The Divine Universe

Jesus’ parables usually challenge conventional religion and social norms. They are intended to shock or offend in order to present a wisdom deeper than common sense. But he could on occasion be boringly conventional. The parable of the wise and foolish virgins is an example. No one would be shocked or offended to be told that that it is good to be prepared for life’s eventualities. We all know that. There is often humour and exaggeration in Jesus’ parables but here there is neither – it is humourless, unimaginative and moralistic. Compared to, for example, the parable of the prodigal son it is boring.

It is the context that gives this parable special meaning. The Jewish religious leaders have been asleep when the Messiah has come and failed to recognize him. They were unprepared because their value system was cocked up. They were (and still are) expecting the wrong sort of person.

Most of the time, we do not face situations that need much preparation. Life follows familiar, well-trodden paths. But unexpected and inconvenient things do happen. Thousands of people got stuck at airports when QANTAS was grounded by its CEO. Some people were better prepared for this than others. Interviews on TV with stranded passengers included some distressed and anxious ones and some calm and philosophical ones.

For a few religious folk it might even have been seen as an encounter with Christ. It could be argued, though not all would agree, that the strikers were, are, the victims of exploitation. In another parable – the workers in the vineyard – Jesus shows no sympathy for those who seem to be seeking a fair go. But Jesus also said, “Inasmuch as you do it to the least, you do it to me.” If we exploit anyone, we exploit Jesus. He is the victim of all human greed and exploitation. Most of the time we fail to recognize him.

The knee-jerk reaction of Mr Joyce in grounding the entire QANTAS fleet also showed his unpreparedness for the long-foreseeable strike. It was a singularly counter-productive move, creating thousands more bewildered victims than the original strike had created. The Federal Opposition was (for once) probably right in accusing the Government of unpreparedness in not intervening more quickly.

But, for most of the time, for most of us, life flows along predictably and smoothly. And, like the unwise virgins, we become somnolent. In theory, as Christians, we await the coming of Christ on a daily, even an hourly basis. There is a kind of Christian called “milleniumist” who boldly, and repeatedly, announces a date quite soon when Christ will literally appear from the clouds locally in the sky. When it doesn’t happen they revise the calendar without embarrassment. That is, I suppose, preparedness of a kind.

Jesus said he would return while most of his generation were still alive. He did, of course return in a matter of hours rather than days after his death, but showed himself to only a handful of close disciples, and then disappeared again. But he left them with the expectation that he would yet return again. The Thessalonian Christians did indeed expect an immediate return, leaving aside their work and normal duties. St Paul rebuked them for that. But even if you’re not a milleniumist, you probably believe, like most Christians, in some kind of “second coming” as it has come to be called.

Personally, I tend to think that too much interest in some so-called second coming does not encourage true preparedness. It casts our attention too far away. Because of what Jesus said about whatever you do to anyone being done to him, I think we encounter Jesus every day. And much of the time we are not at all prepared for that. There’s a client at work who asks me over and over again if she is an angel, if she will go to heaven when she dies and if her brother, who died young, is in heaven. Too often I don’t really pay attention.

Some people simply irritate us by their personality. The reasons for that may lie deep in our own personality, so the way to be prepared is to be sceptical of our feelings. Christ dwells in irritating people just as much as he dwells in nice people. We have to be prepared to experience sudden negative feelings of other kinds too: anxiety, anger, fear, sadness, and counter them with positive thinking.

In spite of the Boy Scout motto, children are not typically forward-looking people. They live in the moment. To drop an ice cream on the pavement is a cosmic catastrophe. Part of growing up is learning to be prepared for upsetting accidents.

When Jesus said, “Take no thought for the morrow, what you shall eat or what you shall drink or how you shall be clothed,” he went on to say, “Set your heart not on these things but on the things of the kingdom.” This is very much a state of preparedness, but it is not immediately obvious what setting your heart on the things of heaven rather than earth means. They are the things that bring peace and harmony rather than conflict or competition, things that bring happiness rather than sadness, serenity rather than stress, here and now; not in some imaginary cloud cuckoo land.

There is an old mission hymn which goes, “Give me oil in my lamp, keep it burning; . . . . “ The oil referred to in the parable and in the hymn is not something you can buy. It is a gift from God the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to go anywhere to get it. But to be able to burn it, you have to put it in your lamp, so to speak. There has to be some conscious and deliberate act on your part, even if it is a purely mental action: it is a prayer. More than anything, I think, this parable is a direction to prayer. True preparedness is a God-focused mind – Peter said, “Pray without ceasing.”

We need to pray: “Give me oil in my lamp, keep it burning.” Don’t get lukewarm like the Christians of Laodicea so that God wants to spit you out. Blow on your embers and get some flames going. Allow yourself to get angry about the wealth gap, mistreatment of refugees and other social injustices, about political tyranny, persecution of minorities, about military thuggery by Israel in the Middle East, homelessness and poverty in this rich country. Maybe join Amnesty International.

God, give us hearts on fire with unsentimental and sacrificial love that can be active or indignant as well as warm and fuzzy.

The word ‘God’ in our English Old Testament translates the Hebrew word Elohim, and we should notice that, ending in ‘im’, it is a plural noun. Christianity is what is called a monotheistic religion. We believe in one God, but that does not necessarily mean that the Christian God is what philosophers call a monad, a totally homogeneous entity. The Christian God is the same God that the Jews call Elohim. God has inner complexity. One could say that God is a community, a family even.

We speak in the Nicene Creed of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit is sometimes represented as a bird, from Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism where the Spirit descends on Jesus “like a dove”. But we do not believe that God is literally an oldish man, a young man and a bird. In recent times we have referred to the Trinity as “Creator, Redeemer and Spirit of life.”

Calling God ‘Father’ unfortunately suggests that “He” is male. God is not an animal and does not have a gender. However, we should not dump the metaphorical word ‘Father’. God did not create the universe like a craftsman might create a work of art or a piece of machinery. It is more appropriate to think of God as procreating, giving birth to the universe as a living organism: his offspring. The universe is the fruit of God’s overflowing love.

Of course, when Jesus spoke of his ‘Father’ he did not mean one person of the Trinity. Jesus knew nothing of such a doctrine. He referred to the whole of God, Elohim, or the other Hebrew word for God, the enigmatic and unspeakable name revealed to Moses, represented by four consonants, YHWH. In the Jewish Bible (the Old Testament) YHWH is, with a very few exceptions, rendered by the word Adoni, which we translate as Lord.

So let’s think about God the Creator, God the Redeemer and God the Holy Spirit. All three notions of God appear in the Old and New Testaments, though the word Trinity does not. That first appears in the 2^nd century but was not precisely defined until AD352, when the Nicene Creed was composed.

We can think of God as creator in terms of the two creation myths at the beginning of Genesis, which are not particularly anthropomorphic, though he speaks in human language, or we can think of him in terms of Big Bang theory. You will probably be less familiar with the latter so let me say a bit about that. Big Bang theory actually follows approximately the order of events in Genesis Chapter 1, which is a poetic narrative about an imaginary seven-day period in primordial time.

In primordial time, before chronological time where we exist, there was the chaotic void, without form as Genesis says. Physicists call this the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum occupies the whole of space and time but it transcends it. It is boundless. Space and time were created in the Big Bang. The universe came into being in the quantum vacuum.

Christians and, in fact almost all religious traditions, hold that the universe has a divine or supernatural origin. Science has no idea what caused the Big Bang or what causes the universe to develop and evolve as it is doing. A Christian scientist would hold that God was the initiating force; that God, as it were, ‘breathed’ on the quantum vacuum and there emerged what physicists call the ‘Singularity’ which inflated and expanded from the ‘Big Bang’ to become what we know as the universe today. This expansion, the Big Bang, is still going on.

To go back to the Bible: St Paul and St John refer to the divine Christ as the one “in whom and through whom all things come into being”. The universe is therefore not only divine in origin, but also divine in nature. Christ is not simply the individual whose life is described in the gospels, but a cosmic being. The American theologian, Professor Sallie McFague, refers to the universe as the Body of God in a book of that name, the embodiment of God, the cosmic Christ. In the Nicene Creed we call him the Son, “begotten, not made”. As I said: the universe is the fruit of love, not the product of divine craftsmanship.

At the same time, the Church teaches that God is pure Spirit, without parts or passions. That may seem inconsistent with the doctrine of the Trinity, but bear in mind that the three Persons are not distinct parts of God they are all fully and completely divine and they merge completely.

Scientists have studied the universe exclusively as a physical entity – that is their field. But many philosophers and even some physicists believe that the universe has a non-material dimension– that the universe is not only a material entity but a spiritual one as well.

Einstein discovered that matter is not something separate from energy; matter is made of energy – concentrated, complex formations of pure energy. The universe is ultimately made of energy. When we say that God is pure spirit, we might also say that God is pure energy. The universe, the cosmic Christ, is filled with the energy of God. And it is informed by the Mind of God, evolving towards some future and mysterious perfection.

Some philosophers and scientists like the late Alfred North Whitehead and the living Australian physicist, Charles Birch, have proposed that the universe is not only a living organism but also has mind. The universe thinks. It has its own psyche, but, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, the cosmic mind is being drawn into conformity with the divine mind.

When we preach about the Holy Spirit, we generally focus on Isaiah’s seven gifts and Paul’s seven fruits of the Holy Spirit. That is quite proper, but it rather suggests that we humans are what the cosmos is all about. The Holy Spirit is not just an exclusive gift to devout Christians; he is a gift to the universe. St John wrote that God loves the world. The Greek word there is cosmos, which we usually translate as universe. So he refers not just to human beings or even just the planet Earth but the whole universe. The Holy Spirit, the active agent of God’s love, is a universal, indeed a transcendent being.

One cannot be long-winded in a blog so this is only a brief reflection on the central dogma of Christianity; but there is a rich store of scholarly literature written by learned scholars.

It has been suggested that I make it clear that the opinions expressed in this blog are my own and personal. While I hope they are not heretical, they do not represent official church teaching or the official position of my community, the Society of Saint Francis.

William SSF

Even if you are a religious believer like myself, this is a moot point. It might seem that it is not a theological issue but rather a philosophical one, but the question underpins theological debate. How do we know that something exists? Philosophers tell us that to exist means, strictly, to be a distinct entity amidst other entities. If, for example, I say that I exist, that depends on some kind of environment of other things. If we say that God exists, we mean that he (she or it) is a thing (or person) among other things and persons. It means that God and the universe are two distinct entities.

The word universe means every physical thing that exists, including atoms and subatomic particles and energy fields. If there are other similar entities like the one we observe around us, then the word universe should include them. Speculative cosmologists like the Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, use the word multiverse.

Does the multiverse exist? It is not, in that case, a thing among things; it is all there is – the totality of being. Many philosophers, particularly those called ‘logical positivists’ would claim that the word exist is inappropriate.

Is God a thing (or person if you prefer) alongside other things or persons? Rowan Williams, one of the world’s leading theologians, says that we experience God with a certain sense of ‘alongsideness’. However he would hold, with all other mystics, that God is also within us and immanent in the whole of nature. The twelfth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said, “God is everything, but everything is not God.” In other words he was saying that God is everything, yet more than everything. God is all there is: there is nothing else. The universe is not a non-god thing; it is that in which God is immanent and embodied. It is, so to speak, the physical dimension of God. The Archbishop’s use of the word ‘alongsideness’ is metaphorical. God is not alongside in the sense of outside and separate.

The immanence of God is a basic doctrine of Christianity, derived most clearly from the prologue of John’s Gospel: He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him. (John 1:2,3) And in Paul’s letter to the Colossians he writes, For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible . . . All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together. (1:16,17). Everything is in and comes into being through the Word, Christ. St Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395) wrote, “Nothing can exist which does not have its being in God who is.” But God is not only in us; we are in God. God transcends the universe.

The cosmic Christ of Paul and John is the theological basis of the green movement and environmental science. American theologian and environmentalist, Sallie McFague, has written a book called “The Body of God”, focusing on the theology of matter. She, among others, sees the incarnation as a cosmic event – the cosmic event in fact. It would seem that she (and Paul) might celebrate the Big Bang at Christmas, not just the birth of Jesus!

For those who believe that God is some kind of entity who exists beyond the universe, this might seem to deny the independent existence of God. Many, if not most of those who believe in God conceive of him dualistically. They see God and the universe as two distinct entities, over against each other. But independence is not quite the same as separation. We say, metaphorically, that God has a will, a free will. But so has the universe. God created the universe to evolve freely according to its own laws. At its most basic, subatomic level there are no laws of cause and effect such as apply at our macroscopic level. Max Planck and others discovered this early in the twentieth century, and it is the basis of Heisenberg’s law of uncertainty and quantum theory.

When we say that God exists we are more or less forced to create an imaginary image of some kind. It doesn’t need to be anything as crude as an old man seated on a throne above the clouds. I saw a child’s drawing of God once that was simply a large grayish smudge on paper. This, I thought, was quite sophisticated for a six-year-old, but it was no less fundamentally idolatrous than any other image of God, Christian, Hindu or whatever. All images of God, even abstract mental images and philosophical definitions, are idolatrous.

It is often said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are obvious exceptions to this, such as a bag of beans, but it is powerfully true of any sort of organism. The universe is an organism containing an innumerable number of parts. The universe, as a whole, is more than a collection of stars: galaxies and so forth. As a whole it is a living organism. Some physicists and cosmologists, like David Bohm and Alfred North Whitehead, believe that the universe is even a self-conscious organism in which self-consciousness is materialized cosmically in the human beings of planet Earth and possibly elsewhere as well. Physicist, John Wheeler, drew a little picture of the universe as an eye looking at itself.

The doctrine of the Trinity suggests that God contemplates himself in love. The Trinity is the metaphorical image of the eternal, divine love affair.

The reification of the Trinity (making God into a thing or person) that the word exist implies bothers me. The Trinity is not a thing or person among things or persons. The Trinity is the whole of everything, immanent but also transcending everything. We cannot say, therefore, that God is a thing alongside some other non-god thing or collection of things. We cannot say that God does not exist, of course, but it is better simply to say, like Gregory of Nissa, that God is. This is the sense of the ineffable name YHWH, revealed to Moses.

Does God exist? If we have to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ then the answer has to be yes, but in fact the question is not quite so simple as that.

DOES GOD EXIST?

Even if you are a religious believer like myself, this is a moot point. It might seem that it is not a theological issue but rather a philosophical one, but the question underpins theological debate. How do we know that something exists? Philosophers tell us that to exist means, strictly, to be a distinct entity amidst other entities. If, for example, I say that I exist, that depends on some kind of environment of other things. If we say that God exists, we mean that he (she or it) is a thing (or person) among other things (or persons); or, at least, it means that God and the universe are two distinct entities.

The word universe means every physical thing that exists, including atoms and subatomic particles and energy fields. If there are other similar entities like the one we observe around us, then the word universe should include them. Speculative cosmologists like the Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees, use the word multiverse.

Does the multiverse exist? It is not, in that case, a thing among things; it is all there is – the totality of being. Many philosophers, particularly those called ‘logical positivists’ would claim that the word exist is inappropriate.

Is God a thing (or person if you prefer) alongside other things or persons? Rowan Williams, one of the world’s leading theologians, says that we experience God with a certain sense of ‘alongsideness’. However he would hold, with all other mystics, that God is also within us and immanent in the whole of nature. The twelfth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said, “God is everything, but everything is not God.” In other words he was saying that God is everything, yet more than everything. God is all there is: there is nothing else. The universe is not a non-god thing; it is that in which God is immanent and embodied. It is, so to speak, the physical dimension of God. The Archbishop’s use of the word ‘alongsideness’ is metaphorical. God is not alongside in the sense of outside and separate.

The immanence of God is a basic doctrine of Christianity, derived most clearly from the prologue of John’s Gospel: He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him. (John 1:2,3) And in Paul’s letter to the Colossians he writes, For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible . . . All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together. (1:16,17). Everything is in and comes into being through the Word, Christ. St Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-395) wrote, “Nothing can exist which does not have its being in God who is.” But God is not only in us; we are in God. God transcends the universe.

The cosmic Christ of Paul and John is the theological basis of the green movement and environmental science. American theologian and environmentalist, Sallie McFague, has written a book called “The Body of God”, focusing on the theology of matter. She, among others, sees the incarnation as a cosmic event – the cosmic event in fact. It would seem that she (and Paul) might celebrate the Big Bang at Christmas, not just the birth of Jesus!

For those who believe that God is some kind of entity who exists beyond the universe, this might seem to deny the independent existence of God. Many, if not most of those who believe in God conceive of him dualistically. They see God and the universe as two distinct entities, over against each other. But independence is not quite the same as separation. We say, metaphorically, that God has a will, a free will. But so has the universe. God created the universe to evolve freely according to its own laws. At its most basic, subatomic level there are no laws of cause and effect such as apply at our macroscopic level. Max Planck and others discovered this early in the twentieth century, and it is the basis of Heisenberg’s law of uncertainty and quantum theory.

When we say that God exists we are more or less forced to create an imaginary image of some kind. It doesn’t need to be anything as crude as an old man seated on a throne above the clouds. I saw a child’s drawing of God once that was simply a large grayish smudge on paper. This, I thought, was quite sophisticated for a six-year-old, but it was no less fundamentally idolatrous than any other image of God, Christian, Hindu or whatever. All images of God, even abstract mental images and philosophical definitions, are idolatrous.

It is often said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There are obvious exceptions to this, such as a bag of beans, but it is powerfully true of any sort of organism. The universe is an organism containing an innumerable number of parts. The universe, as a whole, is more than a collection of stars: galaxies and so forth. As a whole it is a living organism. Some physicists and cosmologists, like David Bohm and Alfred North Whitehead, believe that the universe is even a self-conscious organism in which self-consciousness is materialized cosmically in the human beings of planet Earth and possibly elsewhere as well. Physicist, John Wheeler, drew a little picture of the universe as an eye looking at itself.

The doctrine of the Trinity suggests that God contemplates himself in love. The Trinity is the metaphorical image of the eternal, divine love affair.

The reification of the Trinity (making God into a thing or person) that the word exist implies bothers me. The Trinity is not a thing or person among things or persons. The Trinity is the whole of everything, immanent but also transcending everything. We cannot say, therefore, that God is a thing alongside some other non-god thing or collection of things. We cannot say that God does not exist, of course, but it is better simply to say, like Gregory of Nissa, that God is. This is the sense of the ineffable name YHWH, revealed to Moses.

Does God exist? If we have to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ then the answer has to be yes, but in fact the question is not quite so simple as that.

The relationship between science and religion has been variable since experimental science entered European culture from Moslem North Africa in the 14^th century. Most of the time they have been at ease with one another, but there have been tense periods when the discoveries of science seemed to contradict the dogmas of religion. Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543) declared that the Sun was the centre of the universe and the earth and the planets rotated round it. This contradicted mediaeval tradition that the Earth was the centre of the universe. He was rigorously interrogated by the inquisition, and lucky to die peacefully in his own bed.

In the nineteenth century, another rift was caused when, in 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace simultaneously published the theory of evolution as the basis of the diverse world of plants and animals. Geologists later deduced from fossil discoveries that the process had been going on for four and a half billion years, since the first primitive living organisms emerged.

This, of course, seemed directly to contradict the story of creation in six days in the first chapter of Genesis. I am told that 40% of the population of the United States believes that the Genesis myth is the true, scientific account and the Wallace-Darwin theory is false. This seems to indicate that, in the United States especially; there is still a conflict between science and religion. Coincidentally, or maybe as a consequence, most scientists in the U.S. are atheists. This is not the case in other parts of the world.

Some scientists have made a contribution to theological debate, and there is a long list of clerics, from the 13^th century Franciscan friar, Roger Bacon, onwards, who have made a significant contribution to the advance of science. A contemporary example, Robert Russell, professor of physics and also professor of theology at UCLA describes the resurrection of Christ in terms of an evolutionary breakthrough. Other scientist philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead for example and Australians, Paul Davies and Charles Birch, show clearly their belief in a spiritual dimension of the universe.

Other scientists have made discoveries that have theological significance without intending to. Einstein is one of these. He discovered through applied mathematics that the universe is not a static, three dimensional region containing fixed stars and galaxies, but a dynamic, flexible and mobile structure in which space and time are one entity that is stretched and compressed between objects that are moving relative to each other.

We cannot visualize four dimensions, but we can experience it any evening. When we look into the sky, we are not just looking at things that are far away in space; they are far away in time also, because light travels at a finite speed – very fast: about 300,000 Kms a second, but finite nonetheless. This finite speed means that the light we see from the stars has taken time to reach us. We see everything as it was when the light left the star or galaxy. Astronomical distance is measured in light years – the distance light travels in a year, and the most distant galaxies visible through the Hubble telescope are billions of light years away. Astronomers can therefore see the universe as it was billions of years ago.

In 1929, the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, after whom the big orbiting telescope is named, discovered all the stars and galaxies are moving away from us, and, because Earth is not the centre of the universe, as mediaeval theologians believed, that means that everything is moving apart – the universe is expanding. If the universe is expanding, it must have been smaller in the past, and logic suggests that it must therefore have begun as an infinitesimally small object in which all the space-time and all the energy and matter of the universe was concentrated. If the expanding universe were simply a three-dimensional thing it would be like a balloon being inflated, and that would have a spatial centre. But because, as Einstein realized, it is a four-dimensional, space-time thing, it does not have any spatial centre. The centre of the expanding universe is its beginning, when it was infinitesimally small. It lies in a time direction, in the past, not a space direction. So looking into the night sky in any direction we are looking towards the centre of the universe.

The universal speed of light led Einstein to his first theory of relativity, in 1905. He proved that there is no such thing as absolute time or absolute space. There is no universal ‘now’. Time is part of the universe; the universe does not exist in time. There is no “before the universe”. God didn’t hang about in heaven for aeons of time and then suddenly decide to create the world. Time began with the creation of the universe.

In his first theory, Einstein ignored gravity. In 1915, however, in his general theory of relativity, he took gravity into account. Gravity tends to draw things together, even things like light, so he predicted that a ray of light would be bent if it passed close to the Sun. This was proved experimentally in 1932 during a total solar eclipse in India. A star visually near the edge of the sun (which would only be visible during an eclipse) appeared to move away from the Sun as the Sun approached it in its transit across the sky. That meant its light rays were being bent. Since light always travels the shortest distance possible, a straight line in other words, this meant that gravity curved space: the straight line was no longer straight; it was bent by the gravity of the Sun. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein treats gravity, not as a force but as a curvature of space.

Do Einstein’s theories have any theological significance? Do they affect the way we think about God? A reasonably sophisticated believer would, I think, say no. But the Psalmist sang, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” John, in the prologue of his Gospel (1,1-14) and Paul, in his letter to the Colossians (1,15), declare that, in and through Christ, or “the Word”, everything comes into being and has its existence. For them, the whole universe is God’s embodiment, God’s incarnation.

Many scientists believe that, in studying nature, they are learning more about God. Einstein discovered a universe that is not static and inert, but a dynamic organism in which every event is felt throughout its entirety. That sounds much more like the God I believe in than does the old idea of a static, three dimensional universe with the Earth or the Sun as its centre.

Jesus seems to be subverting the Jewish law and even contradicting common sense. He challenges the idea of legitimate punishment. The law about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was, in fact, a civilizing move, away from barbarism. If someone committed an offence against you, your response was to be strictly limited, based exactly on how much harm they had done to you. The natural instinct is to return an injury vigorously without much thought of restraint. Jewish law allowed for measured retribution but insisted on discipline and fairness.

But even this is not good enough for Jesus who tells us to abandon all thought of retribution. He even speaks of turning the other cheek, metaphorically inviting further hostile aggression, but I think that was a kind of hyperbole, exaggeration, to drive home his point: a device Jesus often used in his teaching.

The problem with this, as people often point out, is that it would lead to a complete breakdown of law and order in society. If burglars were to be invited back into the houses they had broken into to help themselves to anything else they might fancy; or even if they were to be let off any penalty for their actions, no one would be able to live in their homes with any sense of security.

So our governments enact laws and regulations and employ police forces to preserve order and a certain level of basic good behaviour in society. And they prescribe penalties for violations of those laws. Our prisons are a monument to this system of crime and punishment. The fact that objective studies reveal that prisons do nothing to reduce society’s crime rate, rather the opposite, and longer sentences merely burden the taxpayer pointlessly, does not mean that we should abandon the idea of penalizing anti-social behaviour. We need to have measures that will protect people’s safety and security.

Ideally, the penal system is to provide a means for the rehabilitation of someone who is emotionally and mentally alienated from mainstream society, because that’s what criminals are, often largely for reasons that are no fault of their own. Prison is not, officially at least, a vehicle of revenge. Let’s bear in mind too that the majority of prisoners are either intellectually handicapped or socially disadvantaged such as Aborigines.

In the book Leviticus we have the famous injunction to love your neighbour as yourself. When Jesus speaks of hating your enemies he is not quoting scripture of, course. There is no injunction in the Torah to hate your enemies; Jesus is simply expressing a common attitude.

If I ask myself who these enemies are whom I must love, I would be hard pressed to think of anyone. And, like me, most people don’t really think of themselves as having enemies – people who would wish them harm. We are rarely engaged in serious, violent conflict over anything. People run businesses in competition with other entrepreneurs. Sports teams engage in games with rival sports teams. Students are encouraged to compete for being top of the class, but we distinguish quite clearly between a competitor and an enemy. Competitors can be good friends.

However, there are many instances where individuals find themselves incompatible for some reason. It is often an emotional or psychological thing, hard to explain rationally, but it would be an overstatement to refer to this as enmity. Enmity implies wishing harm to another. So it may be difficult for most people to identify enemies, in the true sense, that they must love not hate.

Does this mean that Jesus’ words have no relevance for us? No, it doesn’t. While the word hate may be too strong, there are likely, as I indicated just now, to be people for whom we feel a dislike, rational or otherwise. Though we do not really wish them harm, we distance ourselves; we try to avoid contact, and we are quick to find causes to rationalize our feelings. It is easy to see someone as selfish and thoughtless, because everyone is selfish and thoughtless to a greater or lesser extent. It requires more patience and diligence to get to know someone well enough to love them, warts and all.  It has been said that to know all is to forgive all.

I spend a significant amount of time with people with disabilities, and the majority are psychological or emotional disabilities rather than purely physical ones. This can be very wearing at times, but I also know enough of their background to be aware that their life is something of a struggle. There is plenty of ground for admiration of the way they cope with life. They have grown up in a society that does not really want to know about them. The ones we see at SWARA most often come with a very damaged self-image.

The charismatic founder of SWARA, the late Dorothy O’Brien, established from the start a tradition of making people feel that they are valuable and lovable. A cynic would claim that we kid ourselves, but our mental attitudes generate our feelings to a great extent, and vice versa, our feelings generate mental attitudes and rationales. We have more control of the way we think than we do of the way we feel. Dorothy O’Brien’s mental attitude was infectious and Dorothy established an atmosphere of affection and goodwill that is far from common in society in general. I find my connection there edifying and it also fortifies my own feeling of self-worth.

But Jesus doesn’t stop with our attitude to people who want to harm us or even who dislike us; he demands that we be perfect as God is perfect. That’s the real punch line. It doesn’t seem he would accept the popular plea “I’m only human”. We have to be like God. That is a very extreme demand, but it is also an invitation to a happier and more joyful life. Jesus is making a demand that he must have known his hearers could not immediately fulfill. It is a call to a distant place, but it is also an invitation to the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.

So, as always, Jesus leaves us with a sense of challenge: challenge to change. We all need to change, but changing oneself is a difficult undertaking. To identify the ways and the means by which we can achieve this will require some reflection and ongoing, focused attention. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And that translates, in practical terms, to acting and speaking and even thinking differently.

Jesus sat down. It was the traditional posture to teach from rather than standing. A modern lecturer would begin by outlining what he was going to say, but Jesus gets straight into it. “Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Poverty of spirit could mean two things: it could mean that your spiritual life was dry and barren – a condition common even among those who pray faithfully, or it could mean an attraction to a life of simplicity. I think the latter interpretation is the more popular. Individuals of great wealth sometimes, I have been told, express a yearning for a life less complicated by the intricate and challenging responsibilities of their abundant property. Some even take the plunge and change their lifestyle and find great satisfaction and tranquility by doing so. But this is rare.

There are those, of course, a greater number I think, who enjoy being rich and powerful or rich and famous. They get a thrilling surge of adrenaline playing the stock market with patiently acquired skill. They love being seen in costly motor vehicles and expensive restaurants. Their spirits soar when they discover a quick means of increasing their wealth.

There is an even greater number who are not rich, who even struggle to make ends meet, with a mortgage and children at school, who wish they were richer. The Australian gambling industry has more facilities than that of any other country. We have a significant problem of addiction to gambling: more to poker machines than to horses, but both ruin lives on a daily basis.

It is said that Australians will bet on two geckos climbing up a wall: we are inveterate gamblers.

I am too mean to gamble, even if I had the means. The only form of gambling I know of with a flat playing field is cards and two-up. In all the Lottos, Golden Caskets and pokies, and even the horses, the odds are stacked against the punter. There have to be laws to force the operators of these most popular gambling options to return a certain percentage of the take.

Saint Paul said that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Not money in itself, notice, but the love of money. Philargura is the Greek word he uses. Saint Francis considered that all money was contaminated and on one occasion, finding some coins on top of a fence, he trod them in the mud. But society, in his time, was less dependent on cash. There was a lot of barter, especially among the lower social orders. I know one or two people who engage in little barter schemes, based on theoretical tokens call “eggs”. One person mows the neighbour’s lawn and the neighbour feeds their cat when they’re away.

I mentioned earlier another kind of poverty of spirit. I meant that where one tries to experience the spiritual dimension of life, to pray perhaps or meditate creatively, and nothing seems to happen. One’s mind just wanders around about trivialities or passing concerns or worries. In fact people who give time regularly to prayer and meditation find this is the most common experience. Moments of inspiration, let alone ecstasy, are very rare. Two saints, famous for their writings about prayer, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross both speak of this kind of spiritual poverty. St John called it “the dark night of the soul”.

St Luke quotes Jesus in a parallel passage as saying simply, “Blessed are the poor.” I think that is an oversimplification. We see a good deal of the world’s extremely poor on TV. Many of us feel real concern about this because we don’t see this as a blessed state at all, especially as it is largely caused by the greed of the rich and powerful.

But in both Matthew’s and Luke’s narrative, this is only the beginning of a long discourse that, doubtless in each case, gathers a number of Jesus’ teachings together – a sort of introductory selection, you might say.

The poor in spirit, or simply the poor, are the first in a list of “blessed” people. “Of such is the kingdom of heaven”, Jesus might have said. But, according to Matthew, that would exclude the wretched poor, the starving millions in third world countries where more than thirty percent of children starve to death before they are five. Matthew says nothing to comfort those who are hungry for food, only those who hunger for righteousness.

As the list of the blessed proceeds it becomes increasingly idealistic. He promises comfort to those who mourn, but there are many inconsolable widows, widowers and parents of children who have been killed or died of a fatal illness. The promise is most likely to be fulfilled only if the mourners have a relationship with God. There is no guarantee that the merciful will receive mercy. I take purity of heart to mean single-minded benevolence of intention. I know a few individuals who seem to me to have that attitude to life and it may well be that they meet God every day, but often unconsciously I suspect.

The final ‘kingdom type’, the ones who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, have to wait for their reward in a heaven that seems to be projected into the future: in an afterlife presumably. The reference to the prophets is an affirmation of Jesus’ belief in life after death.

Jesus’ teaching here, as always, is a challenge. It challenges several popular ideas or even turns them upside down. I would have liked a reference to women. Jesus never explicitly challenged the male chauvinism of his people. The church, in this particularly, offers an ambiguous expression of the values expressed in Jesus’ “beatitudes”. We, its clergy and laity, do little by our lives to challenge the conventional thinking that Jesus challenges.

So his description of what we might call ‘heavenly people’ is a challenge. The kingdom may, as he said, be nearby, but it is really a case of so near and yet so far.

In 1925 Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King on the last Sunday of the liturgical year. After the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus escaped alone to the desert because he feared that the crowd wanted to make him king. On his last journey to Jerusalem with his disciples, he accepted Peter’s declaration that he is the Messiah but told the disciples to keep it a secret. This was not necessarily simply an expression of his modesty; he knew that such a claim would make him the target for assassination by both Herod and the religious leaders.

Herod had tried to find him and kill him as soon as he got wind of his birth, and the religious leaders were so offended by his teaching that they feared he was a threat to their authority, so they too were after him. It was only Pilate who, either mockingly or sincerely, declared Jesus to be King of the Jews.

It would not be unreasonable to say that, in the traditional and historical sense, Jesus rejected the idea of kingship. He never tried to establish any executive authority in Judea. He specifically encouraged his people to accept the Roman authority and pay the Emperor’s taxes.

In this democratic age the government of a nation by an individual is seen as the worst kind of political system, a dictatorship, totalitarianism, giving rise to oppressive, corrupt and often cruel tyrannies. The kings and queens living today fulfil mainly ceremonial and symbolic roles in democratic societies. (Though it is interesting that Plato regarded democracy as the most debased kind of social system.)

Although Jesus was directly descended from king David through Joseph, and might, perhaps, have made a valid claim to the throne of Judea, he never gave the slightest hint of wanting to do so. Quite the opposite. Perhaps one could almost say that, when Pope Pius XI instituted this festival, he might have been foisting onto Jesus something he would never have wanted.

From a Christian perspective, it really only makes sense if we view kingship in a radically different way from the historical and traditional one. In fact we need to go further and take a close look at what we mean by all leadership from a Christian perspective. Is it about control, or is it about service?

Ever since Australia became a nation we have actually been ruled by a prime minister (after the English model). The significance of the word ‘minister’ is important. The word originally referred to a galley slave. They were the lowest of the low. The emphasis is on service, not about control. The modern ceremonial monarch is very much the servant of the nation.

What is often not recognised is just how deep that servanthood goes. In ancient times, a monarch has been seen as, in a sense, the embodiment of the nation – in a metaphorical but deep and powerful sense. If something bad happened to the king, it was a national disaster.

Paul saw Christ as the embodiment of the entire universe. This is clearly expressed in Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (1:15-17).

“In him were created all things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible. He is before all things and in him all things hold together.”

That is an immensely important theological statement. If we believe that Christ is divine, it means that the physical universe is in some sense divine with a divine will giving direction to its evolving nature. In a metaphorical sense then it makes good sense to regard Christ, the cosmic Christ, as king of the universe.

Christ’s rule is God’s rule, and God’s rule is sometimes bewilderingly non-interventional. Jesus’ so-called miracles, wrought in the power of the Holy Spirit through shared faith, were an empowerment, a channelling of power available to all, not an unnatural intervention or some kind of alien, supernatural control.

I do not believe that God ever intrudes to manipulate or alter the laws of nature. Those “laws, evolving as they are, reflect the mind and intention of God. It is not surprising that the famous physicist JBS Haldane said: “Nature is not only weird, it is weirder than we can possibly imagine.”

The word miracle means something that causes wonderment; it doesn’t mean something against the laws of nature. As I remarked earlier, the universe, and even the laws of nature, are changing, evolving, but they are changing consistently with their own coherent structure and process. Whatever is driving cosmic evolution, it is as its servant, not its dictator.

Christ is truly a servant king. One of the last things that Jesus did was to wash his disciples’ feet. He promised them that they would sit on thrones in the Kingdom of Heaven but, at the last supper, told them to wash one another’s feet.

In church circles we do tend sometimes to treat Christ as a ceremonial monarch like our queen. We multiply tokens of respect and worship, but we don’t consistently allow him to rule our lives.

People in the past were fond of the notion of humankind as ‘lords of creation’. We know to our cost what this attitude led to during the industrial revolution and into this age of consumerism, waste and pollution. In the important myth of the Garden of Eden, the Lord tells Adam and Eve to tend and nurture the garden.

We are not lords of creation, we are its youngest, its most junior members, a mere million or so years old on a planet billions of years old. Mother Nature will care for us generously, but cannot do so if we abuse and injure her.

If, as members of the Body of Christ, we want to share in Christ’s kingship, then we must learn to be servant kings – servants to one another and also thoughtful and tender towards the natural environment that has given birth to us. If we behave like greedy and rapacious tyrants, or even as selfish and ignorant children, bad things will happen.

Christ loves and cares for his cosmic body. He loves and cares for us, the latest emergence in cosmic evolution. We must learn to do the same, to care for one another and for all the natural world around us. As members of the Body of Christ, we share, not in a dominating tyranny but in a servant kingship.

Zacchaeus. (Luke 19:1-10)

I have always visualised Zacchaeus as portly and middle-aged. Nevertheless he must have been reasonably athletic to be climbing trees, even though he cannot have been very young, having risen to the position of chief tax collector in Jericho.

I wonder what he expected to see. The reports going round would be about his teaching and miracles, not his appearance. Exorcists, healers, prophets and preachers do not have any characteristic physical features.

Was Zacchaeus merely curious, or was there a deeper motive for wanting to see Jesus? It seems he didn’t actually want to meet him because you don’t climb trees in order to make a first acquaintance. Very likely he felt unworthy. He was well aware, I am sure, that he was a social outcast as far as respectable people were concerned. Working for the hated Roman occupiers was no way to make friends among his own people, chafing under the foreign occupation.

Zacchaeus was caught in an immoral system. The Roman authorities would set him a quota amount that he was to collect but did not pay him, so he would have to extort extra from people if he was to make a living. Luke tells us that he was, in fact, a wealthy man. It is not surprising that tax collectors were unpopular people. Jesus caused scandal to the Pharisees because, as they said, he ate with tax collectors and sinners. Tax collectors were de facto sinners. Perhaps it was not surprising then that Zacchaeus did not try to meet Jesus directly.

Jesus evidently knew Zacchaeus at least by name and probably by reputation as well. It would have been quite natural to ignore him, even if he noticed him up the tree. But Jesus called him directly, as he had called the first apostles. He did not say “Follow me”, as he did to Matthew, another tax collector, but his call “Come down,” and inviting himself to Zacchaeus’ house was a kind of vocation just the same.

Zacchaeus might have been embarrassed and made an excuse not to entertain this challenging person, but he didn’t. “He came down quickly and received Jesus with joy,” Luke tells us. The religious people were scandalised, of course, but that wouldn’t bother Jesus or Zacchaeus.

Luke included this episode in his Gospel for a reason. He clearly felt it had evangelical value: it proclaimed good news.

First, it shows Jesus taking the initiative with someone who was, religiously, beyond the pale. Zacchaeus was a man who had habitually stilled his Jewish conscience. He was not only a social pariah, he had a guilty conscience as well. Jesus didn’t wait for him to be converted, like the prodigal son. He called him personally. And it changed his life. He didn’t stop being a tax collector but he would become something that was probably unique – an honest and conscientious tax collector.

In telling this story, Luke had an audience in mind and I don’t think it was just tax collectors. I think it was anyone who had an uneasy conscience. Jesus was especially attracted to those – people like the lady, maybe a prostitute, who anointed his feet during lunch at Simon the Pharisee’s house. Jesus declared once: “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

With Zacchaeus, Jesus did not declare his sins forgiven. He made no comment about being saved by his faith as on some occasions. He said that salvation had come to Zacchaeus’ house because Zacchaeus had had a change of heart. He was inspired to change his way of life.

And Jesus did not just say that salvation had come for Zacchaeus but to “this house”. Zacchaeus may or may not have been married, Luke doesn’t say, but I am sure that, as a wealthy man, he would not be living alone. He would have had servants. His change of heart would have had a subtle impact on the atmosphere of the whole household.

Don’t let’s underestimate the moral complexity of Zacchaeus’ position. He had to collect more from people than the Roman officials demanded if he was to make a living of any kind. He was caught in a system that was innately immoral. Our tax collectors are paid good salaries. The Romans forced their employees to fiddle.

Many people find themselves, like Zacchaeus, in morally ambiguous situations. They work for companies that make immoral profits or dodgy products. I had a friend years ago, a lawyer who was leader of the defence team when the Distillers Company were being sued for damages over the deformities caused by the contraceptive thalidomide. He ended up having a nervous breakdown and committing suicide.

We all find ourselves part of a nation that does things we disapprove of. The war in Iraq, for example. Many of us feel that our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers leaves much to be desired. They are treated like criminals, though their only crime is to try and save their own lives and that of their families. Some countries, New Zealand for example, let them live in the community while their claims are assessed.

There are many temptations in employment to cheat a bit. Executives inflate their expense accounts. A garage attendant told me once that he was often asked to put an inflated figure on a petrol bill.

But I don’t think Luke just meant to prick our consciences. I think he had in mind that, however trapped we seem to be in a society that commits corporate, social sins, we can do something about it. I have done what I can to dissociate myself from our punitive treatment of refugees by writing to the immigration minister. I hope it had some tiny impact because politicians worry about popular opinion. I joined in protest marches during the Vietnam war and walked with Brother Lionel in the procession demanding an apology from the Howard government for the mistreatment of Aborigines.

These are little things. Zacchaeus did far more. He challenged an immoral system in a way that cost him a lot. But I think his story is not irrelevant to our own lives. I think that all of us would sometimes feel like Isaiah at his call: “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.”

So far as the four canonical gospels are concerned Mary is not a prominent figure. In John’s gospel Jesus even seems on a couple of occasions to put her down. It is only in the birth stories of Matthew and Luke that Mary is a central character. It seems it must have been generally known that Jesus was conceived out of wedlock. According to John, some Pharisees taunted Jesus with this during his final visit to Jerusalem (John 8:41). This would be a grave impediment to any claim that Jesus was Messiah, which is the basic theme of all the gospels. However, someone, presumably Mary herself, must have told the apostles that the conception of Jesus was through a miraculous intervention by God, and that she was still a virgin when she married Joseph. Matthew says that Joseph also confirmed this in his story of an angelic visitation in a dream. Luke has given us a very beautiful story of an angelic visitation to Mary predicting her pregnancy. Luke never encountered Mary in person so the story must have been part of an oral tradition or, just possibly, a creation of Luke himself .

Luke also gives us a glimpse of Mary, Joseph and Jesus when Jesus was about twelve. The family had gone to Jerusalem for Passover and Jesus left the family party and went to talk with the learned men of the temple. It took Jesus’ parents three days to discover that Jesus was not with the party returning to Nazareth, and another three days to find him. This is a vividly human story of distraught parents searching for their child in a city far from home. Jesus’ excuse is enigmatic (Luke 2:49) and Luke remarks that his parents were puzzled. We get the impression of a quite ordinary, working-class couple who experienced the kind of frights and stresses common to parenthood.

The Church has exalted Mary above the whole hierarchy of saints but, in doing so, it has to some extent de-humanised her. Though the gospels give no such impression, by asserting as dogma her perpetual virginity, she has been denied a normal relationship with her husband. Matthew, however, names four brothers and also sisters. These may include children of an earlier marriage of Joseph, and the word for brother can also mean cousin. This allows for the possibility that Jesus was Mary’s only child but it is not conclusive evidence.

One wonders why the Church insists on Mary’s perpetual virginity. Would motherhood somehow soil her saintly image? Is sexual intimacy in marriage seen as something that defiles the soul? That has never been the teaching of the church, though the Roman Catholic Church, in insisting that her priests and bishops remain celibate, does imply that the celibate state is in some sense superior to the married state.

But Catholic dogma related to Mary doesn’t stop there. The Catholic Church claims that Mary’s hymen was unbroken, even after giving birth to Jesus. This seems to go from the doubtful to the ridiculous. What is the meaning and purpose of such a claim?

As a final assault on our credulity the Catholic Church asks us to believe that, rather than enjoying the normal funeral solemnities after her death, Mary ascended bodily into heaven as Jesus is described as doing. The word used is “assumption” rather than ascension, but the meaning is the same.

Bishop David Shepherd said once that, in his experience, more people had problems with Jesus’ humanity that with his divinity. This could well be, and the story of his virgin birth and ascension could contribute to this. Even the Catholic Church does not claim that Mary was divine, but, loaded with extravagant claims and dogmas, we might doubt if she was a normal human being. Normal human women do not conceive and bear children with their hymens intact for a start, nor do they go up into the sky after death.

My relationship with Mary is intellectually grounded in my belief in what is called ‘the communion of saints’. Communication with dead people is most often associated with clairvoyants and séances, but Christians are among that majority of humankind who believe that the living have a real relationship with dead people when they are related in some way. Christians believe that all humankind are our brothers and sisters, but particularly other Christians. If Mary is the mother of Christ then she is, in a sense, our mother also.

Jesus told his disciples to call God “Father”. From the cross, he told the ‘beloved’ disciple to regard Mary as his mother. It seems likely that all Jesus’ disciples felt a filial concern for Mary after Jesus’ death. In his account of the disciples’ Pentecost experience Luke says that all the disciples were together. Though Luke doesn’t say so, Mary may have been among them (Mary Magdalen too, perhaps). We have a Pentecost icon in the church that shows Mary among the twelve apostles. Unfortunately it gets too fanciful, placing her on a throne, presiding over the proceedings. I don’t think that Mary ever had that kind of relationship to the early church. It is another example of separating Mary from the real, historical world.

People generally have a distinct and unique relationship with their mothers, as significant, but different to that with their fathers or their siblings. In calling God “Our Father” I am identifying a relationship radically different from that with my own father (though it is almost certainly coloured by that). In calling Mary “Mother” I am also referring to a relationship different to that with my own mother. But it is not at all like my relationship with God. As with all the saints, I need to relate to her as a fellow human being, not a largely imaginary, idealised and theologised creation of rather male-chauvinistic, celibate ecclesiastics.

In the end I am suspicious of the academic discipline called Mariology. I don’t think Mary needs “ologising”. There is so much to admire and empathise with in the person so scantily portrayed in the gospels. Ologising her is an unwelcome distraction. Relating to a person who has died presents enough problems for a modern Western mind without making it more complicated with representations like our Pentecost icon.

Hullo Mary, my mother in Christ. You must have gained much wisdom in your experience of life, so full of bewilderment and pain. Since you are also mother of my Christian forbears, I think of you as a grandmother figure too. I welcome the possibility of an enlightening and supportive relationship with you