The fight, spiritual or otherwise, goes on

Dear ,

I started writing this on Good Friday, and it’s been an unusually hard write for me, because here we are just after Anzac Day.

“Why ‘Good’ Friday,” you might ask. “What’s good about it?” That’s a good question. Or rather a gōd question, gōd being an Old English word which, means “holy” or even “solemn”, as well as “beneficial”. It’s the ancestor of our “good” but we have dropped the “holy” meaning almost entirely, except for Easter.

Good Friday is the commemoration of the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ (Christ, while I’m in an etymological mood, meaning the “anointed one” or “king”). It overlaps this year with the Jewish Passover which runs for 8 days from Saturday April 12 through to Sunday April 20.

This isn’t accidental. The Crucifixion occurred during the week of Passover, and while there is some variation between how Christians and Jews calculate the dates, they are generally close together.

What I want to do is explore some of the differences between Judaism and Christianity and then reflect on Anzac Day, and our present predicament.

Judaism comes from a world where wars of conquest can be justified by God, whereas, while Christians have been conquerors, there is no basis for this in the religion - self defence is another matter.

The Gospels describe how Jesus took a Passover meal and turned it into a ceremony of remembrance fof his crucifixion and death, which must have been mystifying to his Apostles, because they weren’t completely in on his plans.

So what was the Jewish Passover about? Essentially it was the commemoration of events that occurred when the Hebrews accepted the call from their God Yahweh to escape from slavery in Egypt, cross the Red Sea, which he parted for them, into the wilderness.

They wandered for 40 years in parts of Eastern Egypt and Arabia, and other lands bordering on modern day Israel. Then, in fulfilment of a promise they believe Yahweh made to their ancestor Abraham, and which was confirmed many times over and renewed in the desert through Moses their leader, they then invaded, and over perhaps 100 years, conquered the land of Canaan.

Then followed centuries of conquest and reconquest as the Jews conquered other peoples, and at times were themselves conquered, resulting in two major and one minor exiles where large parts of the population were enslaved by Assyrian, Babylonian and Roman conquerors and taken away.

The Jewish Bible claims that at the height of Jewish power King Solomon ruled from the “River of Egypt” to the Euphrates, that is from Egypt along the coast of the Mediterranean all the way to Iraq.

While I support the existence of the state of Israel, reading the Hebrew Bible would not make me easy if I were a Palestinian given that 55-60% of the Israeli population believes to some extent in Yahweh’s promise to Israel.

Many of us, myself included, tend to read the Palestine conflict through a Christian, and also a secular, lens. It’s worth stepping through some of the aspects of the Pentateuch to get a better understanding of what is unfolding there, and a better understanding of what Easter represents.

First, the Pentateuch reads somewhat like a manual for how to set up a military theocracy. It has foundation stories, justifying conquest; it has a religious core; and it contains a comprehensive set of laws, as well as history.

The conquest is brutal. At times God instructs the Israelites to kill all the men in a town and keep the rest as slaves. At other times he instructs the slaughter of everyone, because the women taken as concubines have led the men astray to worship foreign gods.

Then Yahweh is exclusive to the Jews. While Jews frequently lapse into paganism there is no wholesale conversion of pagans to Judaism, and Jews do not, at least in Biblical times, proselytise. This leads to conflict with every other tribal group and nation in the area.

Yahweh is also, while a universal deity, geographically centred on Canaan, and sacrificial worship of him is constrained to the temple in Jerusalem, the remnants of which still stand, and where Mike Huckabee will shortly place a prayer written on a piece of paper by Donald Trump.

This produces a strong emotional territorial claim which has survived maybe 3,300 years.

The religion is intensely tribal and hierarchical. There is a priestly class, but it is hereditary and limited to the tribe of Levi. Later there are kings (although Yahweh is actually resistant to this idea) but even then it is a kingdom run under religious rules.

To be a member of the tribe, if you are a male, you need to be circumcised. There is also a range of taboos, including cooking meat with the blood still in it, or worse, drinking the blood of an animal.

While Yahweh has relationships with individuals, he also has a relationship with Israel as a whole as well. So sin by one can result in punishment of all. When the people stray, everyone is punished, even the faithful. Battles are determined not by who is the strongest but whether God is on their side.

While the greatest sin in the 10 Commandments is idolatry, the greatest horror for the Jews in the pagan religions is human sacrifice, particularly of children. The story of Abraham and the aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac is a declaration that Israel is apart from this.

In his theology and in his institution of the Eucharist Christ was overthrowing many of these ideas. While he operates within the existing Jewish parameters of his time, he radically alters them.

His God is not a warlord god but a father to his people. The Palm Sunday procession into Jerusalem is a repudiation of the theocratic state. He is the anointed one, the King, but his “kingdom is not of this earth”.

Christianity is an evangelistic creed. While Jesus initially seems to have some doubts he tells his followers to go out and baptise the whole earth. It is inclusive with the religious claim being in some sense the whole world.

The centralisation of worship in the Jewish temple and in the hereditary priesthood is put aside. For worship you only need two people: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”, and any can be priests. As St Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, says “we [Christians] are a holy priesthood”.

Sacrifice is to occur regularly, but in a memorialised form. While the Jews had a ban on human sacrifice, Christ makes himself the sacrifice, and even more scandalously, when Christians are drinking the wine at communion, in the Jewish sense it is that part of the animal they are most banned from touching.

Jesus' God is also the God of peace. There is no support in Christianity for wiping out whole populations. And while Christians talk about the “body of Christ” the relationship with God is essentially one to one. The sins of the fathers are not visited on the children.

So the Jewish Passover and Easter share some important themes. One is also the structure from which the other is improvised in a way which would have shocked and scandalised the Jews of its day, or any day. No wonder they had him tortured and put to death. I can imagine them thinking that Yahweh would demand no less.

Which leads me to concepts of war. The Jewish religion is one that accepts war as fundamental. Out of their major religious festivals, three commemorate events which bear on the acquisition and defence of the Promised Land – Passover, Hannukah and Sukkot. Not one major Christian festival has anything to do with the state, and both Christmas and Easter actually celebrate the upending of the hierarchical order.

In this sense, Anzac Day services are quintessentially Christian. Which is no wonder, because, as Peter Rasey, one of our Foundation Members, continually brings to my attention, the idea was conceptualised and realised by Canon David Garland, an Anglican minister in Brisbane.

While war might be part of the Jewish religion, it's not absent from Christianity, but appears as the Augustinian concept of the just war, which recognises war as inevitable and justifies it, but only in a defensive sense.

And how fitting that we celebrate not a victory, but an ultimately failed campaign. Anzac Day is not triumphalist. And it recognises the human sacrifice (in the secular sense of the word) of so many who were, in a lot of cases, not much older than children.

War is troubling to a Christian, but one thing that both Judaism and Christianity accept, is that given the imperfection of man, it is inevitable.

This year, which sees a crisis in national security, Australia and Australians are less-prepared than ever to defend ourselves. As the controversy over Welcome to Country ceremonies remind me, a nation that cannot defend itself will ultimately cede its territory.

Perhaps that is a thought worth carrying into the ballot box with you.

Regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR