On the PM's latest lecturing of Indigenous People

https://www.theage.com.au/national/pm-prompts-fury-by-looking-for-forgiveness-14-years-after-rudd-s-apology-20220214-p59weu.html

Today the PM lectured Indigenous people on how we should respond to Rudd's 14 year old apology to the stolen generations. According to the PM it was hard to say 'sorry' but it is harder to say 'I forgive you'. Still, that is what Indigenous people ought to do, according to the PM. Forgive.

I'm not sure where the PM learned his Christian doctrine, but I feel he has failed to grasp the heart of the matter. First, forgiveness is something that can only be given freely and in spite of all reasonable expectation. It cannot be commanded or coerced from traumatised and wronged victims. A coerced act of forgiveness is not forgiveness. It is a contractual exchange in which one party surrenders the truth in order to buy favour from a far more powerful patron. Nothing gracious about that.

A second observation is that the PM's doctrine of forgiveness seems to have skipped a fairly crucial step, a step we Anglicans call 'repentance and amendment of life' on the part of those who perpetuate the wrongs and therefore create victims. Repentance cannot be reduced to saying sorry. Repentance requires doing whatever it is possible to do to unweave the injustice committed, to give back what was stolen, to bind up the wounds, to restore what was broken. Now, obviously, not all can be restored. Not all can be healed. Not all can be repaired. Not in this lifetime, anyway. But repentance requires that everything that can be done, is done.  Without this desire and this real, concrete, action, sorry is just a word. A word that fails to become incarnate, to take flesh, to inhabit the real world.

The PM lacks compassion, that has been clear for a long time. But his theology, as a Christian who owns his faith in public, also requires considerable rennovation. To that end, I call on his government to honour the Uluru Statement from the Heart and establish a treaty commission to negotiate a path of true repentance with my people. If that path is finally fruitful, who knows? Forgiveness and reconciliation may indeed become possible.  But, as things currently stand, we are a very long way from any such thing.

Garry Deverell

The Paradox of Forgiveness

Text: Matthew 18.21-35

On August 22 in 2005 an extraordinary rite of mutual forgiveness was simultaneously enacted in the English city of Coventry and the German city of Dresden. The English ceremony took place at Coventry Cathedral which, on the 14th of November 1940, was destroyed by German bombs. The German ceremony took place at the newly restored Frauenkirche, which was destroyed by English bombs on the 13th of February 1945. For the blindness which led to their mutual destruction of each other in the 2nd World War, the German worshippers sought forgiveness from the English, and the English worshippers sought forgiveness from the German. Real forgiveness, as we learn from the parable in today’s gospel, is hard. It cannot be granted without an acknowledgment of real guilt or a commitment, from the parties who have breached the relationship, that they we seek to make amends as best they can. So the liturgies at Coventry and Dresden did not shy away from covering that territory. The words that were spoken on that day were the result of many meetings, over many years, between representatives of the Christian communities in both cities. For this was no small thing. The bombing of Coventry was part of a campaign explicitly designed to kill people—women, men and children—and so to cower them into submission and surrender. The Dresden bombing took place when the war was all but over. It is widely acknowledged that there was not even a strategic military reason for the bombing, which levelled Dresden and killed 40 000 people. The motive was revenge. It was humbling to be in Dresden on August 13th of 2005 to hear a local Catholic priest tell us, with tears, how much it meant to him, and to the people of Dresden, that my colleagues and I should come to Dresden to reflect with them on the forgiveness at the heart of our shared gospel.

The crimes committed in the 2nd World War were, you see, not only crimes committed by one group of human beings against another. They were also crimes committed by one group of Christians against another. Most of the soldiers, sailors and airmen involved in the conflict were Christians—Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed, Orthodox and Roman Catholic—Christians who were killing each other not for Christ, but for territorial Empire. What the Second World War highlighted, graphically and tragically, was not only the inhumanity of men and women towards other men and women, but also the lack of true peace or reconciliation at the heart of European Christianity.

Turning now to today’s gospel reading, I’d like you to note just two things. First, that Peter’s question about forgiveness is not occasioned by the misdeeds of someone beyond the community of faith. Peter asks how many times he is called to forgive a member of his own church. “Seventy-times-seven” times, says Jesus, or, if I may translate, as many times as is necessary for the sake of reconciliation. For what is the church if not a reconciled community, a community that is able to live at peace with itself in spite of all the sins of its members? What is the church if its members cannot forgive each other as Christ has forgiven them? If the church cannot do this, then it is not the church. It is nothing more than a sociological or political reality where birds of a feather flock together. If a church’s members cannot live with each other’s differences and forgive each other’s sins, then we are nothing more than a social club, gathered around the very ghettos of race, class or gender that Christ came to overcome.

People sometimes ask me why I am still part of the church, especially given the church’s participation in the genocide against my people. The people who ask are usually those who have been wounded by the church, people who feel that the church has let them down or, at least, undervalued what they had to contribute. My reply usually goes something like this: the scandal of the gospel is that Christ, who had no sin, yet became sin for our sake. He took on the flesh of people who hate and kill each other. By doing so, he loved and accepted our fragile humanity. He forgave our sins and made reconciliation possible. Who am I, then, to pretend that I am somehow superior to anyone else in the church? The church can only exist by forgiveness. How can I, who have been forgiven my sins by both Christ and my sisters and brothers, refuse to forgive the church? I cannot.

That does not mean, of course, that we should forgive each other’s sins willy-nilly, whether there are any true signs of repentance or not. Expecting victims to forgive a perpetrator who shows no signs of remorse and no willingness to change their behaviour is simply to reinforce the power of perpetrators, and does nothing for victims except to retraumatise and preserve them in their victimhood. Last week’s reading, from earlier in this same chapter of Matthew, should make that clear. The one who has clearly and incontrovertibly sinned against another needs to repent and amend their lives if they are to retain their membership of the church. For where there is, in fact, true repentance and amendment of life, true forgiveness also becomes possible. Without it, though, forgiveness should remain forever off the table.

Which brings me to the second thing I would like you to notice about today’s gospel passage: that forgiveness is only possible for people who are willing, themselves, to forgive. That’s the point of the story about the forgiven slave who cannot forgive his brother, is it not? Although the king, out of sheer mercy, had forgiven his unpayable debt, the slave was not able to do the same for a brother who owed him something. So the king threw the unmerciful slave into prison. Now, some of you, I know, will think this very harsh. Perhaps some of you will even get a little theological and say that this story encourages a gospel of works because what it says, in the end, is that it is our capacity to forgive that ultimately earns God’s forgiveness. Well, to that I would reply in the classically reformed way: that our capacity to forgive another does not earn God’s forgiveness, but rather shows that we are people who have truly experienced the power and truth of forgiveness ourselves. Only the person who knows that they can never repay the debt owed to God, only the person who knows themselves to be loved and forgiven it all, would possibly be able to forgive the crimes of his or her brother. If we do not know this, deep in our bones, perhaps we have never experienced the true power of forgiveness?

At a human rights conference at Whitley College in 1997, in the midst of lots of grand speeches about the call to justice and reconciliation, I met a man named Retosa. At lunch one day, I asked him where he was from, and what he did all day. His reply showed me what forgiveness really looks like, in practice. Restosa was from Liberia, and what he did all day was this: gathering families who had killed each other’s children during the first civil war (1989-1997) together into a room to confess their sins and learn the journey towards forgiving one another. “Only the person who knows the depth of their crime, and the amazing liberation that is possible because of God’s forgiveness, could possibly summon the courage to forgive such crimes from the heart” said Retosa. Perhaps that is why this extraordinary work is being undertaken by a Christian pastor rather than a social worker.

Allow me to summarise what we have noticed in this way. (1) That the church is called to be a community of reconciliation. (2) That our capacity to be that community is directly related to the extent to which our sins, which are many, are forgiven in Christ. And, finally, this: (3) that Christ’s forgiveness comes alive in the world only where the church knows itself to be a community of forgiven sinners. For that, my friends, is what all that talk in Matthew about binding and loosing is all about (see 18.18-20). Christ will only do in the world what his church is willing to do. For we are his body, in whom the Spirit of Christ faces this world. What we do, or do not do, is what Christ himself does. Such is Christ’s vulnerability. Such, then, is our responsibility.

The paradox of forgiveness is this, then: that we are forgiven only insofar as the truth of our own forgiveness has so penetrated our hearts that we are able to regard others, also, with mercy and grace. May God help us to repent, and amend our lives, and forgive those who trespass against us, as God in Christ has forgiven us.

Let me finish with a prayer, the litany of reconciliation from Coventry Cathedral:

‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’

The hatred which divides nation from nation, people from people, class from class,
     God forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,
     God forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,
     God forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,
     God forgive.

Our indifference to the plight of the incarcerated, the homeless, the refugee,
     God forgive.

The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women and children,
     God forgive.

The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,
     God forgive.

‘Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’*

Garry Worete Deverell

* I've adapted the litany to address concerns around gender and ethnicity.  The original can be found on the website of Coventry Cathedral.

Reconciliation: personal reflections

This article first appeared in Gesher: the official journal of The Council of Christians and Jews (Victoria) 4/5 (2014): pp.16-19.

 The word ‘reconciliation’ bears witness to a contested space within Indigenous Australia. For many, if not most, reconciliation is precisely what is needed in the face of the historic injustices visited upon Aboriginal peoples by the invading colonists who came to these lands from 1788 onward. Reconciliation describes a process by which colonists acknowledge, in detail, their wrongdoing and then seek forgiveness for these misdeeds from Australia’s First Peoples. Importantly, for the proponents of reconciliation, absolution would not be automatic. It would be conditional upon Australia’s colonising peoples making concrete and measurable efforts to undo previous evils or, in the many instances where such undoing is impossible, to offer a just and proportional compensation for wrongdoing in ways that meet the approval of First Peoples.

However, some Indigenous Australians are not at all happy with the language of reconciliation. They rightly point out that reconciliation is a Jewish and Christian idea, an idea that arrived with the colonists and cannot, therefore, be regarded as neutral or benign. For some Aboriginal commentators, the language of reconciliation is part of the colonising apparatus that keeps First Peoples ‘down’, and it does so by forcing Aboriginal people to think about their future within an alien framework that is not really their own, a framework that puts not their own, but colonists’, interests at the centre. And what is the colonist’s prevailing interest, according to this account? It is the need to find absolution, a salving of conscience, a healing of the gaping wound that has been rent in the colonial sense of self through its multitudinous breakings of the Jewish and Christian law: ‘do not kill’, do not steal’, ‘do not covet’, ‘do not bear false witness’. To this way of thinking, the colonial motivation for justice with regard to First Peoples terminates not when Aborigines are satisfied that justice has been done, but when the ‘whitefella’ sense of guilt is expiated. And that, quite simply, is not good enough.

In the brief paragraphs that follow, I should like to outline the way in which I, personally, have reconciled myself to the language of reconciliation. In doing so, I want my readers to know that I am a Trawoolway man from northern Truwunna (Tasmania) and that I was inducted by my parents and their community into the Baptist tradition of Christianity from a very young age. Since my childhood I have been keenly aware of a struggle, both within and without, between the British heritage of my Baptist beginnings and the Trawoolway instinct for cultural survival against almost overwhelming odds. The nature of that struggle has often changed over the years. There have been times when I felt that my Christian heritage was indeed the enemy of all in me that is genuinely Trawoolway, most often when the churchly institutions of Christianity steadfastly refused to recognise:

a) that I or my people are genuinely indigenous to this land: that we belong to this country, and the country belongs to us;

b) that I or my people are being, or have been, grievously mistreated or harmed through the ongoing violence of colonisation;

c) that churchly institutions participate, and have participated, in that mistreatment and harm;

d) that those same institutions therefore have a responsibility to make some kind of amends for the evils that have been visited upon my people.

Unfortunately, in my view, churchly institutions have made little progress on any of these fronts across my lifetime. Yes, fine words have been uttered in a very general way, especially by the Uniting Church to which I now belong. But I still experience the church as fundamentally racist at the level of day-to-day, concrete relationships. It is in the wake of that experience of racism that I most often consider resigning both my ordination and my membership in any form of denominational church.

At the same time, I have very often experienced the nascent Christianity into which I was inducted – represented, here, by its most fundamental language and imagination in Scripture and apostolic tradition – as the greatest ally I have in seeking to survive as Trawoolway in colonial Australia. (I reject the narratives of ‘post-colonialism’ outright, because the process of colonisation clearly continues apace, even as it becomes more circumspect and reflexive). Consider, for example, the Pauline notion that God chooses the ‘nothings’ of this world – literally those who do not exist as far as the dominant powers are concerned – to be God’s people and to ‘shame’ those who consider themselves wise and strong (1 Cor 1.26-31). As a person who has been repeatedly told throughout my life that I don’t exist (‘you are not Aboriginal, there are no Aboriginal Tasmanians left’) or that I don’t matter (‘you are Aboriginal, but that means that you are a drunk, a welfare cheat, a waste of space and resources who has nothing meaningful to contribute’) I find this notion deeply encouraging. Consider, also, Paul’s revolutionary teaching about the identity of God. God, we are told in Scripture, was ‘in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor 5.19). Yes, ‘in Christ’, a man despised, rejected, condemned to torture and crucifixion by the imperial powers of his world. In Christ, so the story goes, the creator of the universe exchanges his great power and position for that of a slave (Phil 2.6, 7), that God might come close enough to offer help and salvation to all who are slaves, that God might lift them from their servitude to the colonising laws of sin and alienation and make them, instead, free children of God (Rom 8.15-17). Again, as one who has experienced the enslaving power of colonists, I am encouraged by this message about a God who is not identified with such power but comes, instead, alongside the colonised offering help, support and ultimately the gift of liberation. In my darkest moments, when I find myself agreeing with my oppressors that I am nothing, no one, of no value to anyone or anything, this message can be the only thing between me and oblivion. In this sense, the message of God’s love that is at the heart of the Christian evangel is often the only thing that is able to rescue my Trawoolway self from the overwhelming racist power of church and society alike.

So how have I reconciled myself to the language of reconciliation, a language that the colonists brought with them from over the seas? By first recognising, frankly, that there can be no return to an existence or mode of indigeneity that is somehow free of colonial influence, that dreams of any such return are (somewhat paradoxically) generated by colonialism itself. And, then, by recognising the genuine power of the Christian gospel of reconciliation to make a positive difference to Indigenous people and not simply to our oppressors. And, finally, by recognising that the language of reconciliation in no way absolves colonists from shouldering the lion’s share of responsibility when it comes to creating a just settlement for the First Peoples they have wronged. Indeed, as I will argue below, the language of reconciliation actually creates that responsibility. Allow me to expand on each of these claims in turn.

I recently attended a conference in Melbourne that billed itself as a discussion of the notion of sovereignty from ‘postcolonial’ and ‘theological’ perspectives. The only Australian Indigenous speakers at the conference were a Warlpiri elder and his son, both of whom are also committed Baptists. Following their presentation, which drew liberally from the language of reconciliation, they were berated with questions about why, as Indigenous people, they felt the need to draw upon the ‘language of the colonisers’ at all. Did they not see that the language of reconciliation was little more than an opiate given to Aboriginal people by the missionaries as something of a consolation prize for the stealing of their lands and cultures? Why did they not draw, instead, on purely Indigenous stories and traditions in order to maintain their noble identities as Warlpiri people over and against the oppressive language of the coloniser? I found it extremely difficult to listen to these questions and take them seriously because, from my perspective, such questions serve only to inscribe the mentality and methods of colonialism all over again. 

First, it is simply not possible to talk about a purely ‘indigenous’ language and tradition in contemporary Australia. The fact of contact between Indigenes and colonists over more than two hundred years has created new, more or less hybrid, narrative frameworks for the interpretation of Indigenous traditions. That is what contact does: it creates new traditions out of older traditions. And the traditions live on precisely because they are adaptable; they are able to respond creatively to new data, new voices, new narratives and meaning structures. Every living Indigenous culture in this country has adapted in this way. And every interpretation of older traditions – preserved, for example, in colonist’s journals and academic papers – are themselves examples and performances of these hybrid narratives of contact between Indigenes and colonists. All insistence about working from ‘purely’ Indigenous traditions – unpolluted by Western or Christian influences - is therefore not only naive but also deeply disrespectful of Indigenous people. It fails to recognise that it is precisely our ability to adapt and respond to colonial perspectives, to absorb them creatively into our own, that has made the difference between our surviving and not surviving.

Talk of cultural or racial ‘purity’ is also, rather nakedly in my view, a reinscription of that ‘noble savage’/Garden of Eden fantasy so beloved of Romantics and Nazis alike. The perseverance of the fantasy into so-called ‘post-colonial’ times demonstrates just how powerfully the colonist needs to maintain the fiction that a ‘pure’ form of indigeneity is still possible. This fantasy has two basic functions. It first soothes colonial guilt by assuring the troubled conscience that the damage is not irreparable, the ‘pure’ has not, in fact, been irredeemably lost. At the same time, the fantasy also works to legitimate that familiar colonial strategy of dismissing or ‘disappearing’ – sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively (the effect is equally devastating in either case!) – all forms of the so-called ‘half-caste’ or ‘half-breed’. Half-castes (so-called) – whether constructed in cultural or biological terms – are deeply threatening to colonists because they imply a ‘muddying of the waters’ with regard to purist notions of identity, culture and vocation. Their presence, if acknowledged at all, signals the emergence of an alarming hybridity that deeply disturbs the ‘us and them’ dualism of the colonial psyche. It is a curious fact of colonial history around the world that colonists – usually from Europe – hate only one kind of people more than the ‘blacks’. And that is the ‘coloureds’. It is my observation that Second Peoples in Australia remain confused - routinely and predictably confused – by Aborigines like myself who do not fit their purist notions about what an Aborigine is. Second Peoples – whether their ancestry be European or Asian or whatever – are routinely confronted and offended by the fact that the vast majority of Indigenous people have fair skin and are clearly adept at living urban and suburban lives along with everyone else. In my personal experience, colonial masters are particularly offended by red-headed Aborigines who clearly know more about their traditions than they do themselves and are able to offer an alternative reading of the significance of those traditions from another place or viewpoint.

That brings me to my next point of reconciliation with the language of reconciliation: the genuine power of this narrative to make a positive difference, not only to oppressors, but also to Indigenous people. Against the critics of reconciliation who claim that the project is primarily about expiating ‘white guilt’ I want to say that reconciliation is actually about the truth, most of all - the telling of truth and the common ownership of that truth - by both First and Second peoples alike. The truth is this: that there can be no reconciliation, no coming together of First and Second Peoples to build a more just future, without a common ownership of the undeniable truth of what has happened in this country.

For many years – from the 1850s right up until the 1990s – the public imagination of this country was dominated by a great silence about the stealing of Aboriginal land, the long war between invaders and native warriors, the systematic attempts to destroy whole cultures and nations and the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their families. School children were taught that the land was largely ‘empty’ when white ‘settlers’ arrived and that the few natives who already lived here soon died out because of their stupidity and their failure to cultivate the land. Students were also taught that Australia was unique amongst European colonies because it had never known a war that was fought on its own soil. 

These narratives were taught to Indigines and colonists alike. But throughout this period First Peoples held on to their own histories, their own memories, their own versions of what had happened. Eventually our memories and tellings came to the attention of revisionist historians such as Manning Clarke, and later Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds. In their hands, the truth began to get out. It began to contest the false versions of history so beloved of those whose wealth and power had been founded on lies. As this truth is slowly owned by Second Peoples, as the injustices visited upon Indigenous peoples and the fact of our survival slowly become part of a common national narrative, a more genuine launching-place for a reconciled future comes into focus. For reconciliation begins, as the Johannine gospel says, with a confession of the truth (1 John 1.8). Without the recognition of that truth, there can be no freedom (John 8.32). For freedom, in this understanding, is ultimately about liberation from falsehood and lies – lies about oneself, about others, and about the identity of the divine. Whoever lives in falsehood is a slave to falsehood. But whomever is set free from falsehood by the arrival of the truth will be free to choose a new destiny (John 8.34-38).

Perhaps it is now clear why I feel compelled to argue that the language of reconciliation in no way absolves colonists from shouldering the lion’s share of responsibility when it comes to creating a just settlement for the First People’s they have wronged. Indeed, as I have already intimated, the language of reconciliation actually creates that responsibility. For wrongdoing, in the language of reconciliation, creates a responsibility in the guilty party to provide satisfaction or recompense to the party that has been wronged. 

How did Jacob reconcile himself to Esau, the brother whom he had wronged by swindling him out of his inheritance? First he confessed to God that he was, in truth, unworthy of the good fortune that had come his way (Gen 32.10). Then he sent a very valuable ‘gift’ on ahead of him – a great flock of goats, sheep, camels, cattle and donkeys – along with a message that these were for Esau (Gen 32.13-21). When the two brothers finally meet Esau greets Jacob with words of forgiveness and grace, to be sure, but the story is structured in such a way as to highlight Jacob’s responsibility to offer – at least to offer! – some kind of compensation for what has clearly been stolen. A saying of Jesus in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount reinforces the point. If one attends the temple to be reconciled to God, one should not pretend that such reconciliation is going to be in any way real or effective if there is a matter outstanding between oneself and another. If you have wronged someone, Jesus counsels, you must first do whatever it takes to be reconciled with that person before you can pretend to seek the forgiveness of God (Matt 5.23, 24). 

So, while the language of reconciliation clearly invokes the possibility of forgiveness as a way through to a lasting peace, the granting of forgiveness is very often conditional: conditional upon a recognition in the guilty parties that they have indeed done wrong, and that those parties therefore have a responsibility to make recompense for what has been stolen or destroyed.[1]
  Let me conclude with a challenge for the Jewish and Christian leaders who will read this article. Can any of you say, out of the truth that whispers deep in your hearts, that you have truly taken responsibility for the wrongs your synagogues, churches and congregations have visited upon the First Peoples of this land? Have you acknowledged your part in stealing land, removing children, and destroying culture? Have you acknowledged, and do you take responsibility for, the ongoing effects of these injustices in the form of disproportionately high levels of Indigenous poverty, incarceration and mental illness? Furthermore, have you made apology to the people so affected – not in that general rhetorical way so beloved of politicians and CEOs – but face-to-face, neighbour-to-neighbour? Finally, have you demonstrated to the people you have wronged that you are serious about seeking recompense and justice for them, so that they may have a chance to create a better future? Have you asked them what form that recompense should take, genuinely asked them? For the history of do-gooders in this country unfortunately suggests that such asking – and the careful listening for a guiding response that is part of any genuine partnership – rarely happens on the ground. Instead, it is the colonists who decide what form the compensation should take, and when, and how. Your response to these questions will make all the difference to whether reconciliation really has a chance in Australia, or whether it does not. My prayer, as always, is that the veil of ignorance might be torn from all our eyes (2 Cor 4.4). Only then will reconciliation have a chance.

[1] Elsewhere I have explored in detail the relationship between what has been called the ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ dimensions of covenant-making in the Jewish and Christian traditions. I am aware that unconditional forgiveness very often creates the possibility for a just response in the wrongdoer. My intent in this essay is not to exclude that possibility outright, but simply to argue that whatever the motivation toward just compensation, recompense is always part of the settlement phenomenologically. See Garry J. Deverell, The Bond of Freedom: vows, sacraments and the formation of the Christian self (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster Press, 2008) pp. 124-127.

You are forgiven!

Texts: Galatians 2.15-21; Luke 7.36-8.3

In the story we just heard, Jesus does not one, but two things that no self-respecting Jewish Rabbi should ever do.  First, he tells a woman that her sins are forgiven.  Definitely a no-no, for only God can forgive sins, and in the eyes of the religious folk with whom he was eating at the time, Jesus was certainly not God!  Nor was he an ordained priest who could speak for God.  But then, while they are reeling from the shock of that first gesture, Jesus makes yet another controversial move.  He declares to the woman not only that her sins are forgiven, but also that it is her faith, faith mind you, that has saved her.  Now, this is pretty weird stuff, coming from a first century Jewish Rabbi.  Because, as every Jewish schoolboy could tell you, the only way to experience God’s salvation was to obey the law of Moses.  Indeed, some would have argued that obeying the law and salvation were exactly the same thing.  Salvation was obeying the law.

So, what was Jesus up to here?  Were these actions just a piece of stirring?  Was Jesus just the kind of bloke who liked to rouse his mates up before he told them he was joking and ordered another round of bitter?  Well, no.  What Jesus wanted to do was nothing less than to change their understanding of God.  In his view, their God was way too small-minded, way too concerned with fretting over the minutiae of human failing.  Jesus’ God, on the other hand, was one who was big-hearted, a God interested not so much in rules as in relationship.  The key question that this big-hearted God asks of humankind is not ‘have you done the right thing?’ but ‘do you trust me with your future, do you believe that I love you?’

There are two ways to understand sin, you see.  Yes ‘sin’—I know it’s not a particularly hot topic these days—but it’s kind of indispensable to Christian theology so the preacher really has no option but to talk about it.  One could see sin as breaking a set of moral rules set up by God.  You know, do not steal, do not kill, do not bear false witness against your neighbour.  That kind of thing.  In this case, sin is defined primarily as law-breaking.  There are many Christians, Jews and Muslims who hold this view of sin, even today.  But there is another, slightly more complex, way of understanding sin, and that is to see the breaking of those moral prohibitions not so much as a breaking of law, but as severing of trust in relationship.  That is to see the breaking of the moral law as symptomatic of a more foundational breakdown in the relationship between neighbours.  In this view, a person kills or steals because she no longer cares for her neighbour; or does not believe that her neighbour cares for her.  This latter view of sin is more faithful, I believe, to a genuinely New Testament faith.  And it is borne out in the story we are reading this morning.

Traditionally, the sinful woman in our story is portrayed as a prostitute, one who chose to sell her body to men in return for money.  If this is true, she must have been a very high class prostitute in order to afford the alabaster jar of ointment which she lavishes upon Jesus!  Such items were, in first century Palestine, very rare and precious.  Only the very rich could afford them.  It is likely, then, that the woman in Luke’s story is not a common prostitute but, rather more complexly, the slave or concubine of a Roman official, a woman who would have been passed around his friends and business associates as part of the hospitality and entertainment of his house.  If that is so, then it is really very unlikely that the woman ever really chose to become the ‘sinner’ that she is.  More likely is that her parents, or a former owner, sold her to the colonial invader in order to pay off their debts.  It is unlikely that she would have had any say in such a transaction, because in the first century woman had little say about anything.  Woman – and especially young girls -  were regarded by both Jews and Gentiles as chattels to be bought or sold according to the economic needs of their fathers or husbands.  Here is a woman, then, who probably never intended to break the Jewish moral code, but is forced to do so, whether she likes it or not, simply because she is caught up in a cruel and unjust economic system.

What Jesus is able to see about this woman, that his dinner-table friends are unable to see, is that while she is indeed a sinner in the formal sense—someone who breaks the moral law—in her heart of hearts what she longs for most is nothing less than the restoration of her relationship with both God and her people.  In the place where she lives and works, she is simply unable to keep the Jewish law and stay alive.  As a consequence, she suffers the judgement of her religious community, a judgement which includes the belief that God has rejected her as well.  Yet, in her heart of hearts she believes that this cannot be so.  She cannot keep the moral law.  But she does not believe that God would reject her over something she cannot do.  In her heart of hearts, she believes that God loves her, that God is merciful, that God would forgive her even if her community will not.  And it is that longing, and that belief, that gives her the courage to pour out her love upon Jesus.  For her, Jesus is clearly God’s representative, the one through whom relationship with God becomes possible again.

Now, I put it to you that we, all of us, are not so different to this woman. Most of us try to live upright lives.  We believe in the value of the moral code, but we cannot always keep it. We are caught up in economic and social systems that make us sinners even where we do not intend to be.  Like when I bought some flash new clothes at Chadstone last year.  There was nothing, absolutely nothing available in the store that was not made by slave labour in China.  And the kind of clothes I needed were not available at the op shop.  Does that mean that I am condemned by God, that I shall never share in God’s salvation?  Certainly, I broke the moral law.  And I do so every day simply by being a member of this scandalously privileged society in which I live.  Every piece of buying and selling I do rips somebody off.  Yet, I do not believe that God rejects me simply because I break the moral law.  I believe that if my intention is otherwise, if I care about God and my neighbour and long to live with them in a just and loving relationship, that God will honour my desire.  I believe that God loves me, and forgives me even though I am, objectively and by any measure, a sinner.  It is faith that saves us, as Jesus says.  Faith in the fact of God’s forgiving love.

Now, that turns around what many of us commonly understand as sin.  In the perspective of the New Testament, the real sinner is the one who thinks she or he is righteous, while the really righteous person is righteous only insofar as she or he has faith in God’s love and mercy.  For that is what Jesus teaches in the story he told the dinner guests.  The righteous person is no longer the one who does no wrong.  Rather, the righteous person is someone who knows that she stands in need of God’s mercy, and believes in her heart of hearts that God will forgive her.  For righteousness is not, for the God of Jesus Christ, ultimately about keeping the rules.  It is about trusting that you are loved and accepted even though you cannot keep the rules. 

In Galatians, the Apostle Paul says this:  that a person is not justified before God by keeping the law, but by trusting or having faith in Jesus Christ.  Through Christ, he says, we die to the demands of the law, because the law only serves to highlight our guilt.  In Christ, however, we live a life in which it is not our own righteousness that matters, but Christ’s.  Only Christ was able to live the truly righteous life that made no compromise with evil.  Only he was willing to suffer the full consequence of doing so, to be killed by evil men because he would not play the game.  Therefore the Christian is called to depend on Christ, and on Christ alone, to approach God - not in one’s own righteousness but in Christ’s.  But that takes faith, faith in the word that Christ says to the woman in Luke’s story, ‘your sins are forgiven, go in peace.’

In the end, all that that save us from this dog-eat-dog world of corruption and despair is our faith in God’s word of forgiveness and mercy.  Do you believe?  Do you trust this word and believe it with all your heart?  If you do, then live the life of faith.  Do not judge your brother or sister who sins, because you are yourself a sinner who lives from the power of God’s forgiveness.  From now on, says the apostle, ‘it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.  The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’  Paul, it seems, actually lived his life as though he was a forgiven sinner.  We are called to do so as well.