When we reject another, we deny the truth

Easter, Sunday 5B 28. 4. 2024

(Acts 9:26-31, John 15:1-18)

The First Nations actor Jack Charles reached a degree of peace, contentment and acceptance by the end of his life. This was despite being terribly rejected many times during the course of it. When he was a toddler, government agencies took him from his mother; in a Salvation Army boys’ home he was often sexually abused, and at the age of seventeen, the police locked him in a reformatory for – illegally! – trying to find and connect with his family members. But despite twenty years of heroin addiction, and working as a frequently jailed cat burglar to support his habit, he became an excellent artist and a respected elder.

But Jack Charles’ mother suffered profound three-fold rejection all her life. She suffered the racist, universal rejection of all First Nations people; she was rejected as a mother by having the nine surviving children of the eleven to whom she gave birth stolen from her by the government; and he was rejected even by her own people, who believed she was somehow connected with the death of a tribal elder.

We see people being rejected by others in every area of life. Sadly, we often ourselves “write them off”. But the answer to this terrible, unnecessary abuse of human beings seems to lie in what we find in today’s reading from the Gospel of John. Its author recorded many things about Jesus of Nazareth, whom he saw as God living among us, the Logos become human, “the word made flesh”. This author reports that in his parting message, Jesus told us that we – the human race – are all included in an amazing web of life similar to the organic unity found in living plants. This web has a divine source, and in it every human person is intimately joined, as the countless cells of a vine are given life and made fruitful by the sap flowing through it.

If only people – we ourselves – could begin to see this truth. Even if we no longer see much benefit in formal religion as it is presented, and struggl to find a “spirituality” to replace it. For in the understanding Joh’s gospel, the vine of which we are all part is an almost incomprehensible Person who “In the beginning…” made “everything that was made”. And that Person loves us.

If only we could look at each other, especially at people who are different in race, politics or in any other way, and see that we literally share the same lifeblood, and come from the same creator!

if only we could unlock this amazing truth from the pages of the bible and from the pulpits of our churches, and apply it in our lives, would not the world be very different?

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Autobiography: Jack Charles, Born Again Blackfella, Penguin 2020.

“We shall see God as God really is”

Easter, Sunday 4 21^st April 2024

(John 10: 11-18, 1 John 3:2)

Many young Catholics, even before they leave school, lose interest in attending Sunday Mass. Parents and grandparents have long been expressing their concern about this trend. Older folk also struggle to find reasons why they should continue to attend, and many decide not to.

Could this dissatisfaction in young and old be happening at least partly because our churches do not bring people into real contact with the infinite mystery of God? Let’s look at the metaphor for God that we use in the gospel on “Good Shepherd Sunday”. When Jesus called himself the “good shepherd”, he was speaking to people who every day would see shepherds leading their small flocks along the road to and from pasture. Those shepherds knew each animal by name, and their sheep knew and trusted them.

So in the earliest days church leaders reasonably used the title “pastor”, but unfortunately, over the centuries, because many clerics had superior knowledge the title came to be associated with superior power and control rather than with love and concern for persons. Clerical privilege led to the scandal of tens of thousands of children being abused, and the crimes concealed.

Some people might find questionable Pope Francis’ metaphor that clergy should immerse themselves in the “smell of the sheep”. Who wants – even metaphorically – to be seen as a dumb sheep, anonymous among a huge flock, waiting to be shorn or sent to the abattoir?

Some clerics speak and write as if God has revealed God’s self once and for all, and that clerics hold the key to this cache of esoteric information. It would seem more helpful, especially to young people, if we were to teach in our churches that God reveals God’s self in every flower, sunrise, thunderstorm and human face. If clerics mistakenly call such teaching pantheism, they might learn – for example from Thomas Aquinas – that God is within every particle of creation.

We need to move beyond this contemplative vision – true as it is – to learn from Jesus that God loves each of us with all our faults, far more tenderly than any two lovers ever held each other, or parents looked at a newborn child.

Perhaps more people would come to church if they heard us clerics remind them, as saint John did in this letter, that each of us is already like God (Genesis 1:26-27), and that after our death we will see God “as God really is”?

Almost half of the people who have been clinically dead for a short while see a real mystical vision. They find themselves out of their body but still conscious and deeply at peace. They meet and communicate with a “Being of Light”, who is seen by people of every faith or of none, and whom Christians recognise as Christ.

But I have known clerics to scoff at this Near Death Experience. Perhaps if we “leaders” listened more carefully to people’s experiences, rather than imagine we hold a monopoly on truth, then more people would feel welcome in our churches?

* * * * *

“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)

Love your enemies

Second Sunday of Easter 7.4.2024

(John 20: 19-29)

Dr Izzeldin Abueleish was born in poverty in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. His family somehow enabled him to study medicine at Cairo, London and Harvard, and to become the first Palestinian doctor to work in Israeli hospitals.

His wife died of leukemia 2008, leaving him to raise their eight children. In 2009, when Israel was attacking Gaza yet again, a tank fired two shells into the Abuleish apartment, slaughtering three of Izzeldin’s young daughters and a niece. Despite his extreme grief, Izzeldin wrote the book I shall not hate.

Dr Abueleish is a Muslim, but like the Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi, he teaches and lives Jesus’ central teaching, as contained in the gospels: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).

He describes one way he learned why we should not hate: when we see newborn babies lying side by side in their hospital cribs – Palestinian, Jewish, Chinese or African – they have absolutely nothing within them which make them hostile to each other. All later hostilities come from human choices, distorted by our selfishness and anger.

In the emotional final scene in John’s gospel, we see Jesus’ disciples locking themselves into their meeting room, terrified that they too might be caught and tortured to death as he was. But when Jesus appears among them, they are filled with limitless joy. He then breathes God’s Spirit into them and sends them out on mission. But his instructions are puzzling. Why does he tell them to forgive people’s sins, and possibly sometimes to retain them? Surely he wasn’t giving instructions to priests about how to “hear confessions”, as some have piously thought! That custom – like ordained clergy – did not begin until many centuries later!

Jesus was summing up his whole teaching in a few words. Isn’t this the same command as “love one another as I have loved you”? (John 5:14) and “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”? (Matthew 5:44) Wasn’t he giving every disciple the immense power to transform our world, the power to forgive, and to “contain” sin with creative love? Like Dr Abueleish, countless good people have shown us the way to be peaceful to each other, rather than hostile: St Benedict, St Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, Gandhi, Mandela, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, etc etc.

Our “Christian” nations – USA, Australia, UK, Germany and others – are still providing Israel with terrible weapons, enabling it to continue its genocide. Isn’t it up to us, now, to point out their gross sin? The world knows that for seventy-five years Israel’s leaders have been expressing their intention to remove all Palestinians from the whole land, of which in 1947 the United Nations gave Israel 56%.

In the same passage in John’s gospel, Thomas has difficulty believing that Jesus is alive. This challenges us too, but it is an even greater challenge to believe that we have the power to bring peace, as Jesus calls us to.

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In November 2023, Izzeldin Abueleish, now living in Canada, learned that an Israeli bomb had killed twenty-two more members of his extended family.

Ecce homo

Palm Sunday 24.3.24

(John 18:1 -19:42)

“Pilate said to them: Ecce homo… “Here’s your man”. (John 19:5)

Now it’s 2024

Scene 1:

Do you call that a human being?

That refugee? You think he could have a wash! And those rags he’s wearing! Hardly an Armani fashion advertisement. Ha ha! Don’t you think that funny!? And there’s thousands like this chap, trying to get into the UK by boat; and even trying Australia. They’re only looking for a more comfortable life! I’m glad our government’s got a tough policy to turn them back, or deport them!

Scene 2:

That’s not a human being!

You can tell he’s been on the grog; probably drugs too! And you know he spent six months in jail? But he’s just been to see the diocesan lawyers again. Claims he was abused by Father O’Donnell… 30 years ago! How can he say that? We all know the great work Father did to build up the parish… and to set up the Priests Provident Fund!

That druggie must have false memory syndrome! I’m glad they are going to defend the case strenuously when it goes to court.

Scene 3:

Do you call that a human being?

That sad case lying, under the bridge? We know her. Her name’s Monica. She actually prefers to sleep there. The Vinnies went to a lot of trouble to find her a flat, but she walked out after only three days. You think she’d be grateful, but she complained about the noisy neighbours!! And it’s not as if she doesn’t shout a lot herself when she’s had a few… and talk to herself all the time! No one can help her. She’s mad. Just leave her where she is!

Scene 4:

Voice 1: Julian Assange? Hardly what I’d call a good human being. Didn’t he put huge amounts of information online, exposing state secrets, risking the lives of our secret agents?

Voice 2: Well nooo… he actually took out all the names before he published wikileaks. The US government could never name anyone whom he put at risk.

And the so-called “secrets” he exposed… many of them were actually horrendous war crimes. But none of his judges has ever taken that into account.

And now he faces extradition, and the torture of solitary confinement, possibly for more than 100 years!

Voice 1; but… surely governments know better than we do, what’s best for the people?

Scene 5:

Not Gaza on the news again! Look at those people, fighting over food off the truck. They hardly look human! And it’s hardly news… I saw that video yesterday on facebook. That old lady is the grandmother, and the chap with the broken bucket… that’s her son. Yes, his wife and the other four kids died when their house was bombed. The little girl is the only granddaughter left. Six years old. Yeah, had to have her leg amputated. They said there was no anesthetic, but that’s hard to believe. Probably just anti-Jewish propaganda.

No, don’t turn it off. The sporting news will be on in a minute.

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Ecce homo. Look, there’s your human beings! The ones we crucify.

* * * * *

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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Where is God in genocide?

Lent 4B 10.3.2024

(2 Chronicles 36:14-23, Ephesians 2:4-10, John 3:14-21)

The terrible events happening in Palestine today have reached the point where they loom as background behind every conversation we take part in, every piece we write or homily that we preach. Immeasurable crimes are being committed in full public view. If we do not discuss and demand action to stop the bombing of densely populated areas – including hospitals – and depriving more than a million imprisoned people of water, food and medicine, aren’t we failing to value and protect the rule of law which holds our civilisation together?

Besides, anyone who believes in God or is struggling with the question of God is forced to ask how this continuing evil can be reconciled with a divine Being who is presumed to be the source of all goodness.

In the readings chosen for the fourth Sunday of Lent, the ancient Book of Chronicles relates that when the people of Jerusalem had been unfaithful, refusing to heed the prophets God had sent them, they were invaded by the Babylonians. Ridiculously, the writer describes God as petulant, impatient and angry: “at last the wrath of the Lord rose so high against his people that there was no further remedy”. The Old Testament contains many similar passages. Wrongly interpreted, they have led people to think they are “doing God’s work” by destroying others whom they believe to be God’s enemies.

Scripture scholars show us how to interpret these writings of earlier cultures; how they are coloured by ways of thinking quite different from our own. Certainly we cannot build our view of God by crudely projecting human emotions onto the creator of a trillion galaxies. Christians, particularly, have heard the gospels speak of the Good News brought by Jesus of Nazareth, which can be summed up in this passage from John’s gospel: “God loved the world so much that he gave the only Son, that everyone who believes in him … may have eternal life” (John 3:16); and in the reading from Ephesians:“God loved us with so much love [that God] brought us to life with Christ.”

To project any emotion onto God is entirely metaphorical and almost ridiculous. Our own emotions or feelings are movements of the faculty we call our will, accompanied by physical effects in our bodies. We feel desire for a cool drink on the hot day; we enjoy it when we drink it. We may be afraid that an illness may get worse. We hope to find our life partner, and feel love for such a person where we find them, but none of these emotions comes within a million light-years of describing God, of whom we can have no description or definition.

But throughout history many sane people have experienced not only the presence of the Source responsible for sunsets, newborn babies and all the mysteries of nature, but have unmistakably felt friendship and love from this Holy One. These widely varying experiences of trustworthy people have given us the writings of the Christian scriptures, those of earlier religious traditions, and the beautiful outpourings of mystics and poets. In various ways these offer glimpses of the beauty and truth of god, who remains beyond description.

This Source of our Being teaches, through all major religions and through our own compassionate instincts, that our future depends on forgiving enemies and loving our neighbour as our self. Doesn’t this give each of us a part to play, speaking and acting with others, to stand against current examples of hatred, racism and genocide? Isn’t it up to us to free people oppressed by any regime that would try to dominate them?

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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.

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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.

* * * * *

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.