By Rev’d Richard Browning
O Holy Spirit, open our ears to hear, that by listening we would live and make your thoughts our thoughts, and our ways would become your ways. Amen.
I would like to begin by offering three threads that will be woven together at the end into, let’s hope, a beautiful cloth. (You be the judge.)
Thread 1. Sin as disease
Dr. Gabor Maté, physician, author, expert on addiction and trauma, living saint. He was born in Budapest, 1944. Within the year it was Hungary’s turn to have its people, including thousands of Jews exported to systematised state run death camps. As a one year old his mother handed him over to a complete stranger in the middle of the street. It was the only way she could conceive of keeping him safe. As a one year old he had no access to language, memory or recall, but fifty years later that catastrophic event of abandonment lived in Gabor and was felt by him viscerally in his body fifty years later. His books and writing are remarkable. His insights on authenticity and acceptance are profound. I joined thousands at the Gold Coast Convention centre recently for his public lecture on his latest book The Myth of Normal[i]. I was struck by his fierce intelligence, deep compassion and the artful way he honoured the dignity of broken human lives.
There was one story he said that day that is an important thread to understanding today’s gospel. He spoke of the Iroquois nation (I think it was) and how they view sickness. A young woman from among them was diagnosed with a serious disease. An elder in the community met and spoke with her and said, “thank you. Your sickness is a mirror to our sickness. We will look at how we live together and address the sickness that is within us. We will be a part of your journey to healing.” [ii]
This is no vapid ‘thoughts and prayers’ type comment. It understands disease is not an individual problem, nor is it solely the individual’s problem.
Disease is a good way to understand sin. Like disease, sin corrupts the body. Like disease, the origins of sin are relational. So also is its treatment and healing.[iii]
Thread 2: hypocrite and sub crisis
If we can be certain about one thing Jesus hated, it was the hypocrite. It’s a fabulous word and literally means ‘sub’ ‘crisis’. The hypocrite is someone stuck in fascination with the pseudo-crisis. The hypocrite says with extravagant flare, “lookehere everyone, this is outrageous.” In some way it is, but it is a distraction from the real crisis.
In Luke’s Gospel, Pilate’s brutality triggers the mingling of sacrificial and Galilean blood. “Did those wretched Galileans suffer because they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?’” This question is at the heart of the book of Job. The logic of the day suggested people suffered bad things because they were out of favour with God.
Watch how Jesus attends to this sub ‘crisis’: No.
Watch how he switches to the real crisis: “Unless you repent, you will perish as they did.” Ouch.
Repentance is the issue, not accountancy for gossips. Jesus kills for all time the notion that suffering is a warranted infliction by God in response to personal impiety. By doing so Jesus also kills the inverse. Any notion that blessings and massive windfalls of wealth are a sign of holiness and God’s blessing is a furphy, a distraction, a sub-crisis.
It is interesting to consider what sub-crises we surrender our attention to. Pick your preferred sub-crisis:
The climate crisis is so serious we need nuclear energy as a safe and sustainable solution. Maybe. Maybe not. Nuclear or not nuclear is the sub-crisis. The real crisis is climate and we have already surpassed 1.5 degrees. We don’t have two decades or more to work on our response. The climate crisis is here.
50 year old Gabor Maté, was distant, detached, rude. Yes. But the real issue was the wound existential abandonment through genocide inflicted upon his body and what matters is what was going on inside him because of what was done.[iv]
Youth crime is a serious problem. Well yes it is. But don’t lose sight of the alarming rates of youth homelessness, alienation and abuse.
October 7 was appalling and criminal. But don’t let it mask decades of occupation, colonisation, segregation, degradation, humiliation, extermination and with the termination of ceasefire this week more killing is happening on top of the tens of thousands already killed in a land made unliveable on purpose.[v]
We can celebrate Harmony Day (March 21) but don’t brush over what is actually the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This is harder, more critical, more urgent. No Palestinian, no Jew, no Congolese, no Sudanese, no Indigenous, no Gypsie, no Singalese, no Tamil, no one should experience repression and hate. No one. The dignity of every human is at the heart of the Gospel and is written into International Law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What ever little rabbit hole you have just been sent down with that quick sketch, don’t lose sight of the task: what is the sub-crisis and what is the real? Can we tell the difference between the distraction and the problem? Can we tell the difference between fear of the external with inner vice and self-deception? Can we tell the difference between humour and racism?
Between a strong leader and authoritarianism?
Between self-defence and genocide?
Governments governing and multinationals profiteering?
Christianity and nationalism?
Judaism and Zionism?
War and self-serving policy?
Can we tell the difference between democracy and apartheid?
Democracy and fascism?
If we can’t, we must learn, for the sake of civil society.
Third thread – Pattern thinking
This week I had the privilege of spending time with Aunty Rhoda Roberts. She is a mighty force for good, standing as a Widjabul Wia-bal elder of the Bundjalung Nation from around Lismore. She spoke about Pattern Thinking. Pattern Thinking knows about trees and soil, water and manure. It looks at seasons, rhythms and order. Pattern Thinking is profoundly relational, connecting generations with land and water and enough for all. Pattern Thinking makes actions respectful of past generations and those still to come.
In our culture, Pattern Thinking is about seeing and recognising the Eternal Christ within the 14 billion years of creation, erupting enfleshed in person in Jesus for a moment within history. John the Baptiser speaks with Pattern Thinking (Chpt 3) when he pointed to Jesus while speaking to the people:
‘You brood of vipers! (“Hypocrites). Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.’
Today’s parable by Jesus sits squarely alongside John’s call to repentance with the responsibility to be free of disease and free to be fruitful. That axe at those tree roots points to the right crisis.
John the Baptiser continues his Pattern Thinking. When the crowds ask ‘What then should they do?’ He replies: share what you have with the needy. Got two coats? Give one away? Got food? Share it.
To the tax collectors: collect only what you must. To the soldiers: never extort by threat or false accusation. Be satisfied with enough, they are called wages.’
Metanoia is the Greek word translated as repent. It means to think back and usually implies the turning of mind and heart in humility towards God. But this reduces sin to personal piety, which is a sub-crisis. The real crisis is the disease, the shared loss of Pattern Thinking.
Meta also means beyond or over, nouse or noia is mind – the Mind Beyond. What if Metanoia is the overarching Pattern of God, set within Creation, announced by the Baptiser, embodied in Christ Jesus? To use the language of Isaiah, metanoia as a verb would mean seeking out the thoughts and way of ‘above’, they are higher than our own. Metanoia is a return to Pattern Thinking, being aligned with the Pattern set within Creation established by Creator God, the Mind Beyond, following the Christ who is before and within all things. Live into this Mind and the ordering of our days will be true and good, faithful and fruitful, serving community and justice.
There are the three threads:
- Sin as disease that infects the body as is a mirror of the community[vi]
- Hypocrisy as the infatuation with the sub-crisis
- Repentance as aligning with the Pattern of Christ within and throughout creation
The Weaving
Let’s put the threads together into the tapestry woven by today’s Gospel:
Deaths involving sacrifices and blood and state sponsored killing caught people’s imagination. They came to Jesus and said, “Look over there, it’s really important.” Jesus said, ok, but don’t be distracted, what is really important is binding your bodies to the Eternal Pattern. It was as if they then said, “well then look over there!” So Jesus pressed even harder, “the collapsed aqueducts near the Pool of Siloam killed people. Do you think they were bad people? Worse than other Jerusalemites? No. But binding your bodies to the Eternal Pattern is what matters most”.
Seeing the moment was ripe, Jesus pressed home the point with a parable: “so a man planted a fig tree. When there should have been fruit there was none. So he said to the gardener, there is the axe, cut it down. So the gardener, understanding the economics of productivity and efficiency, cut it down.”
That is where this whole narrative leads. Except it doesn’t land here! Can you feel just now what Jesus did? Grace is at the heart of the Eternal Pattern! The binding of our bodies to the Eternal Pattern is the central crisis, and the grace of God takes responsibility to nurture our brokenness, our flawed hearts and minds, and tends to the soil in which we live and loves for yet another year, calling forth the fruit that is in us. The parable of the Fig Tree appears to be about judgment, but it is first about grace. Or rather, the healing of the disease is judged to be grace.
Good people, the economics of efficiency is not at the heart of the Eternal Pattern, thank God. Grace is. Don’t be distracted. May the Mind Beyond made present in Jesus shape and inspire our own.
Good people. Easter is coming. We prepare our hearts and minds to recognise God’s Great Pattern in the death and resurrection of the Eternal Christ, that recognising we would abide, and in abiding we would be fruitful.[vii]
[i] His work is remarkable. Check this out the Wisdom of Trauma:
or better, just read his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
[ii] A good example of this is Jesus’ encounter with the Demoniac in Luke 8. This person is a mirror to the community. His healing is in community. Despite his healing and his return to ‘his right mind’, the people begged Jesus to leave them for ‘they were afraid’. Despite this and the man’s pleading, Jesus sent him back “return to your home and declare what God has done for you”.
[iii] Whilst sin as disease is very familiar to our Orthodox sisters and brothers, it is still pervasive through our own liturgy. One example is today’s post Communion Prayer:
God of mercy,
may we who have shared in this holy meal
know your forgiveness in our lives,
bring your reconciliation to others,
and be a sign of your wholeness in this broken world.
[iv] Maté’s definition of trauma is liberating: trauma is not what happened to you, it is what happens in you because of what happened to you”. Somehow, miraculously, Maté gives agency to victims to deal with trauma without burdening them with shame or blame for being a victim. A truly remarkable gift.
[v] Here we go again. Why does Richard always have to bang on about Gaza and Palestine? Because this week the bombing rebooted. Because Gaza is a window to ourselves, that we actually don’t mind people being killed, tens of thousands killed, that a sickness lives in us that we have not had the courage or grace to address and it lives in the way colonisation here has treated First Nation’s people’s and treated the land. As an example, The Big Scrub, subtropical rainforest from the Tweed to the Richmond, from Byron to Casino was untouched in 1815. By 1900 over 99% was reduced to grassland farming. Timber getters got cedar and teak and took out all else. In that same evening with Gabor Mate, he received one spontaneous outburst of applause. It was when he was talking about how his Jewishness took him down a path to Zionism. Until he went to Gaza and the West Bank and met Palestinians for himself, and saw in their lived experience the exact same trauma he knew as a child of Jewish parents born into occupied Nazi Hungary. He said “Don’t let anybody tell any of you that if you criticise that system (Israel), you’re an antisemite or a self-hating Jew. You’re not.”
[vi] Look at addiction, look at the obesity epidemic, look at the housing crisis, look at what we eat and the chemicals used to produce and preserve. So many diseases rest squarely within the culture we have created and embrace.
[vii] Another way to conclude might have been simply to repeat the text from the Isaiah reading:
Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake their way and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.