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

Wisdom for a time of madness

Proverbs 1.20-33; Psalm 19; James 3.1-12; Mark 8.27-38

We live in difficult and disorienting times. Sometimes I wonder if the world is going mad. Sometimes I wonder if I am the one who is going mad. What about you? One definition of madness is this: ‘a fundamental breakdown in the capacity to distinguish between what is real and what is not’. So how do you distinguish between the real and the not-so-real? And, more particularly for our purposes this morning, how should the Christian church go about discerning the real from the unreal?

Some of you may be thinking that to ask this question is either silly or just plain redundant. You may feel secure in your capacity to know what the truth actually looks and feels like. But tell me this: when our government told the Australian community that a group of refugees had threatened to throw their children overboard unless they were received into Australia, did you know you were being lied to? Or when Colin Powell assured the United Nations that Saddam Hussein possessed huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that he planned to use against the West, did you know that he had been lied to? Or, to pick a very live issue in our community at present, when Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten assure us that stopping the boats saves lives, how do you know that they are right, or that they are wrong?

Let me suggest, ever so tentatively, that many of us decide who is right and who is wrong before the fact. And that even after the ‘facts’ have come to light, that we conveniently change the ‘facts’ to suit ourselves. In at least two of the three instances just cited, reality was manipulated by powerful people for their own ends. They told us lies because the truth would have undermined their stated policy positions, their fundamental beliefs about how the world works, about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I suspect that this will be the case with the policy on stopping the boats as well. But, in all honesty, I do not yet know if I am right about that or not.

‘Time will tell us the truth’. That is what we say to ourselves. That is how we reassure ourselves when reality seems difficult to grasp. But will it? Will time, or the accumulation of evidence, ever convince some of us that our democratic, transparent form of government is not very honest or transparent? Large sections of the Australian community still trust what our governments tells us, despite everything: the children overboard affair, the weapons of mass destruction debacle, the reasons we were given for sending troops into Afghanistan. Large sections of the Australian community are still going to vote for what I call the ‘Liberal-Labour coalition’ at the next election, because they believe what they are told about being overrun by ‘asylum seekers’. So, for many of us it seems, time does not reveal the truth. Many of us prefer to believe subterfuge and spin, if we find it comforting, than face the truth of what is happening to us. Some of us are like the proverbial ostrich, who sticks its head in the sand when danger arrives. Some of us would rather die believing in comforting and convenient falsities than be taught the truth by either time or the accumulation of evidence.

For Christians, there is a plumbline that helps us to discover the truth, that teaches us how to read the world in such a way that we will eventually discern, not without effort I must add!, which way is up and which way is down. This plumbline is Christ, the holy wisdom of God revealed to us in the Scriptures. Christians believe that the deepest truth of things only comes to light when it is scanned, or passed through, the UV field of apostolic testimony. That is not to say that Christians, even Christian theologians, are immune from kidding themselves - as will soon become clear.

So, having read from the apostolic testimony this morning, what can we say about our contemporary attitudes to truth, and to the finding of truth? Proverbs says that the truth has been out there for time immemorial, because Holy Wisdom has been preaching her gospel in the streets and the marketplaces since the world begun. Sadly, however, many human beings would prefer to ignore her counsels. Proverbs tells us that many people prefer to be simple, to reduce the complexities of life to simple propositions that no amount of wise teaching will ever succeed in undoing. It also tells us that the simple will eventually pay for their complacency. One day, says Proverbs, the simple will reap what they have sown. Their ignorance will be exploded by a burst of reality, which will undo the layers of lies on which they found their lives. In that moment, we are told, disaster will arrive to steal away the false comforts by which the simple hold the truth at bay.

Now, are you one of the simple? Are you the one who cannot live with too much truth? Or are you one of the wise, those who are open to the truth no matter where it may take you?

Now before you answer too swiftly, I invite you to consider another piece of apostolic testimony, namely, the story of Peter as we have it in the gospel of Mark. Perhaps, like Peter, you pride yourself on being insightful, on possessing an aptitude for recognising truths that others find too difficult to countenance. For the gospel indeed tells us that it was Peter, amongst all the disciples, who first recognised that Jesus was the messiah of God, the one anointed by God to save his people from their sins. While the other disciples apparently saw Jesus as just another prophet, it was Peter who first recognised that he was the Christ. Surely there are grounds for a certain smugness here? If you were Peter, would you not feel that you were one of the wise, seeing things not usually seen and pointing to truths that others find too difficult to grasp? Well, perhaps so. We theologians are particularly susceptible to such feelings. But we are not alone in this. I can’t count the times that someone has told me, with an impressive sense of certainty and authority, what God is really like, without having spent more than a week of their lives with either Scripture or theology! At such times, I feel like an electrician who is being lectured about how to install a new heater by someone who believes that electricity is what elephants produce when they have eaten too much.

Nevertheless, back to being smug about one’s insightfulness. Peter, having apparently seen the truth about Jesus, then demonstrates to all that he has missed the real, existential, significance of this truth. For when Jesus begins to teach the disciples what the messiah was sent to do—that is, to suffer the rejection of the authorities, to be tortured and killed, but then to rise again on the third day—Peter cannot bear it. Taking Jesus aside, he rebukes him. ‘Look, Jesus, don’t be so downhearted. You’re the messiah, for goodness sake. The messiah thrashes his enemies. He doesn’t suffer and die, he makes others suffer and die. He makes them pay for their sins!’ All of which reveals, from the point of view of those who first heard this story, that while Peter correctly identified Jesus as the messiah, his ideas about messiah-hood were deeply flawed. ‘Get behind me Satan,’ said Jesus in reply, ‘for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things’. And there’s the rub you see. God’s ways are not our ways. What we would like to be real is rarely the ‘really real,’ the real that God is. For we rich Christians from the post-industrial West corrupt ourselves with forlorn desires for a peace that bursts into bloom apart from the costly scars of sacrifice. So say the martyrs. And they tell us the truth.

In the reading from Mark, Jesus tells his disciples, along with everyone who is reading the story, that there can be no peace without a fight, no rest without work, no resurrection worth having, apart from one’s death. Those who want to protect themselves from the truth will only end up being destroyed by it, says Jesus; and those who want to own the truth, that is, to make and control the world according to their own solipsistic lights, they will end up losing the only thing that really matters: the truth of who they are in God. The really wise people, according to Jesus, are those who are willing to submit and sacrifice their version of the truth to that of Jesus. The wise are those who trust Jesus absolutely, even to the point of letting everything else go, every truth they have ever clung to for the sake of solidity and certainty in the world. The wise are those who die to such things in the belief that Christ will raise them anew, new beings in a new world, a world in which the only truth worth clinging too is the love and grace of God. So, who is feeling smug now? Certainly not me!

Christians, then, have a really strange—strange, that is, by the usual standards—approach to discerning the real from the unreal. Christians are, at one and the same time, both absolutely sceptical and absolutely trusting. Christians cannot believe that any version of truth produced by the world, whether by politicians, scientists or theologians, is completely and absolutely right. Apparent truths, no matter how subtlety constructed, need to be tested for their inherent capacity to hide us from the truth. For while the world is indeed real, in Christian understanding, its reality oftentimes consists in its failure to come to terms with the really real, that is, with God. So Christians are called to test and approve everything, especially the truths we manufacture about ourselves.

Yet—and here, surely, is the most extraordinary paradox—Christians can only be so sceptical on the basis of an absolute trust in a particular truth, the faith and belief that God is there, and that God is love. Without this, I would argue, there is no basis for a productive and creative scepticism, there is no really real by which we might evaluate what appears to be real. Equally, without this faith and belief, there can be no finally successful motivation for seeking the truth. For if we do not believe that the Real is finally on our side, that the Real is, in fact, a personal reality who is other than us, who nevertheless loves and welcomes us, then our search for the truth will always be permeated by a lingering suspicion that we are really alone in the universe, that the universe may well be only the entirely made-up conversation that we have with ourselves.

Someone will of course ask, and someone has always asked this of Christians: ‘But how do you know that God exists, and that God is love?’ The answer is the same today as it has always been. We know, not because we have discovered this truth ourselves, but because God has reached out to us across the chasm between God’s being and ours, and revealed that God is there, and that God is love. That revelation is none other than the man, Jesus Christ, God with a human face: God the other, who is nevertheless closer to us than we are to ourselves. So close that our knowing is not so much our knowing, but the knowing of God in and through us. We see in a glass dimly, nothing is surer, but we see nevertheless. We see that we are seen, and we love that we are loved.

And so we return to where we began. If we are mad, perhaps it is because the world regards us as out of touch with the reality it manufactures and reifies. If we are sane, perhaps it is because we have opened ourselves up to a reality that others do not wish to see. For all that, let us not forget that the truth of God is stranger even than fiction. Let us pray for the grace to be sceptical about the truths we are told in the daily round of news and advertising. Let us pray for the grace to be sceptical about the truths we design for our own comfort or security. But let us trust, absolutely, in the God who is grace and truth in Jesus Christ. For without him, we will never find the courage to admit our mistakes and let our truths go. We will never, therefore, becomes signs of the truth for a world that is going mad.

The Dark Light of Crucifixion

John 12. 20-33

In 1819 John Keats, the English poet, sat transfixed before an ancient vase he happened upon in an Italian museum. It was an urn from ancient Athens, the principle city of Greece, and it featured the carved figures of women and men dancing to some kind of ritual in an idyllic forest glade. Something about these figurines captured the poet’s attention and, more than that, took him away into a rapt meditation upon the capacity of art to convey spiritual truths. What Keats found most moving was the way in which the artist had captured a moment of truth—the truth of a particular human joy and longing—in the stillness of such beautiful forms. He wondered at the way in which such truth could be frozen in stone, and therefore rendered communicable even to people who would view the urn thousands of years later. The poem he wrote to commemorate the occasion closes with the famous aphorism,

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.—That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In saying this, Keats revealed his admiration for a particularly Greek way of seeing the world. The ancient Greeks believed that the truth about things was revealed to human beings through their eyes, particularly in beautiful and bright forms, and even more particularly in the beautiful and bright forms of the human body. I’m sure that many of you will have seen pictures of those strong and erect young men carved in white marble, often standing at the entrance of public buildings or temples, often naked, and often with some kind of weapon in their hands. Or of slender women draped in jewelled finery with garlands in their hair. Usually in a state of semi-undress. But such figures represented far more than an ideal for human beauty. They also represented the Greek understanding of God. For them, God was exactly like one of these statues: strong beyond all strength, glorious and bright with the brightness of the sun, beautiful such that mortals would desire to be joined with God, but also distant and impervious to any kind pain or suffering.

Now, in the passage we read from John’s Gospel tonight, who asks to see Jesus? Some Greeks. Some Greeks ask to see Jesus. And because they are Greeks, they are hoping to see a particular kind of Jesus, a Jesus who is like one of their Athenian statues of the human form divine: a strong and noble Jesus, a Jesus whose form is beautiful in that classical Greek sense, a Jesus who shines with divine light and ignites their desire for him, a Jesus who is clearly more than human, who somehow sails above the ordinariness of human pain and regret and grief in some kind of cool, divine inscrutability.

Now, in case you’re thinking that I might be imputing motives to these fellows which don’t exist, consider this. That John’s whole Gospel might be characterised as a sermon to the Greeks, and particularly to Greek-speaking intellectuals. Unlike the other gospels, John talks about Jesus in a language which Greek-speaking intellectuals could understand and appreciate. He nicks, for example, their idea of the logos—an idea or a form that exists in the mind of God before the universe began—to explain how Jesus could be considered divine. “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.” The Gospel also seems to address that peculiarly Greek obsession with light and seeing and form as the appropriate way to find out about divine things. Only in John’s gospel do you have Jesus proclaiming that he is the light of the world. Only in John’s gospel do you find passages where Jesus exhorts his listeners to become “children of the light,” children who gaze at the glorious brightness of God and are drawn to that light like moths to a flame. All of this is very, very Greek. Right down to the word which John uses for seeing in this passage. It is eidein, from which we get both “idea” and “idol”. The Greeks, in wanting to “see” Jesus, are looking for a form, an “idol,” if you like, in which their divine “idea” might be both seen and admired.

But wait. Doesn’t this imply that John is basically on board with all this Greek stuff, that he is something of a pagan philosopher, seeking to transform Jesus into some kind of semi-divine hero like Ulysses or Hercules, therefore priming his image for popular consumption in a world dominated by Greek thinking? Yes and No. Yes, he wanted to talk about Jesus in a way that people other than Jews would understand and appreciate. But no, he didn’t buy into the pagan version of God in the process. Indeed, the passage we are reading contains one of the most damning critiques of that God you will find in all of literature! Note, if you will, Jesus’ response to what the Greeks ask. I quote.

The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life . . . Now my soul is troubled, but what should I say? “Father save me from this hour?” No, it is for this hour that I have come. Father, glorify your name! . . . Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of the world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

What we find here is a specifically Christian warping or transfiguration of the Greek idea of divine beauty so admired by Keats. For John argues that the human form of God is not strong and beautiful, in that classical sense we described earlier. Nor is it impervious to the ravages of ordinary human life—the passing of time, the reality of evil, or of human suffering. On the contrary, according to John, the human form of God is the crucified Jesus. A suffering man, hanging from the most vile instrument of torture of the ancient world. A man vulnerable to being troubled in soul. A man vulnerable to death. In describing Jesus like this, John effects a transvaluation which would have been scandalous for the Greek thinkers of his time. Beauty, he declares, no longer has anything to do with the classical forms of the Olympic body or the Olympian gods, objects of religio-erotic desire that they were. The beauty of God, he declares, is revealed in its opposite, in that which strikes the ordinary gaze of the human eye as the least desirable of all. The weak ones, the ugly ones, the suffering ones. For it is these, to whom the world denies value, that God ascribes the most value. Unlike ourselves, God actually loves the unlovable, and desires the undesirable. Such love is able to raise a person from despair to hope, from darkness into light, from misery to blessedness. Such love is able to bring a sense of the beautiful even to those of us who, in the world’s eyes at least, live not-so-beautiful lives.

I want to close with a word about what all of this might mean for our Lenten journey. The thinking of the ancient Greeks has not gone away. It is everywhere present, even today in Australia. It visits us in every commercial which represents happiness and the good life in terms of the beautiful forms of sculptured bodies, impervious to age or to the suffering of the poor and broken-hearted. It visits us in New Age notions of God as some kind of universal being which is everywhere present, especially in nature, and yet (like nature) is blind and deaf and dumb to our specifically human anxieties. Finally, it visits us in our cultural obsession with seeing as the preeminent way of knowing what is true. If we see it, even if “it” is only on the TV, we believe it. If we don’t see it, then we don’t believe it. These are the realities we live with everyday, and they are not so very different from the realities of John’s “Greeks”. The colonial powers might have changed. But their message has not!

During Lent, God invites us to be immersed in another possible reality, another way of seeing the truth of things. Instead of looking at the world through the light of our televisions, God invites us to look at the world with the dark and contrary light that comes from the cross of Jesus. For John says that the cross is the visible form of the divine glory, and therefore a unique and powerful critique of all that our world would consider beautiful. Under the paradoxical power of this dark kind of light, a power which Shelley called “negative capability,” even scenes of torture become signs of resurrection. Sinners become capable of sainthood, misery becomes capable of joy, and ugliness becomes capable of beauty. All because God’s love empowers us to let go of the way we see things with our eyes, in favour of a seeing by faith in which the beauteous promise of things comes into focus.

Something of what I have been saying this morning is powerfully conveyed in the words of Leonard Cohen, a poet, this time, who understands that sense of joy and liberation one can experience in being loved by a God who is not ashamed to share our imperfections:

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.