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.