Revolutions

Ruth 3.1-5, 4.13-17; Psalm 127; Hebrews 9. 24-28; Mark 12. 38-44

The book of Ruth is a parable, a story written in order to undermine the dominance of a certain kind of religious ideology that was prominent in Israel at the time of its composition.  You can read all about that ideology in the book of Ezra.  There you will read about the zealousness of a group of aristocratic religious reformers who returned from the exile in Babylon convinced that God had punished Israel primarily because its men had taken foreign wives to their beds, thus making it possible for corrupt (that is, non-Jewish) ideas and practices to flourish amongst the chosen people.  The reformers therefore forced or convinced thousands of ordinary men, most of whom had never in fact left Jerusalem at all during the exilic period, to ‘put away’ both their wives and their children as an act of religious duty.  Read against that background, one can see how the book of Ruth would have once been regarded as a revolutionary literature.  For in telling a story of the royal lineage of David, it also seeks to demonstrate that the God of Israel cannot be counted on to support such a programme.  In the verses we read this morning, the authors stress that Israel’s most lauded family only became what it was because God chose to bless and honour two revolutionary women who chose to buck the religious system of dos and donts.  Tamar, a Canaanite woman, disguised herself as a prostitute in order to get an heir for Judah, the great ancestor of the Davidic clan.  And Ruth, a Moabite woman with no firm legal or religious status in Israel, went out on a very thin and very dangerous limb in order to get a son for Naomi.  One must surely conclude, at least, that God is not one to honour our fear of ethnicities other than our own.  And perhaps we may also conclude that God will not be bound by any of our human fears or anxieties, no matter how deeply mythic or religious their origins seems to be.

Now, there is a message in this for our politicians, is there not? And for all those millions of Australians who support their current policies.  Allow me to paraphrase the Psalmist for a moment.  Prime Minister, Premier, unless God is in your vision for Australia, you dream in vain.  Unless God supports all your hard work in keeping the poor and the desperate from our shores, then you work for nothing.  In vain you rise early to plan for a strong and secure Australia, and in vain to stay up late to ‘protect’ our children from the poor and wretched, and so secure their future.  For unless God grants a future, in the sheer gratuity of his love and care, there is no future.  Unless God shares your vision, your vision will fail.  A happy and secure future, you see, is like having children.  It cannot be produced by our one’s will or effort, especially if such effort is motivated by such deeply held fears or anxieties.  Ask any parent you know, especially those who laboured anxiously to conceive for many months or years, and they will tell you that children come when they come.  They come from God, neither as reward for effort nor because of any sense of right or the privilege we could lay claim to.  They come as a gift, without reason or foretelling.  And so it is with our future, Prime Minister, Premier.  God will not labour with you to secure our children’s future by saving them from evil, dangerous immigrants.  Quite the opposite, I suspect.  Could it be, Prime Minister, Premier,, that in their arrival is our gift, God’s gift for a revolutionary future of peace and reconciliation amongst the tribes of the world?  If the parable of Ruth is to be believed, Prime Minister, Premier, then the gift comes always in the stranger, the one beyond the pale, the one who would cross a great boundary, a sea of impossibility, in order to reach us, in order to make the revolution possible.

But I am ahead of myself, for I wanted to talk about another of God’s revolutions, the revolution in which poverty becomes the most enriching experience in the world.  This is figured for us in the gospel story of the widow who gave all she had, all she had to live on, into the temple treasury.  Lest you think I am being romantic about her poverty, let me remind you of the situation such a woman would have faced in that time and place.  In a deeply patriarchal society, such as that of first-century Palestine, women are little more than goods to be bought and sold.  Upon marriage, they pass from their father’s ownership to their husband’s.  If that husband dies and there is no-one else, no other kin, who will marry her, then she reverts to the patronage of her father’s house.  But remember that we are talking about a desperately poor peasant society here.  Most men, because of hard labour and poor nutrition, could not expect to live beyond thirty five in ordinary circumstances.  Fathers and brothers would therefore be most unwilling, if they were still alive, to take the widows of their kin, especially if they had children already.  Jewish widows were, quite simply, at the bottom of the food-chain.  They were the ones left to fend for themselves when the going got tough.  And that often meant either Roman slavery, or prostitution, or both.  Often these options amounted to the same thing.  Now, add to all that the expectations of the religious elites who ran the temple, those whom Mark’s gospel calls ‘the Scribes and the Saducees’.  These groups had enormous power in Israel, in both religious and political terms.  They enjoyed the highest religious and social status because they were the heirs of the priestly casts.  But this also gave them enormous economic power, because, by declaring a person or place ritually unclean, they could also successfully blackmail any person who wished to claw their way back into a state of purity.  The phrase in Mark’s gospel, ‘they devour widows houses’ probably refers to precisely that practise.  It is likely that some of the priestly class, at least, were given to extracting money from pious widows in return for a declaration of cultic purity from sin.

Given all that, why does Mark record the story of the widow’s offering?  Wasn’t she being ripped off?  Why would she put in all that she had to live on, unless she was being blackmailed in some way?  Some commentators say that the story is told simply to highlight the evil practices of the scribes.  But I do not think this is so.  For later tradition will make explicit what is already right here in Mark’s text, namely, the intention to hold this woman up as an example of a truly revolutionary discipleship under very trying conditions.  For while it is true that the text does warn the reader against the false piety and moral blackmail of the priestly system, it does not propose an entirely socio-economic solution to the problem.  How could it?  How could a widow possibly be saved from economic ruin in such circumstances?  Is someone going to step in to give her more cash, or protect her from what the system makes inevitable?  There is no hint, in Mark’s text, that Jesus or his benefactors intend to do so.  So why is the story told?

The answer lies, I think, in a reading of the story which takes the whole flow of Mark’s gospel into account.  In chapter 1 we read that Jesus had come to preach the kingdom, to heal, and to exorcise.  In chapters 2 and 7 we read stories about Jesus’ willingness to confront or break the laws of the temple aristocracy in order to do so.  In chapters 8 & 10, Jesus tells his disciples that there is salvation only in being willing to die, to be baptised with his own baptism, to become the slave of all.  Also in chapter 10, in what I believe to be the key utterance of the gospel, Jesus declares that salvation, while impossible for human beings, is indeed possible for God.  Can you see where all this is heading?  By the time we come to this story of the widows offering, the reader couldn’t possibly believe that Jesus is offering some kind of socio-economic solution to the problems at hand.  On the contrary!  What Jesus seems to be implying is this:  that in order to overcome, to be saved, to be healed, to be liberated, or whatever, one must ultimately give the powers arraigned against us what they want:  our very lives.  Why?  Because Mark believe that it is in giving our lives over to the powers that be, that we shall ultimately gain our freedom from those powers.

Now, one can see how Karl Marx came to his stinging criticism of Christianity, can’t you.  Religion, he said, was an opiate to keep the poor in their place.  But this is of course to entirely miss the point of what Mark is trying to teach us!  You see, for Mark – and indeed for Paul who wrote before him – there are two powers in the world:  the power of religion or karma, which says that we get what we deserve, and the power of gospel and grace, which gives without reason or cause.  Now, in Mark’s world as in ours, it is the power of karma that appears to reign supreme.  We get ahead by paying our dues, working hard, and keeping our patrons happy.  Which implies, of course, that we want to get ahead, that we are happy to invest in the very system that enslaves us because we believe it will reward us.  But grace inhabits this world of karma in such a way that its power is stolen away.  The power of karma is death:  death is what the karmic system threatens us with in order to make us do and be what it wants.  But Grace says:  “in order to find yourself you must lose yourself.  In order to live, you must die.  In order to gain all things you must lose all things.”  In this way, grace promises that the moment of capitulation will ultimately become the moment of freedom, for it is in being willing to let go of what we cling to so desperately that we shall gain ourselves anew as a free people whose lives are hidden with Christ in God.  What seems ludicrous and impossible for human beings, is of course entirely possible for God.  This is God’s revolution:  the coming of a new and strange peace, at precisely that point when justice seems dead.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the new Matrix movie is called Revolutions.  In that story, it is at the precise moment when the new Son of Man, Neo Anderson, gives himself over to the power of inevitability - to the evilly karmic power of Smith who wants to repeat his banality over and over in the world until there is nothing left but the Same - that the revolution begins.  As he lies crucified upon the power of the machines, absorbed, it seems, into the power of the same old thing, a miracle begins to happen.  What was absorbed begins to absorb.  What was dead now begins to infect the whole system with life.  What had been given away now spreads through all the world, bringing light and life and peace where there was only darkness, death and enmity.  So it can be for us.  Jesus promises that if we give over to him that which controls us most, our desire to ascend the karmic ladder and become someone, then we can be saved.  Only in dying is there is life, only in stillness is there dancing, only in suffering the evil of what surrounds us is there freedom from it.  This is the revolution the gospel promises.  What is impossible for human beings, is possible for God.

Signs of revolution

Isaiah 35.1-10; Luke 1.47-55; Matthew 11.2-11

For Matthew’s gospel, John the Baptist has a special place amongst the prophets of Yahweh.  He is the one who goes before the Christ of Israel, to announce his coming and prepare the way.  Yet even John, when he is imprisoned by King Herod for criticizing his regime, is capable of doubt about Jesus’ true identity.  He sends his disciples to ask Jesus a question:  ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we wait for another?’  The answer John receives from Jesus recalls the prophecy of Isaiah that we read just now, a prophecy that imagines how things might change when God’s salvation has arrived in the world.   Let me quote:

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are fearful of heart, 
“Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God! . . .”

The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert wastes.

         (Is 35.5-6)

Hear, then, the parallels in Jesus’ answer to John in Matthew’s gospel: 

Go and tell John what you hear and see:  the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.  Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.

We may conclude, then, that for both Isaiah and Matthew the advent of the messiah is attended by graphic and visible signs.  The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised, the outcasts are brought into the community once more, and the poor hear good news.

It is important that we understand these signs in their theological as well as their literal sense.  There can be no doubt that Jesus was a faith healer.  He did cure specific medical ailments, and he did raise the dead to life.  Even the most sceptical historians have found it difficult to explain away the sheer abundance of the evidence on this point.  Still, if we are Christians, we must understand that the healings are not just healings, and the raisings are not just raisings.  They are not, in other words, to be understood simply as facts amongst other facts; they are not to be read simply as history.  For the miracles of Jesus have a theological meaning as well.  Theologically, they are to be read as advance announcements or signs of a religious, social, and political revolution, a revolution initiated by God in the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, but not yet completed in its fullness.

I talk of revolution because the coming of Jesus has changed, indeed transformed, far more than the medical fortunes of those individuals he happened to meet in Galilee more than two thousand years ago.  The coming of Jesus has changed everything, from the way we imagine God, to the way we value our fellow human beings, to the way we construct our law and government.  We Westerners so easily forget how deeply our values and our whole way of life have been influenced by Christ and the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  We forget that the discourse of human rights is grounded in the narratives of Christ’s hospitality towards the excluded and marginalised members of this own society.  We forget that feminism found its genesis in the way that Christ formed relationships with women.  We forget that the greatest books and poems of the Western tradition may be read as conversations with the Bible.  We forget that liberation movements, from the abolition of slavery in the Americas to the more recent revolutions in South America and South Africa, have looked to Jesus for inspiration and encouragement.  We forget that many of the modern medical miracles we take for granted are grounded in the research of Christian doctors working in missionary situations.  If there were time, we could talk, also, about the theological origins of the Rule of Law, the Welfare State, the University, the School and the Hospital.  In these, and in a thousand other ways, the coming of Jesus has changed the world.  In these, and a thousand other ways, the love of God in Christ has so changed our humanity that we have been enabled to change the world after Christ’s example.  In so many ways, Christ’s people have been salt and light for a dark and sterile world.

Let us not be content with all of this, however.  For Christ’s revolution is far from complete.  The messianic kingdom has clearly not yet arrived in its fullness.  If you don’t believe me, just look around this country we’re making.  Instead of helping the poor, we lock them up – whether the poor be asylum seekers, the mentally ill, or Aboriginal people.  For these are the people who overwhelmingly populate our detention centres and prisons, each of them all but crushed under the weight of grief, abuse or criminal neglect. I could speak of other national tragedies this morning—like the massive cuts the government has made to foreign aid programmes, or the steady rise in rural and suburban poverty, or the epidemic of depression and anxiety that is sweeping through our young people.  But I shall not.  Instead I would simply remind you that Advent faith is not only about remembering the way in which Christ came to us the first time around.  It is about looking for the signs of that arrival in our own place and time.  Most of all, it is about making ourselves available to God as the church, the body of Christ, so that Christ’s revolution might again become present to the world through the faithful deeds of love and care we offer to our neighbours in response to the grace we have experienced in Jesus Christ. 

I know that many of us care for others deeply.  We work as volunteers with the sick, the disabled, the despairing and the voiceless.  Or we work with the poor and the helpless in our paid employment.  Many of us are generous with our surplus money and goods, living simply so that others may simply live.  But others of us are like so many other Australians.  We look only to feather our own nests, and those of our families.  If that is so, then Christ would confront us this morning with the call to revolution.  “Be converted,” he would say, “be really converted!  Let my Spirit into your cold heart so that the seeds of love may be sown.”  For that is what God’s revolution is essentially about:  love.  God’s love for a lost and broken world; the touchability of that love in the life, suffering and death of Christ; and the power of love to change things, one small corner of the world at a time, through the power of Christ’s resurrection.  If Christ is raised, you see, then the powers of evil and decay we named this morning shall not have the last word.  The last word will be love.  This I believe, and for this I pray daily.  So God help all of us to look for the signs of Christ’s coming, and to become such signs ourselves.

This homily was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in December 2004.