The Bonds of Freedom: vows, sacraments and the formation of the Christian self (2008)

My doctoral thesis from Monash University was published as a monograph in 2008 by Paternoster Press. It is now available as a paperback with Wipf and Stock.

This book proposes that Christian worship is a key source for any theology seeking to understand the covenant between God and human beings in the Christian tradition. Through a detailed examination of phenomenological, biblical and theological sources, the author seeks to write a theology in which the selfhood of both God and human beings is seen as essentially 'vowed' or 'covenantal.' This claim is then explored through a detailed examination of Eucharistic worship, which is understood as a 'non-identical performance' of the covenant established between God and human beings in baptism. Here, then, is a theology that understands Christian worship not simply as 'form' or 'event' but, more radically, as a mutual act of promising and commitment between God and human beings.

A couple of positive reviews:

Dr. Deverell has made a strong contribution. Sacramentality and its relationship to covenant is a position which one rarely finds so fully and richly expressed in sacramental literature. The sacrament of the Eucharist has indeed included the Eucharist as covenant: the cup of the new covenant. But Dr. Deverell has made this covenantal idea central. The insights of this book can help theologians further develop the essential dimension of sacramental responsibility.

Kenan B. Osborne, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology, Franciscan School of Theology

Garry Deverell has written an important book for students and scholars. He is a skilled exegete of postmodernism, biblical text and liturgical thought and practice. Anyone hoping to write in the future about baptism will have to consult what is found here.

Paul Sheppy, Fellow of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, 

Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, UK

The book can be purchased from the publisher's website.

'Your Faith Has Healed You'

 Job 42.1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34; Hebrews 7.23-28; Mark 10.46-52

The key theme in today’s lectionary readings is that of passage or transformation.  Passage from a place—variously described—of ignorance, fear or blindness to a place of repentance, trust and the enlightened following of Christ. 

Over the past few weeks we have been reading about Job.  Here, at the very end of the book, God finally speaks up to cut through the ignorant speculations of Job’s advisors.  The response of Job to this rather spectacular intervention is recorded in the verses we read:

Who is it that obscures your counsel without knowledge? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said ‘Listen now and I will question you, and you shall answer me’. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

The passage traversed here by Job is not the classical Greek journey from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to ‘true’ knowledge. It is not that Job thought he knew about divine things, but then was shown some secret knowledge or mystery which gave him the key to understand what God was on about in a brand new way. Not at all. Job’s passage is from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to repentance.  A crucial difference, that.  Not to ‘true’ knowledge but to repentance.  The point of this last chapter in Job is not that he has a beatific vision of God that unveils for him the meaning of everything, but that Job has a vision of God that uncovers precisely nothing, nada, nihil.  That is the paradox of this final vision.  God reveals Godself, certainly, Job is given to ‘see’ things that he had only heard about up until the moment in question, but the God so revealed is one who cannot be mapped, contained or domesticated within the strictures of human thinking or imagining. 

The ‘repentance’ of Job represents, therefore, an acknowledgement of this fact.  ‘My eyes have seen you . . . therefore I repent in dust and ashes’.  Dust and ashes is apparently all that remains of Job’s apparent knowledge and insight into God’s ways.  That Job’s fortunes are then immediately restored, and doubly so, should not therefore be read as some kind of reward for Job’s new-found insight, a classically Greek restoration of equilibrium because of the hard work of the hero in order to restore order from chaos. On the contrary, the restoration is a gift. It comes without antecedent or reason. It cannot be inferred or deduced from anything that comes before. It is sheer grace, the very opposite of that karmic worldview which is obsessed with buying the favour of the gods through the performances of virtue and knowledge. In Job, the abundance of the final restoration represents, by contrast, the sheer grace of the divine toward everyone who repents of such ambitions.

When we turn to the gospel text, a very similar rite of passage or transformation unfolds, a passage that may be characterised as the movement from karmic blindness to Christian discipleship.  The gospel stories are highly symbolic. They should not be read primarily as history in the modern sense, although they certain contain such history.  Thus, this story of a blind man encountered and healed by Jesus on the road from Jericho probably does have a historical core. But Mark takes this core and turns it into an occasion for preaching about the path one must take to become a true disciple of Jesus Christ. 

That this is so becomes clear when we consider the name of the blind man.  It is Bartimaeus—the ‘son’, Mark is careful to underline, of ‘Timaeus’.  Now Timaeus is not a semitic name, it is neither Aramaic nor Hebrew.  It is Roman.  So we know immediately that this man represents not the people of Israel, but another population of the lost, namely the Gentiles, citizens of the wider Roman empire which, at this time, is overwhelmingly karmic in the sense we have begun to describe. 

Furthermore, Timaeus is the common name of one of most influential philosophical treatises of the Roman world, a dialogue written by Plato in the 4^th century BCE.  It is an account, given in the voice of one ‘Timaeus’, of the making of the universe and of the gods by a master craftsman who purposes all to his own good pleasure.  The purpose of human life, according to this Timaeus, is to ascend through the pecking-order of created things at the conclusion of each earthly existence, being constantly reincarnated to a new station in the hierarchy of being according to how virtuous (or not) one has been in a former life.  Here the Roman universe again reveals itself as essentially karmic.  The apparently ‘good’, the industrious and the knowledgeable, are rewarded for their goodness, their industry and their knowledge. They are rewarded by ascending the ladder of being towards a form of divinity which is of their very own making.

That Mark is not particularly impressed with such ideas is clear from his story.  For here we find Bartimaeus, surely a ‘son’ or ‘disciple’ of Timaeus, in a very bad way! His careful following of the way of his philosophical father—the way of virtue, industry and knowledge—has not, in fact, led to enlightenment or a superior station in life, but only to ‘blindness’ and economic poverty.  In fact, he is a beggar who has reached, as it were, the very bottom of life’s barrel. And he has done so a very long way from where he thought he might be by now, living on the very margins of this barbaric town he must now call home, Jericho. 

Now it’s a funny place, the bottom of the barrel. It is a place where things can suddenly become very clear in a way that they have never been before.  It is the place where many an addict, for example, recognises that they have been kidding themselves, and will probably continue to kid themselves to death unless . . .  unless they get some help from somebody else, some other who can intervene on their behalf and give them a hand.  And that is exactly what this former disciple of Timaeus does.  Having recognised that the path of the self-made man has taken him nowhere fast, he cries out for help.  That Bartimaeus was very, very desperate is clear from his willingness to seek the help of one whom his philosophical masters would certainly have regarded as a complete ignoramus, a Philistine or Cretan even, namely the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth.  ‘Son of David, have mercy on me’ he cries out, and not very timidly.  On the lips of the historical blind beggar, the term ‘Son of David’ would probably have meant little more than ‘hey, Jewish person’.  But in Mark’s story it takes on the character of a nascent step of faith towards a very new God.  It means ‘Hey Jesus, anointed one of God, Messiah, have mercy on me’.  There is a recognition, here, that the way of his philosophical master—the way of Timaeus—has come to nothing but blindness and poverty.  There is a recognition here, that Bartimaeus needs a rather different kind of God than that offered by the Roman philosophical tradition, a god who sits impervious in the distant heavens and waits for us to earn our way to his footstool.  He needs, instead, the God of Jews and Christians, a God who is gracious and loving, a saviour and healer who meets us where we are, in the midst of our troubles, and actually helps.  And so he cries out to Jesus time and time again, even when he is told by the frankly racist crowd to shut up.

What happens, of course, is that Jesus responds.  He ‘calls’ Bartimaeus to come.  This ‘calling’ is something that only the God of the Jews does. It is the way in which the God of the Jews creates his people Israel, his chosen people, his covenant people.  Not on the basis of their deserving industriousness, virtue or knowledge, but on the basis of God’s free choosing and grace.  So when Jesus ‘calls’ Bartimaeus, he is saying ‘come, be part of the community of God’s calling, the people who know God’s grace and favour, the people to whom God has given God’s very self.’  When Bartimaeus responds to the call by indeed coming to Jesus, Jesus immediately acts to heal him, to take away his karmic myopia and gift him with the chance to take a rather different route in life. 

It is important to note that the Greek word for ‘heal’ is the same as the Greek word for ‘save’.  Jesus heals the man of his disease, that is to say, but in so doing also ‘saves’ him from the karmic chains in which he is bound so that he can experience, for the very first time, that reality we call the ‘grace of God’, that is, God’s unmerited favour and love. Note, also, that Jesus tells the man that it is his ‘faith’ that has saved him.  ‘Faith’ mind you, not virtue or industriousness or knowledge.  For faith, in the Christian tradition is basically about trusting someone else with our lives, trusting Jesus the son of God.  It is the opposite of trusting in our own selves, in our own virtue, work or knowledge. It is about trusting that someone else’s virtue, work and knowledge—the virtue, work and knowledge of Jesus Christ—is able to save us. The story ends with the man following Jesus along the road to Jerusalem, an image of true discipleship if ever there was one.

Now, what are we to make of these stories today, in the midst of our own world?  Well, simply this, I suggest: that we are as likely as Job or Bartimaeus to be enslaved by the laws of karma so beloved by the author of the Timaeus. While the philosophy of the ancient world is rarely read anymore, its basic message nevertheless permeates our society at every level. Day by day, in popular culture or high culture, on the television or at the museum, we are bombarded by a philosophy that proclaims that our purpose in life is to ascend some kind of pecking-order, to better ourselves through virtue, industriousness and knowledge.  Some versions of this philosophy are purely materialistic, and measure the desired-for ascent in purely materialistic ways, like how prestigious your job is or how big a house or holiday your income will buy you. Other forms are more ‘spiritual’, explicitly proclaiming the potential divinisation of the human self through various paths of virtue, self-discipline or self-knowledge.  These range from the ‘neo-buddhist’ and the ‘new age’ through to versions of ‘Christianity’ which emphasise a need for human beings to save themselves.  This possibility was probably revived, ironically enough, with the subversion of Christianity by capitalism. When Max Weber toured northern Europe and America at the turning of the 20^th century, he noticed that it was the ‘protestant’ countries that were succeeding the most in economic terms.  He proposed that there was a ‘Protestant work ethic’ that made this possible.  Protestants worked harder than atheists or Catholics because they lived to work rather than working to live.  The irony here is that this ‘ethic’ is as far from the foundations of the reformed faith as one can get.  The reformers wanted to protest what they saw as a subversion of God’s grace in Catholic thought and practise, the tendency in medieval Catholicism to grant salvation only to those who were able to satisfy the church’s harsh conditions and demands.

The good news for us today is the same good news that revolutionised the ancient Roman world and gave rise to the Reformation.  That God does not treat us as we apparently deserve to be treated, that the favour of God is not conditional upon our capacity to be good, or industrious or knowledgeable.  That God simply loves us, and has acted to save us from our misguided attempts at saving ourselves in Jesus Christ.  For in Christ we can throw ourselves upon the mercy of God and find that God has accepted us and welcomed us into God’s family or commonwealth no matter what we have done or what we think we know.  I, at least, find that to be very good news indeed, not least because I feel that I am simply unable to ‘come up to scratch’ in ways that this society and culture can recognise as ‘successful’. Perhaps you do as well!  In the welcome and grace of God I feel that I am loved, accepted, and valued.  And I need that more than I can say.

Garry Worete Deverell

First preached at Monash Uniting Church on the 30th Sunday in ordinary time, 2012.

Killing the Indigenous: reflections on baptism in Warwick Thornton's 'The New Boy'

‘The New Boy’ is a 2023 film by Kaytetye man Warwick Thornton which explores the collision between white Catholic and Aboriginal spirituality. It does this through an exploration of various baptismal motifs such as that of a new birth and body, along with death and resurrection. In short, a captured Aboriginal boy seeks to incorporate Catholicism into his own spirituality, but is eventually, himself, incorporated by white Catholicism.

The ‘New Boy’ (Aswan Reid) is captured by police and brought to a remote orphanage run by nuns. He doesn’t speak English and is largely silent throughout the film. He refuses to wear a shirt and eat with cutlery. He hugs trees. He plays with baby snakes. These function as signs of his difference and his resistance to being incorporated in the white Catholic community.

The orphanage is run by Sr Eileen (Cate Blanchett), who assumed leadership extra-canonically when the parish priest died a year earlier. Sr Eileen is a complex character. Powerful yet vulnerable. Spiritually earnest and zealous for the boys’ education yet given to systematic lying and alcoholism. She symbolises a form of white Catholic feminism, assuming the authority of a white male priest yet without the protection of the white male church.

Sr Eileen’s subordinates are Sr Mum (Deborah Mailman) and George (Wayne Blair). Both ‘incorporated’ Aboriginal people who nevertheless keep up their resistance in small ways. Sr Mum is the cook and domestic servant. She apparently became a nun when her own children were taken from her. She is kind to the New Boy. George is a farm labourer who is glad to have work a long way from the centre of white society. He puts the children of the monastery to work but is disinclined to participate in church services. He is gruff and cold, but clearly cares.

The New Boy’s otherness is also seen in his ‘clever’ powers. He has a light with him, by which he heals a boy bitten by a snake and saves the life of another boy burned in fire. George recognises that the boy is ‘clever’, a practitioner of Aboriginal magic, and worries that word will get out and their remote peace will be destroyed. Sr Eileen seeks to interpret the New Boy’s healing powers as signs of saintliness.  It is her way of seeking to incorporate the boy into the white Catholic body.

The New Boy’s best attempt to incorporate Catholicism into his own spiritual frame comes when a large crucifix, made of wood, arrives at the monastery. Seeing the crucifix as a suffering being somehow connected to trees, the New Boy seeks to heal its wounds by taking some baby snakes and placing them before the crucifix. In many Aboriginal cultures, snakes are powerful ancestral beings able to heal and bring life to the dead. The snakes are killed by the worshippers, but one is made alive again by the New Boy and effects a transaction by which the wounds of the tree/Christ are connected to self-inflicted wounds on the hands of the New Boy.

Perhaps because there are not enough snakes involved in the magical exchange, the living being is not healed and the New Boy becomes unwell from his wounds. Sr Eileen interprets his wounds as stigmata and prays for his recovery. When the New Boy is well enough to walk again, Sr Eileen baptises him in the church and his wounds are apparently healed with baptismal water. The New Boy notices that the crucifix no longer communicates with him as a living being. And when he seeks to summon his light later the same day, it is extinguished. The New Boy begins to wear a shirt and, having lost his ‘spark’, apparently submits to white Catholic ways. Having sought to incorporate the white Catholic imagination into his own, he finds that it is he who is incorporated.

     Theological Reflection

At the heart of the film is a confrontation between two ways of imagining the world, each seeking to absorb or incorporate the other. Will native Aboriginal ways prevail, or the coloniality of the white Catholic body?

Historically, the white Catholic body prevailed. In this frame, the New Boy can be seen as an ‘innocent’, a saint, sent by God to bring hope and healing to this small, struggling, Christian orphanage. He is a Christ figure whose eventual baptism fulfills all righteousness and incorporates him fully into the body of the church. I am, however, part of a very small group of Aboriginal thinkers who are seeking to subvert this colonial logic in the field of theology by seeking to re-read white Christian interpretations within the more ancient frame of Aboriginal spirituality.

From this point of view, the crucifixion of Christ is not about God sending a messiah to save the world. It is about the suffering of country, and of Aboriginal community and culture, under colonial power.  For us, there is no ‘divinity’ other than ‘the dreaming’ and its embodiment in the cosmic community of country and kin.

In this perspective, the resurrection of Christ is not an intervention, extra nos, from a God beyond, but the innate capacity of country and kin to renew themselves, to be reborn from the compost of old bio-matter. This means a ritual washing in water is not, primarily,‘baptism’as an incorporation in the white Christian community. Water symbolises, for us, the lifeblood of country, distributed to the whole body of the land via the ‘veins’ of creeks, rivers and other waterways. For us, water rites dramatize a participation in the dying and rising of country itself, including country’s capacity to resist the power of coloniality for stealing, killing and destruction.

This capacity is beautifully illustrated in Glenn Loughrey’s painting ‘From the Depths, Life Rises’, where the colonial imagination is represented by squares, much like fields cultivated in the European manner. At one point there is a circle within a circle. This represents the capacity of country, and of mob, to resist the colonial imagination.

On this anniversary of the failed referendum, I simply note that this theological work is necessary because Australia remains a colony in which First Peoples, our culture and our spirituality, are still regarded as little more than a footnote in the 'great' theological narratives from Europe that have made modern Australia what it is.

Garry Worete Deverell

A short paper given at the Talanoa Oceania conference held at United Theological College, Paramatta, on April 5, 2024.

Jesus the Fire of God

Texts: Exodus 3.1-12; Psalm 46.4-11; 2 Peter 3.3-16; John 8.12, 28-30, 54-59

As we wind our way toward the conclusion of this ‘Season of Creation’ next Sunday, with its celebration of Saints Clare and Francis of Assisi, the resources provided by the Uniting Church and, indeed, the global church, go missing in action. There are no specific liturgical resources provided for today, and no suggestions for a theme. That being so, I’ve decided to lead you on a pathway that begins and ends with fire.

Perhaps the oldest story still in human memory is not from the bible, but from the songlines of multiple Aboriginal nations, stretching from the Yupan-guthi on Cape York to the Whadjuk in Perth. It is the saga of seven beautiful sisters who come to earth from the stars and are chased by a mischievous ancestral spirit from the very moment of their arrival. To evade the mischievous spirit, they use the magic of fire—the essence of their creative power—to create hiding places and shelters all over the continent of Gondwana. Their flight forms much of the landscape we know as the Great Dividing Range and both the southern and western deserts. Eventually the sisters turn back into the pure flame of their true forms and return to sky as a constellation of stars. There they are still pursued by the mischievous spirit, the morning star, across the night sky.

This old, old story has much wisdom to share. It tells us that fire is both beautiful and creative. It is beautiful, because it lights up the dark and draws us to itself. Its warmth and its light make us feel as home.  Fire is also creative. With fire, we can transform raw ingredients into tasty meals. With fire we can bend and melt metals, forging them into new forms. With fire, we can farm the landscape of Australia through ‘cool’ burning and make it fruitful, as my kin have been doing since the seven sisters shared their secret fire with us.  We all need fire. It is the divine warmth and light around which we gather as community. And it is the divine power which makes and remakes the land and skyscapes on which we all depend for life. As Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, ‘nature’s bonfire burns on’ even as we humans seek to darken its blaze. 

It is not at all surprising, then, that the divine appears to the ancestors of the Jewish people as fire, also. The call of Moses, as we read it just now in the book of Exodus, begins when he strays onto the mount of God and sees a bush that is burning but without being consumed. From these flames a voice is heard, identifying this fire as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a God who has heard the cries of God’s people under the enslavement of the Pharoahs and has ‘come down’ to deliver them to a wide and spacious land, filled with milk and honey. Here we learn, amongst other things, that the God of the Hebrews, as with the seven sisters of primordial dreaming, is a fire who both draws people to Godself and also transforms them by giving them a mission and a purpose in the world. God is the Holy Fire who provides us a home. God is also the fire that leads us out to share that sense of home and freedom with many others.

Of course, the road to freedom is not entirely straight forward. There are many dangers along the way, many enemies who would prevent us from becoming the free people God would call us to be. That is why the Psalm for today imagines God as one who must sometimes become a fierce and consuming fire in order to protect the people of God. One might imagine, here, that fire is transformed into a weapon of war, as it is transformed in a thousand and one Hollywood epics retelling the terrible deeds of both ancient and modern worlds. But no. That is not what the Psalmist imagines. For him, God is a fire who actually burns the weapons of war so that they can no longer to do harm. Here wars are ended not by using fire as a weapon against other weapons, as in your standard arms race, but as the substance which makes war impossible in the first place. God as a consuming fire, a fire which transforms violence and abuse into nothing. God as a still-point around which we are called to be still, ourselves. To stop our bickering, to deescalate our violent ambitions and share, instead, the gift of our common home in God. Oh, that the warriors of our world would learn this lesson. Oh, that our politicians might learn to be still and wonder at the consuming fire of divine love, that would have us surrender our weapons and look at each other with joy and welcome.

Which brings us to the story of Jesus, whom the evangelist John calls the ‘light’ or the ‘glory’ of the divine amongst us, here in the midst of our communities and our world.  For when the enemies of Jesus seek to cut him down to size, he claims to have been around since well before the patriarch Abraham. He claims to be divine, the very same ‘I am’ who addressed Moses as fire in the burning bush and led the people through the wilderness as the ‘Shekinah’, or glory, of the pillar of fire. For Christians, Jesus is indeed our light. He is the campfire in our midst who holds the darkness as bay. He is the glory who lights our way through the wilderness our lives. Who helps us to find shelter, a home and hearth, that is warm and nourishing and welcoming for everyone. He is fire who consumes in us all that is false and untrue and sets us free to be real and genuine. He is the great transformer, the fire of alchemy that can turn us from being afraid into being comfortable with who we are and what we are called to do in the world. He can turn our mourning into dancing and our spears into pruning hooks. He can make all that is dead alive and fresh once more.

With this capacity for alchemy and transformation, Jesus remind us Aboriginal people of the Old People who made our world and gave us the law. We recognise him as an ancestral spirit, like the seven sisters, who visits the world with the gift of divine fire. So, Jesus is as much a friend to us Aboriginal people, as he is to you settlers. A gift from the heavens for warmth, and for home, and for light when all the other lights of the world appear to be going out.  Let us look to him and his ways for wisdom when we can find none of our own.

Garry Worete Deverell

Season of Creation 4

South Sydney Uniting Church

Sept 29, 2024

Bread for Indigenous Lands and Peoples: an Aboriginal interpretation of the story of the Syrophoenician woman

Texts: Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23; Psalm 125; James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

Amongst the most common metaphors in the Scriptures for the loving action of the divine is the distribution of staple foods to the poor and the broken.  Proverbs 22.9 says, for example, that the generous are blessed because they give their bread to the poor. Bread was a staple food in the ancient far-West, just as it is a staple in many other places today. For Aboriginal peoples from Melbourne and coastal Victoria that staple was not bread, but the murrnong or daisy yam. Its cultivation depends on a loose soil structure that is easily permeable by air and water. When colonists arrived in these lands they brought with them millions of cattle and sheep whose grazing compacted the soil and drove our native food-crops to the brink of extinction. Consequently, Aboriginal people have gone from comfortably being able to sustain our families in health and well-being over many millennia, to now being amongst the most poorly nourished people on the continent. Because colonists stole our lands and all but destroyed the ways in which we traditionally fed ourselves, most of us now live as beggars in a brave new world of industrial farming and globalized food distribution networks. I doubt that the captains of such industries have even read these verses from Proverbs,

Do not rob the poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
and despoils of life those who despoil them.

Jesus, we are told, was someone who bucked the trend. Instead of stealing the people’s food, as the Romans did through their cruel land management systems, Jesus shared bread with everyone whom that system crushed. In the gospel according to Mark, even before we arrive at the text we are reading today, there are feeding stories. Most prominent amongst them is the ‘feeding of the five thousand’ (6.30-43) where Jesus feeds a hungry crowd of Jews by miraculously multiplying the meagre offering of just five loaves and two fish. By giving them staple food to eat, he also returns to them their dignity as God’s beloved people. The 12 baskets of food left over at the end of the feast signify the 12 tribes of Israel, God’s chosen people. The number 12 here functions as a confirmation that God is honouring the covenant God has with them from of old. It is as if Mark is saying, ‘the Romans may have stolen and exploited your land, but you are still beloved of God. God will feed you, even if this colonised and exploited land cannot’.

We arrive, then, with Jesus and his disciples, at the city of Tyre on the Phoenician central coast of the Roman province of Syria. This is unambiguously Gentile, that is, ‘non-Jewish’ territory. But you need to know that it was once a territory of Israel, a territory taken by conquest from the indigenous Canaanite tribes by Joshua. Here Jesus is petitioned by a local woman whose daughter, we are told, has a demon. Now I want you to know that ‘demons’ likely refer, in the gospel of Mark, not to disembodied spirits of evil as we would imagine them in western culture, but to a disruption of wellness caused by Roman imperial occupation. This is made clear in the story of the healing of the demoniac who lives amongst the tombs at Gerasa (Mark 5.1-20). When Jesus inquires after the name of the demon who afflicts the man, it replies ‘we are legion’, in the plural. ‘Legion’, of course, is the name of a highly trained and heavily armed company of Roman infantry, usually numbering five to six thousand men. They were used as both shock-troops who took territory from others, but also an occupation force to keep conquered people under control. In the ancient far-West, they were everywhere, and their word was law. So, the demon afflicting the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter is most likely one of the many forms of unwellness—both physical and psychological—that can afflict a colonised people.

The woman and her daughter are doubly colonised. First by Israel, under Joshua, and now by the Roman Empire. They are poor, their way of life has been repressed, they are hungry and desperate, and they want things to change. That is why the woman is willing to break all manner of cultural and religious taboos to petition Jesus for what she needs. She falls at his feet, a sign both of desperation and of respect, asking that Jesus heal her daughter. Note that there is no buttering up of Jesus in this version of the story. In Matthew’s version, she calls him the ‘Son of David’, a name for the messiah. But here she simply calls him ‘Sir’. ‘Sir, can you heal my daughter please?’

Note that, at first, Jesus appears deeply offended at the very idea. ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ The children who should be fed first are, of course, the children of Israel, the children whom Jesus apparently believes to be the only worthy recipients of God’s love and care.  ‘Dogs’ was a racist name that Jews at the time, especially Jews from the upper echelons of society, used to describe non-Jews. So, lest anyone in this church think that Jesus would not be capable of being both sexist and racist, allow me to translate what he says here into the Australian vernacular. ‘You won’t be getting anything from me, bitch. God’s love is not for the likes of you.’ Shocking, isn’t it.

Thankfully the woman, who is apparently used to such treatment, is not put off. She retorts, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ Or, if you will allow me to translate into an Australian vernacular once more, ‘even us bitches eat the food that falls from our betters’ tables.’  As I watch this scene unfold in my mind, I imagine Jesus pausing and drawing breath at this point. I imagine him thinking. And feeling. I imagine him considering carefully what the Syrophoenician woman has said, and why. For Jesus then responds.

And what Jesus says shows that, unlike many of us who enjoy a modicum of respect or power in our societies, he is teachable. He is open to learning new things, even theological things, from women and from people whom he regards as of lesser status and importance than himself. Jesus says, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ Which, if I may again translate once more, says ‘You’re right. God’s love is not only for the children of Israel. It is for you and your daughter, too. Go back home and find your daughter well.’ I hope you’ve caught the significance of what is happening here. The Jewish rabbi, Jesus, has been tutored in theology by an indigenous woman from the conquered and colonised lands of Phoenicia. And he has accepted her teaching so completely that he is willing to so widen his understanding of God’s love that now even the ‘dogs’ of the worlds are worthy of compassion. So, Jesus is here changed, both in mind and in heart.

For those of you who are worried about the son of God needing to be taught in this manner, ask yourself why the evangelist who recorded this story might have done so. Is he not leaving an example here for those of us, especially us men, who believe we are entitled to belittle others? Is not Mark teaching such men to be humble, and to listen for the instruction of the divine in the mouths of those we so regularly ignore or perhaps abuse? Is not Mark also encouraging the colonists of the world to stop their colonising, their stealing away of the lives of indigenous people, and instead return some of their stolen bounty to our hungry mouths and hurting hearts? In this all of us who enjoy both respect and power are encouraged to follow Jesus, a man who was willing to humble himself and change his behaviour when he is shown to be wrong.

The Syrophoenician woman is an example as well. An example of every colonised woman who cannot get what she needs for herself and her children. A woman who is willing, out of sheer desperation, to break all kinds of social rules in order to obtain the staple foods that are necessary for life. Don’t let the bastards keep you down, says St Mark. Ask, and keep on asking, ask in your religious community and ask in your society, ask for the love and the care which ought to be yours. For you, too—as much as anyone else—are worthy of the love and compassion of God.

Let me conclude this brief reflection by suggesting that this suffering woman’s pleading may also be read as the pleading of the land itself, our suffering, colonised land, the land that we Aboriginal people call ‘country’. As I have noted on many other occasions, every genocide is accompanied by an ecocide. Whenever a people are subjugated, their annexed land is devastated as well.  We are witnessing this, right now, in Gaza. But we have witnessed it here in Australia as well, for we are now reaping what was sown by colonists as they compacted the soil and gave the land over to sheep and cattle. Native ecosystems have all but collapsed in many parts of the continent. The soil has become salt, the rivers and the forests are deeply unwell, and a hundred native species have already become extinct.  The land cries out in pain and longing as it suffers its own form of crucifixion, its own form of colonial subjugation and abuse.

This would not be the first time that a women’s voice stood in for the lament of a colonised land in Scripture. Native American scholar Jace Weaver points to daughters of Zelo-phehad, in Numbers chapter 27, as a case in point.* There the soon to be conquered land of the Canaanites is being allocated to the tribes of Israel. But just as the process is nearing its conclusion, five women step forward, women who name themselves Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. They claim an inheritance in the land through their father, a member of the people of Israel, who is now deceased. Later on in the story, when the conquest is all but over and Joshua is going through the allocation once more, those same women step forward to claim their inheritance (Joshua 17.1-6). This time we learn that the names of the women are also the names of five Canaanite towns in the coastal region of Hepher, which is also, very significantly, the name of their grandfather, clearly identified as a Canaanite.  The daughters, in other words, are also the land. The land making its claim for inclusion in the covenant between God and God’s people, even and especially when God’s people are inclined to forget or deny its claim.

So let us learn from the advocacy of these women of Canaan, and the advocacy of the woman of Syrophoenicia. Let us hear in them the claim of both indigenous lands and indigenous peoples for a right and equal portion in the bread that is given us all as a sign of God’s covenant of love. And let us with Jesus, the representative of God in our stories, learn that it is right and proper to both recognise this claim and to do something real and practical about it. 

Garry Worete Deverell

Sept 9, 2024

St Paul’s Cathedral, Naarm/Melbourne

* Jace Weaver, ‘Premodern Ironies: First Nations and Chosen Peoples’ in Mark Vessey, Sharon V. Betcher, Robert A. Daum, Harry O. Maier (eds), The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 300-301.

White Supremacy with a Human Face: reflections on Australian theological education

I have been in and around theological education in Australia since 1992, when I first enrolled in a Bachelor of Theology through Whitley College and the Melbourne College of Divinity.  As far as I can tell, I was the very first Aboriginal student to successfully enrol in that hallowed institution. Unsurprisingly, working my way through the degree proved challenging. For myself, certainly, but also for my teachers and fellow students. For I was a 'difficult' student. 

On the one hand, I was academically capable and articulate in class. On the other hand, I struggled to find a home within the prevailing culture. My teachers and my class mates were overwhelmingly white and middle class. They valued being polite and avoided any discussion which might highlight their privilege or their participation in cultural violence. Matters of theology (from books written almost entirely by white Americans or Europeans) were discussed mainly in the abstract, thus indulging the white fantasy of objectivity.  Or, when discussion strayed into the personal or the biographical, it was white and middle-class worlds which were assumed to be both 'normal' and 'moral'.  Many, not all, of my comrades would shift uncomfortably in their seats when I spoke about what was normal for my family and community or offered a critique of what they assumed to be 'normal'. As a consequence, I would regularly be taken aside and asked both to 'tone down' my contributions and to 'be respectful' of others.  At the time, I felt beaten up, misunderstood and despairing. I fell into a long and deep depression. Now, from the vantage point of years and experience, I can see that the dominant culture was simply seeking to expel and control what it understood to be a threat to its equilibrium.  

To be and feel at home in this 1990s world of Australian tertiary theological education required much more than a talent for theological reflection. You also had to possess the cultural capital that came with being white and middle class. You had to know, deep in your belly, how to navigate the cultural rules. And I didn't know. Nor could I! Because here is the cruelest fact of all about white, middle-class, theological education. It is fundamentally and structurally racist. If you suceed as an Aboriginal person, even if they give you a degree (or two, or three) you will never be seen as one of them. Even if you write books and teach with aplomb and insight and grace, you will never be seen as an equal. You will always have to work harder and longer and with far less institutional, financial, and personal support than everyone else. Simply because you are blak. Simply because you will never belong to the privileged society that makes the rules. 

There's more to it than that, of course. What I have said so far could apply, equally, to many people 'of colour'. South-East Asians. Semites. Indians and Sri Lankans.  Africans. South Americans. Pacifica people. Even Indigenous people who have come to Australia from other parts of the world. But Australia reserves an especially intense form of racism for its own Aboriginal people. For mob represent not only white society's 'other'. We represent that other which has survived colonisation and attempted genocide at the hands of the white settler community that now controls this country. We are therefore arch symbols of both the failure of colonial ambitions and the shame of its genocidal desire. We are, quite literally, white Australia's worst nightmare. As such, we attract a sense of revulsion in the white gut that runs stronger and deeper than all the more common forms of structural racism.

That is why, despite the many welcome changes that have occured in Australian theological education - despite the great influx of teachers, students, and theologies from the sub-continent, south-east Asia and the Pacific - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and perspectives are barely there at all. The best the established churches can do is Nungalinya, an institution that continues to teach theology at TAFE level because its financiers and white governors believe that we are not capable of much else.  Wontulp Bi-buya was much the same, despite having a Torres Strait Islander man as its Principal. In any case, Wontulp was closed just a few weeks ago for lack of funds.  The School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity, which sought to become a place where Aboriginal theologies were developed and taught by Aboriginal academics, was recently closed after less than three years of operations. Whilst it is true that the School 'failed' because it could not raise sufficent funds to stay operative, it is also 'failed' because that was always going to be the case. It is very clear now, if it has never been clear before, that established churches have no interest in Indigenous theologies or the development of a tertiary-educated Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander leadership. The School of Indigenous Studies was set up to fail. And now it will be blamed for its failure. Which leaves only the NAIITS programme at the Sydney College of Divinity, a programme run by a single Aboriginal academic using funds raised in north America, as the last hope for our people in Australian tertiary theological education.

Let me be as clear as I can about what all this means.  White supremacy has a human face in Australian theological education. Its face is that of the concerned white ally who expresses sympathy and solidarity as a private individual, but who continues to occupy a secure place in a system that excludes and villifies the crucial contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers, students and theologies. It is the face of tenured white theologians who do not hesitate to appropriate the labour of untenured Indigenous theologians and to teach the theologies of the marginalised as if such theologies were their own. It is the face of white instutional moderators, bishops, presidents and principals, who agree that the theologies of Indigenous people are important, but allocate not a dollar to either employing us as tenured academics or to recruiting and supporting Indigenous students.  

There are very few Aboriginal people with research degrees in theology. There are very few tertiary-trained Aboriginal clergy or church leaders. We are marginal to society, and perhaps even more so to the established churches. Most of us do our ministries and our theological work entirely without recompense. But that is why our theology is so crucial for Christianity in Australia. We, more than anyone else, occupy the symbolic space of the crucified one, the Jesus who was driven out of town and crucified on the cross of empire.  We are those who have been exiled from our own land. We are the strangers and sojourners the colonial church can only ever pretend to be. Could it be, then, that Aboriginal people might be just the theological teachers that the church needs to learn the way of Christ? Could it be that Aboriginal theologians, who have experienced the paschal mystery in the embodied life of our own history, might be exactly the ones who can teach that path to others?  Could it be that Aboriginal theologians might instruct the church about the primacy of country and of creation to our common survival? I believe so. But belief has never been enough. What we need, also, is communal and institutional change. Trunk and root change. Some kind of revolution.

I am tired and I need to retreat a while to lick my wounds and commune with country. For I am the one who, with valued blak and white allies, founded the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity. I am one who, along with the entire Aboriginal staff of the University, was made 'redundant' just a couple of weeks ago. I am tired, and hurt, and sad once more. But I take comfort in the words of the Johannine Christ, 'If the world despises you, be aware that it despised me first' (Jn 15.18). Now, as always, and especially in the midst of this present catastrophe, we can speak from the depths of the divine experience with empire.

This post is dedicated to my esteemed Aunt, Dr Anne Pattel-Gray, and my cousin Ms Naomi Wolfe. Blak theologians both.

Garry Worete Deverell

August 6, 2024

Gondwana Theology: a trawloolway man reflects on Christian faith (corrected edition, 2024)

My 2018 book, Gondwana Theology: a trawloolway man reflects upon Christian faith, is now available for purchase in a new 'corrected' edition from ATF Press. 

Here are two commendations:

'In this compelling work, Garry Deverell offers a remarkable synthesis of autobiographical reflections, theological analysis and liturgical creativity. Putting aside theoretical jargon and conventional God-talk, we encounter here an Aboriginal voice that none of the churches in Australia can afford to ignore. This is a book that all Australian Christians need to read.'

Professor Mark Brett
Whitley College, University of Divinity

‘In this brief volume Garry wrestles with questions Indigenous Christians everywhere regularly confront. As have others before him he asks, “How does an Indigenous person authentically make the faith that has been used as a means of oppression of him and his people, the ultimate source of his liberation from that oppression?” “Furthermore,” he inquires, “how can he challenge the White Christian world that has all but subsumed his and his people’s lives in theirs, with the need for reconciliation and change of heart, if their own hearts continue to harbour only bitterness, resentment, and anger?” The key concern is, of course, “What will it require of each of us to live together well in the land?” Personal story, embedded with pointed inquiry, and a spiritual pleading for transformation, invites the reader to consider her own way of faith and her own journey toward wholeness. Enjoy in these pages, a work of heart and soul seeking the good way.’

Dr Terry LeBlanc
North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies (NAIITS)

Thanks are due to everyone who helped me get this book to press.

To purchase, please click here to go to the ATF Press bookstore.