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What Judas' act tells us about Christian values and where that leadsDear , Every Easter and Christmas I send out a meditation on some part of the Christian story. Not to preach but to enlighten. Our society is based on Christian values and most of us, even many practicing Christians, don’t understand how deep that influence is. If we want to preserve the moral order, and our sense of ourselves as a nation, we need to understand the language and concepts that underpin both. I’m also writing this in the shadow of the Bondi Beach massacre when religious conflict and violence have been thrown into relief. We need to understand not only our own beliefs, but the beliefs that underpin other religions. Some atheists, as well as believers, will tell you that all religions are just religions, and virtually interchangeable. That’s like saying that all people are the same, and interchangeable. Anyone familiar with religions, or with people, knows neither proposition is true. So this Easter I want to distinguish the Christian way from the Islamic one. If our society is based on Christian virtues and values, and if those virtues and values are unique to Christianity, where does that leave sincere believers of other religions? Is assimilation an option for them, or will they form perpetual islands of difference? The Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion defines social cohesion as “the national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law”. So the bare minimum for social cohesion must be to honour a form of government where laws are made by the people who enjoy individual liberty to do and say as they best think, and where these laws are impartially administered to all. This year I’ve been thinking about the betrayal of Jesus. When I survey my social media feeds I see many with high status in our Western societies who are held in high esteem as good people, but who seem to me to betray our values. Judas was once thought a good man. He was one of the twelve disciples whom Jesus deputised to go out preaching, healing, driving out devils and forgiving sins. What turned him from one of the inner circle into the betrayer? That would be a speculative missive all of its own, but thinking about it caused me to wonder about his reward, specifically his monetary reward. We all know the phrase “thirty pieces of silver”. It’s the price he was paid for betraying Jesus. But why are the gospels so specific about the sum? Who sets the market in betrayal and why was this betrayal worth thirty pieces of silver? The answer is that for a Jewish audience it said something deep about Jesus. According to Exodus, thirty shekels was the compensation to be paid to a slave’s owner if the slave were accidentally killed. So the Gospels are telling us that, in money terms, Jesus was valued no higher than a slave. Theologically this does more work than a mere insult. In the Christian world view where the social hierarchy is inverted and where “the lowliest will inherit the kingdom of heaven”, to be a slave is to be at the apex. Jesus never explicitly describes himself as a slave, but he does say “But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” And St Paul in his letter to the Philippians says, “But he [Jesus] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in human likeness.” Christianity takes this theme and counterpoints it with kingship. When Jesus is crucified the inscription above the cross reads: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. For the Jewish authorities Jesus’ real offence was blasphemy, but the Romans wouldn’t execute a man for that, so the convenient charge was he claimed to be king, which amounted to insurrection. Crucifixion was the proper legal punishment for that. But crucifixion also carried the connotation of punishment for rebellious or runaway slaves. So the symbolism of the cross carries the same inversion: your king is a slave. At Easter, the founder of Christianity is valued at the market price of a slave, yet through that degradation transforms slavery into service, and service into triumph itself. Slavery was accepted as a fact of life throughout the ancient world. It is only in the modern West, especially from the nineteenth century onward, that it came to be seen as an absolute evil. That has much to do with our Christian inheritance. In a worldview where the lowest is the highest, it becomes increasingly difficult to claim moral goodness while owning another human being. Ownership connotes control, but Christ tells us to surrender control. This frame of mind leads inexorably to “democracy, freedom and the rule of law”. Maybe Judas’ problem was that he had lost faith in the Jesus project and decided to control it by ending it. His payment was a statement that he valued the security that money could bring over the radical uncertainty of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus was promising. The Christian worldview is not the Islamic one. Christianity’s symbolic core is the inversion of hierarchy: the king becomes the slave. Islam preserves a different moral architecture, in which hierarchy, sacred law and submission to those along with Allah order the world. Islam is inherently theocratic and therefore can’t be democratic in the way we understand democracy. It is not merely a private spirituality but carries an enduring political theology as well. Sharia law is not a code or acts of parliament, but interpretations of the Q’uran and the Hadiths. Islam can tolerate democracy, but only to the point where democratic law does not contradict sacred law. That is why there is a push from Islamic communities to have their own Sharia tribunals, or for Sharia principles to be imported into the law of the land when cases are judged in domestic courts. To the deeply religious Muslim, Australian law is only contingently legitimate. There is also a distinction between the people of the Ummah and the rest. Historically in the Dar al-Islam – the area under Islamic control – the “people of the Book” being Christians and Jews could be tolerated, as long as they paid a tax specific to them. That’s submission, but not what Jesus had in mind. Outside the Dar al-Islam lies the Dar al-Harb which is classically “the abode of war”, the realm which has not yet submitted to Islam. That might sound like an antique distinction, but it remains alive in the rhetoric of the Iranian regime, as well as radical organisations such as ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hizb ut-Tahrir. Not all advocate force. But those who lived in what was, until recently, the Christian Middle East can testify that societies can be colonised and systems of government transformed with extraordinary speed. So Islamic communities in democratic countries can present a problem for social cohesion, not because most Muslims seek to expand Dar al-Islam, but because the doctrinal architecture that permits such an expansion never disappears from the texts and can always be reactivated by later readers. Of course, Christianity is not without its own blemishes. Anti-Semitism starts with Christianity as a result of the charge that “the Jews” killed Christ. Saint Chrysostom was virulently anti-Jewish, as later was Martin Luther. That explains half of the footprint of anti-Semitism in the world. The other half is explained by Islam which has its own reasons for hostility to Jews. The difference is that the Christian churches have formally repudiated their anti-Semitism - for example the Roman Catholic church in 1965 with Nostra Aetate - yet we can still see dormant strains re-emerging through figures such as Tucker Carlson, who appears to be channelling older Catholic anti-Semitic currents. That is Christianity’s own mea culpa: texts and traditions never vanish. They remain latent, waiting for new readers. On the Islamic side the war in Iran is as much a war against anti-Semitism as anything else with Jews, not just Israel, the target of much of Tehran’s terrorist activity, and its educational activities, through its various state and non-state allies. The Royal Commission should survey Australians to detect where physically dangerous anti-Semitism is located, but we already know that elements of the Islamic community are a clear danger, and that this is religiously motivated. So part of the solution to anti-Semitism in Australia, which the Royal Commission must consider, is to restrict those Islamic fundamentalists who spread violent anti-Semitism. Bar them from entry, deport them if possible, and close their institutions. This doesn't violate our laws against religious discrimination - we prosecute people for breaking the law, even when they are acting on sincere religious belief. We do have something uniquely special in Australia, but we shouldn’t make the mistake that universal rights are a reflection of universal values. They are, in large part, an inheritance of our unique religious history. We cannot simply assume that newcomers from a different religious tradition will automatically support those values, particularly when even some in good standing within our own community have shown how easily those values may be betrayed. 
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