March 14, 2004

George Armstrong

The World saves Christianity from its religiosity by drawing it deeply into its sorrows and joys, its goods and evils and the struggles between them.

Wide awake and more "world-awake" studies of Jesus wake us up to a perception of Jesus who was awake to his own world just like this. It's a far larger and more real view than the conventional popular Hollywood view of Jesus. Jesus was far more than an essentially other-worldly pious man who somehow saved the world by a flawless life and a horrible death. In fact, Christianity was a Movement as much as it was a person. It was a whole Movement incarnated in and called into being by a remarkably communal, remarkably inclusive human being who practised what he preached. Likewise, the gospels are not so much sacred biography as social history. In fact, the gospels point to an actual total transformation of history as we know it.

This was my point last week in sketching the realities of the succession crisis following Herod the Great. Following Herod the Great came his son Herod Antipas, Herod "the Not-So-Great". This was the Herod of Jesus day. Jesus never knew any other ruler than him. Herod the Not-So-Great carried on the ruthless pattern of his father's rule. This butchery and ruthless milking and dispossessing of his own people is perfectly obvious from history. But alongside this ruthless behaviour he ran the usual political Good News Machine.

Herod the Not-So-Great followed his father in trying to persuade people that he was the King of the Jews. He was the successor of King David and King Solomon. The Roman overlords of the day did not trust Herod Antipas to rule over Jerusalem and the multi-million dollar Temple Cathedral that his father had built there. Herod the Not-So-Great had to content himself with the Galilee franchise with neighbouring Perea thrown in.

We looked last Sunday at the splendid city of Sepphoris built by Herod Antipas near Jesus boyhood haunts. It proved too far away from the trade routes for Herod to make the monies that his ambition required. So he built an even more magnificent Administrative Centre for the armies of tax collectors, police under-cover spies and temple agents needed to exact taxes and tribute with remorseless thoroughness. He named his new city after Tiberius Caesar successor to Augustus. Herod had built Sepphoris upon the embers and blood of its former rebellious inhabitants. He built Tiberias on the site of a former burial ground.

Herod the fox, Jesus called him. This fox got Rome's licence to watch over a far flung chicken coop belonging essentially to the Caesars. To celebrate the founding of Tiberias, Herod minted a whole new series of propaganda coins with the Roman and Hebrew symbols of power and plenty stamped on either side. He restarted the calendar with the founding of Tiberias as the first day in Creation. Tiberias was a city built fully and magnificently on Graeco Roman not Jewish lines. It was a city that was indeed in every way an affront to all that the Jewish central tradition stood for.

It was perfectly clear to the impoverished surrounding population - who formed the body of the crowds who flocked to John the Baptist and later Jesus - where the money had come from to build these cities. And their chief purpose was to keep the people in order even as it sucked from them every last drop of economic blood. It was a savagely bad situation, much worse than I can briefly here describe. The ruthless control exercised locally from Tiberias was complemented and perfected from Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the economic sacred and ideological centre of a whole infernal Palestinian machine.

This was not what the God of Israel had intended. That was and is perfectly plain from the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures, our so-called Old Testament. In the Hebrew tradition, the nation of Israel had been a suffering People without a God and enslaved to the Egyptian Pharaohs. In the depths of their slavery and despair in Egypt, this People was found by a God without a People. A great religious and social covenant took shape between this remarkable Nation and this remarkable God. Israel was often described in their scriptures as a fig tree planted by God, a fig tree intended to bear plentiful fruit. And what fruit figs are - big purple succulent delicacies, full of seed for the new trees and crops that could multiply for ever.

There's a fig tree in the Gospel story today, a miserable one. It hasn't born fruit for years. A fig tree that hasn't produced figs? What use was that to God or man. What's this fig tree about? Not itself of course but about Israel under the Herods and Caesars. For all its pretense and greatness, Israel as a whole People had been so barren of true righteousness. The Temple system and Tiberias and Herod the not-so-Great, the fox had actually produced nothing but thorns driving deep into the flesh of God's poor.

What then was to be done?

John the Baptist started a Movement of the common people that was carried to a further stage with Jesus. Not that Jesus's style or strategy was the same as John's. Jesus knew early however, once John was beheaded by Herod the not-so-great, that his own fate was likewise sealed. Jesus saw himself as in the true succession of the ideal Kingdom of the Jews, a Kingdom of righteousness in the sense of justice and peace and plenty. This was Good News but not for a tiny ruthless royal and imperial elite. This was genuine Good News for all of God's people, especially the hitherto deprived and dispossessed, those put down and cast out.

The current power-mongering Herod, who hungered for his father's title of King of the Jews was a pure phoney according to Jesus. He wasn't any sort of shepherd, as Jewish kings were meant to be. On the contrary, he was a fox. At every point in the Gospels, in subtle form not always apparent to the casual reader, Jesus and his kingdom are presented as a Good News that is the complete reversal of and alternative to the Kingdom exercised by the Herods of the ruling establishments. Here was the true succession. Here was the true kingdom and the king who would mediate its appearance into the world of desperate men and women and children.

Whale Rider, Witi Ihimaera's novel (and now film) is also a crisis of succession. Who would become the leader once Koro Apirana had gone? The old man is desperate - understandably so. He searches amongst the young men around him, then amongst the boys. No answer. Well there was an answer. But no way could that stubborn old Paka - as he was affectionately called by his charmed grand-daughter - no way could the old man hear or see this answer. For the little girl who doted on him, the beautiful child whom the stubborn old Paka roughly and time and again rejected - this girl was The One. And through her, the People were reunited with the whales whose ancestral and creaturely destiny was bound to theirs. Wondrous resurrection broke out upon a worried and fractured tribal world. In this magical child and true young woman, a mediator had come into the world. Some mystical transaction was accomplished in this girl in ocean depths far from prying human eyes. She thereby brought back life from the dead in gift of her own whole person to her own aching people. Out of the depths of the tiny troubled tribe had gone the call to deep in Ocean's depths. And from the depths of Creation had come a wondrous answer.

Here is a kind of re-play of the agonised groans of the Hebrew slaves. From their depths they cried out towards a God whom they did not yet possess. And the God who himself was longing for his people heard and recognised in his eternal depths that cry from afar. In that cry the God of Israel heard the loved accent of a people that would become his own.

How can Israel of the modern world fulfil its true destiny? It's still a fraught question for the whole world to reflect upon. More appropriately, how are we in Christianity, younger sister and brother to Israel's tradition, to discover and fulfil our own vocation? Just as urgent and by no means unconnected: How can we in our own country, with our own religious traditions of Christianity fulfil our destiny? Our succession is not a simple political one between Helen Clark or Don Brash, or between a constitutional monarchy and republic. It's a far deeper one about ourselves as a whole nation of two founding peoples.

Rev Dr George Armstrong