The Last Will Be First

 Text: Matthew 20.1-16

On Easter Monday, 1996, at the famous Stawell Gift Athletics Carnival, an extraordinary running race was held. It was the 400m handicap race for women. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the language of athletics, the word ‘handicap’ does not here refer to a race for people with an identified disability.  It refers, instead, to the practice of spacing the runners out as the race begins so that the ones with the strongest pre-race record start at ‘scratch’, that is, the starting line, and the other, weaker, runners are given a variety of head-starts further along the course. In theory, this means that were everyone to run their personal best times, they would all finish with a dead-heat at the finish line. On this particular occasion one runner, Catherine Astrid Salome Freeman – a sixteen year-old Kuku Yalanji girl from Woorabinda in Queensland - was the only runner to start at scratch, and the next closest runner was placed a full 54 metres ahead of her as the race began.  Some old and grainy footage of that race has been ‘going viral’ on social media over the past couple of weeks and it is worth a look. For it shows the young Cathy Freeman not only catching the field of white runners ahead of her, but also enduring a big shove from one of them as the field passes the 350m mark.  Amazingly, Cathy keeps her form and comes home to win the event by a whisker. 

That Cathy did so, and went on to become both a world and Olympic champion in this same event, is something of a modern miracle. For she is Aboriginal. She belongs to a people whose lands and waterways were stolen at the point of a gun, whose ancestors were massacred, poisoned, raped, shackled, removed from country and kin, enslaved in missions, orphanages and individual homes as domestic servants, and now continue to be the single most disadvantaged ethnic group in the country on any measure. Twice as likely to be living with a disability. 4 times more likely to live with a chronic disease. 4 times more likely to take their own lives. 37 times more likely to be imprisoned than any other Australian. 1000 times more likely to die in police custody. On that Easter Monday in 1996 Cathy was at the back of the line on handicapping. But she was also at the back of the line when it came to the likelihood that she would even be there to compete. That she was able to slip pass every single white runner, including the one who tried to take her out of the race with a physical shove, is absolutely amazing. From last in the race to first. From last in this country to sporting royalty. 

The story we read just now from Matthew’s gospel also talks about the last becoming first. In one of Jesus’ most intriguing parables, he says that the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who has a vineyard. The landowner goes out at dawn to the marketplace in town where willing labourers are most likely to gather. He hires those who are there after agreeing to pay them the usual daily wage, a denarius, and they head over the vineyard to pick grapes.  But there are not enough labourers to secure the harvest, so the landowner goes out again at 9, 12, 3 and 5 to hire more workers.  Each are hired on the promise that they will be paid ‘what is right’ for their time. Now, at knock-off time, each of the workers are paid, beginning with the last hired, and finishing with the first. Those hired at the beginning of the day are incensed to learn that all the other workers, even those hired at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, are to be paid the full daily wage, just as they are. They complain bitterly about these latecomers ‘being made equal’ to themselves, even though they have worked longer. But the landowner responds ‘Did you not agree to work for a denarius? That is what you have been paid. Are you calling me evil because I am generous towards these others?’ And so, says Jesus after he tells his story, ‘the last will be first and the first will be last’.

Now. I’ve used this story in bible studies across twenty-five years of ministry, and I can report that almost every white, middle-class, person who hears the story for the first time responds, like clockwork, ‘but that is so unfair!’ This has convinced me that many white-middle class people tend to identify most strongly with the people hired at the beginning of the day. Why? Because they are raised from birth to believe that if you don’t work, you don’t eat, and that justice is primarily about getting what you deserve because of your hard work.  If you work hard, you rightly expect to be rewarded in proportion to the amount of work you have done. Since justice is proportional, it follows that those who work less than you should be paid less than you. Now, if that is what you believe, if life is most properly a meritocracy in which the hardest workers take the lion’s share of the rewards, then the behaviour of the landowner in our parable is guaranteed to offend. For it strikes at the very heart of this white, middle-class, work-ethic.  It questions, and possibly even mocks, that ethic’s certainties about what is fair and what is just.

Of course, if you are white and middle-class, there are probably a lot of things that you cannot see.  You may not be aware, for example, that you have a disability, an ailment that quite a few scholars are calling, very simply, ‘white-blindness’. White-blindness is an incapacity to see what life might be like for people who are not white and middle-class, for people whose very different social location may teach them really quite different lessons about the world and how it works.  For when I, an Aboriginal man, read this parable, I identify not with the people who were hired at the beginning of the day, but with those who were hired at 5 o’clock.  For I know, deep in my marrow, that those who are ready to work at 6am in the morning enjoy a long list of advantages that I simply cannot count on. They, for example, are most likely able-bodied. They are four times as likely as I am to be able-bodied. Which gives them a significant advantage when it comes to being job-ready. The fact that they are ready to work at 6 o’clock in the morning almost certainly means that they also enjoy good mental health.  I, on the other hand, do not. Generations of racism from the most powerful towards my people means that I carry with me a weight that is very, very difficult to slough off. It is difficult to get up each day with a certainly that I will be treated fairly when multiple generations before me were not. And that has been confirmed, many hundreds of times over, in my own experience. Simply by being Aboriginal, I am three times more likely to regularly experience high levels of psychological distress than other Australians, and that makes getting out of bed in the morning quite difficult, sometimes. I won’t go on, but I hope you are getting the picture.

From a biblical studies point of view, it is clear that those who are more latterly hired by the landowner are very likely to have been the most marginalised members of Judean society at the time. Landless peasants who are continually exhausted because most landowners exploit their labour for pittance. Widows or ‘unclean’ women who have no male patriarch to protect them. Aboriginal people like the Canaanite women we encountered in chapter 15, the one whose daughter was tormented by a demon, a demon some scholars happily name ‘colonisation’. And so on.  They are late to marketplace because they have learned – through cold, hard, experience – that there is little to be gained by being there early. They are outcasts, they are rarely picked for the work available, and therefore there is little point in turning up at all.

If you read the parable from that point of view, then the point of the story is not about the proportionality of justice, as white middle-class social programming might suggest. It is not even about a failure of such justice. It is about grace, grace here defined as an excess of loving generosity toward the last and the least.  To all who believe that justice is satisfied by getting what you deserve, this might come as very bad news indeed!  Because if you believe in meritocracy, grace proclaims the very opposite: that it is the last and the least, those who are least deserving in the eyes of the meritocracy, who can expect to receive the love and mercy of the creator and landowner of all the earth.  

For the vast majority of people who live on this planet, who are not white and middle-class, the grace at the heart of the parable is actually the very best of news. For it tells us that while the world run by white people may have forgotten us, if it even acknowledges our existence at all, God has not forgotten us. From the lips of Jesus, the very son of God, we learn that God will take us from our customary place at the very back of the field, and help us along, with Cathy, to the winner’s podium.  The last, those who get barely enough work to get by, will nevertheless be made equal with those who can depend on work every day.

Let’s be clear, however, that none of this happens by magic. Faith will not, for example, immediately deliver the poor and the oppressed to the front of the queue. Faith, rather, will assure the poor one, the enslaved one, that she or he is loved, accepted and free in Christ. And this knowledge, in turn, will give her the confidence and courage to have a go, and keep having a go, even if the chips are down and the system is against you. You know, when Cathy won her gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 she had some help. She said that her ancestors rose up from the ground beneath her feet to fill her with the strength and confidence she needed to prevail against the odds. Here Cathy is speaking in an Aboriginal way about the divine. For us, the divine is at work in our ancestors, who live in the earth and flora and fauna, all about us, just as the Holy Spirit lived in Christ and now lives in his church. Cathy is saying, therefore, that the confidence and help of her ancestors filled her with everything she needed to run, and to run without giving up. The divine does not run the race for us. God gives us the power and courage, rather, to finish the race as equal partners in the gospel with all who have had a better start in life. 

For, in the end, it is grace that saves us all, through faith, whether we are at the bottom of the social pile, or in the middle, or at the top. It is not our work, nor our status, as the most powerful would measure it. Such is the way of Christ. Such is the way of the gospel. So, on this Social Justice Sunday I leave you with just two simple challenges. If you are poor, God in Christ has come to raise you up, so trust that his grace will get you there, even to the banqueting halls of heaven. If you are wealthy, then God would have you leave those chains behind for the sake of the poorest and least. For by emptying yourselves of such riches (as Christ did) and sharing your wealth with the least (as Christ did) you will become rich in the eyes of God.

Glory be to God – Creator, Son and Holy Spirit – as in the dreaming, so now, and for ever. Amen.

Garry Worete Deverell

Social Justice Sunday 2020

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.

Holy Longing

Texts: Isaiah 1.1, 10-20; Ps 50.1-8; 22-23; Hebrews 11.1-3; 8-16; Luke 12.32-40

The God we encounter in today’s lections is, in many ways, a pretty angry God.  In the passage we read from Isaiah, the Lord tells Israel that he is sick and tired of all its hypocrisy.  ‘Sure,’ says God, ‘you turn up to worship regularly, you bring along the sacrifices prescribed in the law of Moses.  But your heart isn’t in it.  You have blood on your hands.  You neglect and mistreat the poor, the widow and the orphan.  Unless you get your act together,’ says God, ‘unless you stop doing evil and start doing good, I will put you to the sword.’  The Psalmist echoes these same sentiments when he has God say (and I paraphrase):  ‘Listen up, all you hypocrites who take my covenant on your lips and turn up to worship with the prescribed offerings.  I don’t care how many offerings you make, or how many promises you make; unless you walk the walk as well as talk the talk, I’m going to tear you apart.  What I want most of all is an attitude of thanksgiving, and a people who will actually do as they have promised.’

Now, there have always been some Christians who are very uncomfortable with all this anger from God.  From the second century there was a crowd known as the Marcionites who wanted to excise the Hebrew Bible from the Christian canon altogether.  In their view, the God of the Hebrew bible was not the God of Jesus Christ.  The God of the Hebrews was an angry demiurge who breathed fire and vengeance, while the God of Jesus was loving and forgiving, always regarding human foibles with a smiling tolerance.  In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, with a characteristically northern European distaste for strong emotions of any kind, many learned theologians and ministers argued that it was wrong to associate anger with God—for God is our best name for all that is calm and peaceful in the cosmos, a kind of mystical still-point around which the chaos and anger of the universe turns.  In more recent decades, a whole swag of theologians have argued that the biblical anger of God should be dismissed as nothing more than a projection of our all-too-human anger.  ‘God does not get angry,’ they argue, ‘WE get angry and then anthropomorphise God so that we can enlist God to our cause.’

What are we to make of these claims?  Well, what can I say except that even the most appalling theology has some truth in it!  Marcion wanted to emphasise that God was a God of love, which—surprisingly enough!— I think is right.  God is love, and God does love us.  That is the clear message of both the New Testament and the Old, I would have thought.  But stay with me now.  Isn’t it precisely because God loves us that God gets angry with us sometimes?  Wouldn’t a God who never got angry be evidence that God is actually entirely indifferent to what we do—cold, unaffected and distant like the stars in the sky?  I think so.  Indeed, these days it is widely recognised by both Jews and Christians that the kind of theology that wants to remove every apparently ‘human’ characteristic or emotion from God is dodgy theology, for it fails to take account of the deepest meaning of the biblical covenants: that is, that God has thrown God’s lot in with us, for better or for worse, that God has chosen to become corrigible, indeed vulnerable, to all that human beings decide and do. 

For Christians, of course, this covenant logic reaches its fulfilment in the fleshly career of one Jesus of Nazareth.  What we learn from Jesus is that it is in the very nature of God to become human, and therefore vulnerable to all that being human actually means.  Like getting hurt and disappointed in love, like becoming angry and wishing that one could die.  Every one of those emotions, and a whole lot more, were seen in Jesus of Nazareth who, in Christian theology, is the best picture of God that we have.  And if the best picture of God that we have is a human being, why should it be wrong to think of a God who is vulnerable to all that we do or don’t do in response to divine love?  Love, you see, does not make one strong and indifferent.  It makes one vulnerable to being hurt.

A few years ago I threw a ‘Thank-God-I-survived-my-doctorate’ party.  Some of you were there.  Now you have to understand that this was a very important celebration for my family and I.  It’s not everyday that a kid who grew up in poverty earns a doctorate, you know.  That night therefore represented a wonderful celebration of what God is able to do in us. But I had one disappointment.  A close friend, a friend whom I love a great deal, did not turn up even though she had promised she would.  I looked for her all night, but my looking was in vane, and the excuses she gave after the fact were really, really lame.  I still feel rather hurt and angry about that.  I will get over it, of course, but I am hurt and angry nevertheless.   Love is like that.  If you get close to someone, if you make yourself vulnerable, you can experience great joy.  If that someone betrays you, however, the wound goes very deep.  For when your guard is down, the knife strikes much deeper.

 

That is how it is with God, too, I think.  God loves us more deeply that anyone.  God has come so close to us, in Christ and in the Spirit, that God has rendered Godself almost powerless in the face of our wavering loyalties.  When we make a promise to God, but then we break it, God is really affected.  The cross of Christ is our best icon or image of this, for there God is not only wounded by our faithlessness, but mortally so.  In Christ God dies the horrible death of unrequited love.

The good news, of course, is that love is not without its own power.  It is, as the very heart of who God is, actually stronger than death.  The same passages that present us with a hurt and angry God also assure us that God will always be waiting to forgive our faithlessness and renew the relationship.  God is not one, we are told, who will hang on to the bitterness of God’s disappointment forever, real and visceral as that disappointment actually is.  God’s holy longing for us indeed makes God vulnerable.  But our sin does not, we are told, kill off God’s longing altogether.  God never will become cold and indifferent.  God will always be waiting for that time when we come to our senses in a far-off country.  God will always be waiting to embrace us in forgiving, reconciling love.  God will always stand before us and beside us, in Christ, to show us what a truly redeemed humanity actually looks like.  In Christ, you see, God has been pleased to place in our hands the very kingdom of God, which is gospel-speak for God’s own self.

The strictly theological point to make from this is, of course, that while God may indeed be different to human beings, and we should therefore be very careful to avoid making God into whatever serves our ideological purposes, a very large part of that classical problematic stems from the fact that, in Christ, God is actually more human than we are.  In Christ, God shows us what a human being infused by divine love actually longs for in the face of the very great inhumanity that shadows our world.

Let me conclude by pointing out that this precisely human longing of God also finds a mirror and embodiment in the longing of God’s baptised people for justice, peace and reconciliation in the world.  The dismay and anger that we, as God’s people, feel in the face of the troubles all about us reflects the dismay and anger of God.  The longing we feel for that ‘better country’ described by the writer to the Hebrews, may be understood as an expression and sacramental embodiment of God’s own longing.  For, in the end, it is not that God is slow in bringing about the revolution we so long for.  It is not that God has made a promise but is slow to keep it.  In the end, our longing is that longing which God has placed in our hearts.  It is a longing that motivates us to get off our backsides and do something for this world which God loves so passionately and for which Christ died. 

The challenge for each of us this morning is therefore this.  As God’s child, God has placed God’s longing in your heart.  Will you allow that longing to take flesh, as Christ has taken flesh?  Will you engage the world anew, with all its soiled relationships, in the faith, hope and love of Jesus?  Will you go from this church and actually keep the promises you made in your baptism, to turn from evil and do good, to stop being part of the problem and start becoming part of the new humanity inaugurated in Christ?  Will you care enough even to become hurt and angry?  It’s up to you.  Remember that God is not the kind of God who will bully you into anything.  God will rail with anger, certainly, remonstrating passionately with all in your life and your world that is less than the humanity revealed in Jesus.  But the choice, and all that follows from that choice, is still with you.  The way of God’s Spirit in the world is that of longing and lamenting, of hoping and imagining.  So, will you answer God’s prayers?  Will you light your lamp and keep it burning, that the world may be transfigured in love?

This homily was first preached at the Uniting Church's Centre for Theology and Ministry in 2010.