26th Sunday, 1997

26^th Sunday, 1997

Beyond the God of My Tribe

This passage from Mark is a kind of a miscellany of sayings that are very loosely strung together by the author. So what I want to do is just focus on the first of these sayings because it resonates with the passage from Numbers that Judy read, because the issue is the same: "whoever is not against us is for us". I would like to propose that that, together with a line from Paul in which he says, "I do not even judge myself", are two of the most astonishing statements of freedom in the whole Bible. This of course is what the whole business of religion is about: that we be liberated, that we be free, or to put it as I suggested a couple of weeks ago: "to be so free from our own personal needs that we can touch the real". Hence, that is what is exemplified in this passage when Jesus says, "whoever is not against us is for us".

What we have, throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, is this extraordinary effecting of the detribalization of God. A detribalization of course, which never worked. For example, those of us who grew up in the Roman tradition which stated that "there is no salvation outside the church". It was a tradition with a melancholy past, which also involved The Crusades and The Inquisition and a variety of other sad things. It thus testified, eloquently, to the difficulty of detribalizing God and our endless attempts to cover up this failure, to somehow justify retribalizing God. But it should be fairly clear that we are not just talking about God in this situation. We are talking about ourselves because when we tribalize God this is simply an act of self-promotion. That is effectively how it works. If God is my God, the operative word is "my", of course, in that context. This perhaps gets us closer to the heart of the matter because if we look, that is if I examine myself and ask, "Trojcak what constitutes me?". The answer - - my social class, my academic environment, my economic situation, my colour, my language, my gender, all these things which make me feel safe - - tell me who I am. Furthermore, the prospect of abandoning all this and getting altogether different coordinates for myself is really spooky and terrifying. For example, that hymn, I do not know if Rita had this in mind when picking the hymn we began with, but the text of that hymn precisely lays out radically different coordinates for myself, (because I have to have coordinates for who I am). The coordinate here is that mysterious reality we call God who does not play favourites.

This pushes us, I think, to the ultimate mystery of Christianity: the process of coming to believe that I am loved by God. That is, it seems to me, the ultimate difficulty. For example, it is easy to believe that bread becomes the body of Christ, or the Pope is infallible. That is child’s play compared to being touched in my depths with the conviction that I am held and cared for by the God who loves me. This describes myself. I am utterly convinced that only that is the leverage that enables us to move beyond the God of my tribe to the real God. Without this move, the Scriptures just becomes a new kind of ideology. For example, even these wonderful statements, "whoever is not for us is against us" or "I do not even judge myself" just become slogans. We human beings are expert at taking the deepest things in ourselves, avoiding their costliness, or avoiding looking at them so closely that we have to confront them directly, and somehow trivializing them - - reducing them to some slogan or some formula. By doing this we effectively close off the possibility of real self-knowledge and of the possibility of allowing God to change us.

Thus, in summary, the point of freedom of course is that I am freed from this nervous, passionate, hag-ridden kind of life which is driven by the conviction that I am utterly alone. And if I am utterly alone then everybody else is a potential or real foe, and therefore, the only smart move is to defend myself endlessly. But this is a compulsion, not a free act. So all the talk in the world about social justice, racial equality, gender equity, all of our slogans are facile escapes until we come face to face with that, as I put it, that basic problem: "Does anybody really love me?". Not just anybody, but does God love me? Because human love is too fragile by far. I am too fragile by far to sustain myself, much less to act authentically to build some kind of human community. So, there are always these texts to force us, to drag us kicking and screaming to the deepest questions, and to what we believe to be the deepest realities of our lives.

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RT 19/10/97