immune system? Now that we have wiped out many diseases, and over-sterilise our surroundings, our defence system tends to turn against us in the form of auto-immune diseases.

Peter was one of the group whom Jesus had invited to help teach the world about the Realm or Empire of God: the transcendent dimension beyond our senses, beyond time and space. Jesus invited his generation – and ours – to “repent” – the Greek word is metanoia, to let our mind see the bigger picture.

But those who dare to announce this Good News challenge the world’s rulers: the Roman emperor with his legions, or today’s obscenely wealthy capitalists who rule our world. Then and now, rulers get most of their wealth by exploiting and oppressing the majority of humanity. Whereas Rome’s ruthless looting only partly spoiled the lands it conquered, today’s rapacious rulers threaten to ruin the whole earth.

Rulers don’t like to be told that it is wrong to conquer others and take their livelihood; that it doesn’t bring happiness and can’t even continue for long. They violently rebuke those who tell them this truth. They don’t want to hear that God – the source of all being – is more real than the things we grasp or take delight in.

The prophet Jeremiah – in today’s first reading – felt driven to rebuke the rulers of his nation for exploiting the poor and living in self-indulgent luxury. Their wider sin was to rely on military alliances with foreign empires rather then building up their people’s own religion and culture.

Jeremiah felt daunted and afraid, and loudly rebuked God too, for seducing – even violating – him by giving him what looked like an impossible task.

It can be healthy for us to rebuke God, when our suffering is incomprehensible and seems more than we can cope with. But we can find some clues to understand it in Jesus’ Good News about the Reign of God. God loves us all, more than the best of parents could do; God is not remote, but is within us, even in the worstsuffering. Although suffering is itself evil, it is temporary, and through it – whether caused by the weakness of the human body or the malice of other people – God can bring permanent good.

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How do you deal with the problem of evil?

Sunday 16A 23.7.2023

[Matthew 13:24-43]

The crimes that people commit – murder, rape, torture and war – hurt people terribly. They also present us with the problem of how to deal with the people who commit them. This parable in Matthew’s gospel, about weeds growing in the wheat, attempts to address this problem. It is one of the enigmatic and humorous stories Jesus told as he sent out his followers to announce the Good News that the Empire of God had begun.

Parables tell us how God’s Empire works. Several describe how this empire spreads, slow but unstoppable, like yeast working through dough, or seeds sprouting and growing. This story about weeds among the wheat crop focuses on the problem, in the early Christian community and today, of how to deal with members who do wrong and even seriously damage the community. It’s a familiar problem in any family or community.

Matthew offers a solution he used several times in his gospel: at some “end time” God will separate the “bad” people from the “good” ones, goats from sheep, then throw out the bad, who will weep and gnash their teeth in darkness or burn in eternal fire. In saying this, Matthew was reporting how Jesus, in Semitic fashion, used wild exaggeration to emphasise that our actions have serious consequences. Jesus suggested, for instance, that would-be thieves should cut off their right hand, or anyone tempted to look lustfully at a woman should pluck out an eye. Such language might also be used by an exasperated parent to warn a loved but disobedient child: “If you do that again, I’ll kill you!” Such language needs to be interpreted!

The parable of the weeds uses the same kind of exaggeration to warn how God will deal with “bad people” at some future time. But if taken literally, this leads to a dualist universe where two kinds of people will in the end be forever separated. Other parts of the New Testament offer a deeper promise: that God, who is profoundly one, plans to “gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). Jesus himself promised: “I, when I am lifted up from the earth [on the cross], will draw all people to myself.” (John 12: 32)

But despite its dualism, the parable of the weeds in the wheat offers practical wisdom about dealing with people who do wrong. The wise farmer tells his workers not to try to separate the weeds yet, for that would destroy the wheat. For now, let them be. This does not mean that we should do nothing about those who do wrong. We must call out their crimes and act strongly against them, especially powerful people in official positions. But we need also to see every offender as a person like ourselves, formed “in the image of God”, not despising them as “different”, deserving to be punished or eliminated. Everyone is to some degree responsible for the wrong they do, but each person also caries wounds that limit their freedom of choice. In every country, those raised in poverty, or in oppressed groups, are hugely over-represented in the prison population.

Voices on talk-back radio and social media often sling mud at offenders, for we tend to enjoy punishing anyone who has fallen. Too often this has led to bullying, scapegoating and lynching. Politicians know how to win popularity by stirring up our fear of crime, and often legislate for more severe penalties. But this leads to building bigger prisons – often run for commercial profit. Right now, staff shortages in Queensland youth prisons cause young prisoners to spend long periods “locked down” in solitary confinement. Most offenders emerge from prison more damaged than when they went in.

Are we doing precisely what Jesus’ parable advises us not to do: separating the “weeds” from the rest of society? Why not allocate more tax money to educating and rehabilitating, as some other countries do most successfully?

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The wisdom of children

Sunday 14A 9^th July 2023

[Matthew 11:25-30]

A true story: When the parish priest, Father Cuthbert – not his real name – came to dinner at her family’s home, little three-year-old Margaret observed him closely. The following Sunday she was taken to Mass in what she was told was “God’s house”, where the same good cleric was to preside in ornate vestments, of which he was particularly fond. As the procession moved up the aisle, with acolytes, candles and celebrant, Margaret could not see it, for it was hidden by a forest of adult bodies. Always keen to know what was going on, she climbed up the back of a pew, and just as the priest solemnly approached the microphone to open the ceremony, she announced in her piping voice, heard in every corner of the church: “Oh there’s Father Cuthbert, pretending to be God”. We all cherish a few such funny statements, made innocently by a little child, which had a hilarious and perhaps embarrassing meaning for the adults present.

Jesus’ life-task was to change our world by announcing and beginning the Reign of God. He was solidly opposed by leaders of his own Jewish religion, who had succumbed to formalism and become corrupt. Those educated scribes and pharisees used their learning to oppress the common people with onerous ritual obligations, “purity” rules and heavy taxes. In contrast to the “yoke of the law”, Jesus invited the poor to accept his own “yoke”. They could find that God is totally loving and forgiving, like the father in the story of the “prodigal” son, or like the generous employer who paid latecomers a full day’s wage.

Speaking to people who were desperately poor, and suffering cruelly, Jesus offered them rest and life to the full. He spoke of God’s limitless love; and commanded us to support each other in all material needs, and to forgive. For us who hear him centuries later, he offers the wisdom to handle all the burdens and worries of our life, from childhood to old age and death. But his teaching challenged religious hypocrisy; and announcing the Kingdom of God alarmed the officials who represented the oppressive Roman empire.

When Jesus occasionally healed individuals and fed crowds, he was predicting that he would give himself to us in the Eucharistic meal. This was intended to gather as equals women and men, poor and rich of all races, to share the same meal. He gave it as a visible way to celebrate God in and among us, present in food we share: the foundation of the Reign of God.

When Jesus said that only “mere children” are capable of receiving and understanding his radically alternative view of God, it ought to make us pause. What material things and “adult” concerns so fill our lives that they block us from seeing God, the Infinite Mystery, in every particle of the universe as well as in every person? Or prevent us from waking up to the truth that the one whom Jesus called Daddy is our own closest friend?

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The importance of not keeping secrets

Sunday 12A 25^th June 2023

[Matthew 10:26-33]

We call them “whistle-blowers”; those who act on their conscience to report wrongdoing by governments or other institutions. They are often threatened with severe penalties, because the organisations they challenge are enormously powerful. Nonetheless they feel compelled to reveal the truth about the evil, and speak out for the common good.

The Australian parliament recently improved Australia’s whistle-blower laws, but these amendments are not good enough. It is good that those who exposed Australia for shamefully deceiving the Timor Leste government have now been pardoned, but others still face terrible punishments. For instance David McBride blew the whistle on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and faces a trial which could put him in prison for up to fifty years. Richard Boyle, who reported misconduct at the Australian Tax Office, could be given a sentence of up to 161 years in prison. And then there is the Australian Julian Assange, who rightly exposed US war crimes and other evils, but has suffered conditions that amount to torture in a British jail, and may still be jail in USA for more than a century.

The twelve apostles whom Jesus sent out were also to told to reveal a secret – “What you have heard in secret, shout from the housetops” – not about guilt, but the glorious news that God is with us. Every human culture since the beginning had sought to grasp the mystery of where we have come from. and our final destination, but these messengers were to announce that the unseen Creator loves us; that we can address God as the most loving parent; that God’s reign was now beginning. Christians call this revelation: the Infinite Consciousness telling us about itself.

Jesus warned his messengers that they would be opposed and even be killed, as he himself was later murdered like the lowest slave. But he also encouraged them not to be afraid of those who can kill the body, but to fear only whatever can kill body and soul in “Gehenna”. The original Aramaic meant the destruction of the whole “self”, not of the soul separated from the body, as Greek philosophy has taught us to imagine.

Whatever the saying means, it does not mean that God might torment some souls or people in hell-fire forever, as Christian artists and preachers liked to portray. Catholics of earlier generations were taught this belief, but when imposed on children this terrible threat was a form of child abuse. Perhaps it was taught because it maintained the power of clerics, who claimed to hold the means to save us from “damnation”. It was one of the ways in which the church went astray.

The bible’s many sayings about the end of human life, or the end of the world, are highly symbolic and metaphorical. The symbol Gehenna comes from the burning, stinking rubbish dump in the valley of Ben Hinnom, outside Jerusalem. It powerfully symbolised the chaos of a life wasted and destroyed.

But immediately after this threat is mentioned, God’s infinite love is declared. We are told that God knows every detail of the natural world, including the movement of sparrows and the loss of human hairs. Jesus’ reported words conclude by saying that we are worth more than many sparrows. So we need to discard any idea we have of God as a human judge, made in our image, and pronouncing a final condemnation. The New Testament tells us that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8 & 16), and that if we can awaken and respond to that love, we will have nothing to fear. (1 John 4:18). This is the “secret” message that Jesus told his apostles to spread. Is it any wonder that he also told them – and all who speak the truth – not to be afraid, even of death, because the Spirit of Infinite Love is within them.

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To cast fire on the earth?

Sunday 20C 14^th September 2022

[Jeremiah 38:4-10, Luke 12:49-53]

The statement by Jesus that he has come “to cast fire on the earth” is both puzzling and shocking. Especially so, when we recall the August anniversaries of the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagaski by nuclear bombs that our allies used at the end of the Second World War. These bombs caused such terrible “crimes against humanity” that the US military tried to prevent people from seeing the destruction they had caused.

Military authorities forbade all war correspondents from entering Japan, and more than 200 obeyed the ban: except one, the Australian Wilfred Burchett. Carrying his own rations and his typewriter, he travelled secretly for thirty hours by train to Hiroshima, and saw what was left of the once-beautiful city. Only ashes and rubble remained, and thousands of traumatised people doomed to die in agony from radiation poisoning. This is what happens when, for selfish purposes, we try to “cast fire upon the earth”. And it might easily happen again, for thousands of much bigger nuclear weapons are today in the hands of untrustworthy people.

Jesus’ alarming words meant something quite different, of course. More like Wilfred Burchett’s truth-telling, when he sat on a slab of broken concrete and typed his headline story: “I write this as a warning to the world…” The prophet-journalist Burchett disobeyed the army’s attempt to conceal the truth, and this, and for other acts of truth-telling, he was punished by being exiled from his homeland for seventeen years.

It was the same with the prophet Jeremiah, in today’s first reading. Inspired by God, he warned the king that following his counsellors’ advice would lead to national tragedy. Those counsellors tried to kill the prophet, plunging him into a muddy well where he would starve to death. Prophets and whistle-blowers who challenge the corrupt status quo in any institution usually meet with murderous opposition like this. Institutions in government, religion and commerce often try to suppress the truth. Jesus was murdered for challenging the exploiting religious system of his day.

He, the ultimate truth-teller and prophet, made another shocking statement when he said he came to bring division, not peace. Since we know that his ultimate purpose is to “bring a peace which he world cannot give” (John 14:27), and to unite all things in himself (Ephesians 1:10), this division must be only a stage on the way to this goal.

Jesus was trying to show us that we have access to the limitless love that is the Source of all. We can base our lives on it. But he warns us that when some persons try to share the truth they can see, but others cannot see yet, families and communities can be divided. As when a person declares the truth that they are gay, lesbian or different in some other way; or understands scientists’ clear warnings that a huge ecological crisis is coming; that the planet is warming and many species are becoming extinct.

Whenever people are not facing the truth in human affairs, for them the flow of life has become stagnant. It is only by speaking the truth, with as much love as possible that we can help each other to move towards wholeness, which is another word for salvation. The recent Australian Plenary Council – and the Second Vatican Council – were such opportunities for our church.

Our body and mind must be free to move and flow, because since the first basic life-forms began several billion years ago, each individual and species is in a ceaseless process of evolution and development. The question challenges each of us: “Am I open to accepting and living the changes the truth demands of me?” Life-giving change is what forms us, as individuals, families and as a church. When we hear of this fire that Jesus brings, do we “wish that it were blazing already”?

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