November 12, 2005

Christ is slipping out of memory and imagination, but replacing him with myths such as Eureka is not enough to sustain our values in difficult times, writes Archbishop Peter Jensen. I’ve spent most of my life talking to Australians about Jesus. He is my great enthusiasm. But it’s a job that’s getting harder. I am wondering how the future of Jesus and the future of our country will intersect. Let me illustrate. Four of our brightest and best university medallists, historians, lawyers, Harvard graduates and first-class honours men have written a book called Imagining Australia: Ideas for our Future. It is a work of bold and imaginative suggestions. Rightly, they put a discussion of Australian values in the first chapter, headed “Australian National Identity”. After all, it’s hard to imagine the future without starting with matters of beliefs, identity, ethics, relationships and history.

But they do not have much room for Jesus in their vision of our future. They see that we need values, but they favour humanist values. They seem to think that a secular state means a secular community.

Perhaps they think that multiculturalism has disaffiliated Jesus; he is too divisive to be allowed to speak. I wonder, though, how much they actually know about Jesus. Perhaps they lack the requisite knowledge to bring him into the discussion. For example, they casually quote Abraham Lincoln as an authority: Lincoln saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

No doubt he did say this. But he knew quite well, as did all his hearers, that he was quoting Jesus. He was citing a supreme cultural authority; he did not have to offer a footnote. But we have now reached a stage where four highly educated and intelligent Australians apparently fail to recognise a standard quote from the Bible. It explains, I suppose, the absence of Jesus from their treatment of values.

Mind you, it is a surface absence, because, whether they know it or not, Jesus is basic to our history, and so our culture. Thus, when they are trying to upgrade traditional Australian characteristics, such as a fair go, Jesus pops up, anonymously. In a truly striking sentence, they say: “The modern fair go demands that we should do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves.” Jesus is there, but he has been rendered invisible. He is an anonymous Jesus; he makes his contribution without acknowledgement.

Frankly, Jesus is slipping out of memory and imagination. We cannot really blame the authors of the book. As historian Dr Stuart Piggin has observed, Australia’s social commentators and historians are tone-deaf to religion. He documents the way in which the cliche that this is a country without a religious past is religiously repeated.

Professor Brian Dickey of Flinders University is just as trenchant: “The secular left liberal accounts of our history, which became so dominant from 1950 to 1980, did not want to treat with Christianity, except to scorn it …”

In these circumstances, Jesus’ kingdom has waned, you could say. His future is very unsure. We have other gurus now. People seem to know so little about him that they are unwilling or unable to refer to him explicitly in a discussion of values. We cannot bring him to the table to tell us what he thinks. But, and here is a paradox indeed, another reason for his invisibility is that he is very well known. He is like the life of the party – everybody knows Jesus. His kingdom continues to wax, you could say. He is so well known that we do not even have to think or talk about him.

It is difficult to get beyond the boredom, indifference or antagonism that many people feel towards organised religion. Perhaps it would be better for me to stick to something safe, like botany or golf, or even values, or social justice. Why Jesus?

First, because it is simply a fact that he is one of the two or three most influential people who have ever lived. The name of Jesus, said American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world. Most people who have thought deeply about the subject will recognise the justice of this assessment.

Second, his life and teaching have been so fundamentally important to our own culture. I would say that we are even secular in a Christian sort of way: we can quote the Sermon on the Mount as a part of modern humanistic ethics without knowing it. You will always have trouble in understanding our literature and history, our identity, if you know little about Jesus; you will also have trouble understanding the modern world. A world in which the words of Jesus are taken with utmost seriousness, and acted upon, by millions of people, whether in the newly developing China or in the United States. His words have that sort of contemporary significance.

Third, because I think that, as well known as he is, he is unknown. You could say that his sheer greatness has obscured the facts about him. At least before he slips from view, we ought to ask whether he has some vital and permanent truths to share with us.

I want to provoke a national debate with the Jesus of the Gospels. I know that we have no established church or religion. That is good law; we are fortunate not to have been afflicted with a state church. I know that we have embraced multiculturalism, and I myself am delighted by the new and different Australia that is emerging as a result of our immigration policies. But some seem to think that it means that we have no basis for our civilisation, apart from a few scaled-down general values such as a fair go and mateship, the myth of Anzac and the myth of Eureka.

At a time when other cultures seem menacingly assured and powerful, we seem to have become very modest about our own past, very nervous about identifying who we are, very shy about receiving inspiration from some of the greatest words ever spoken. We keep thinking that our inherent tolerance and decency will preserve us. We are, after all, a liberal society, interested in the rights of the individual and giving all a fair go. I would suggest that these national traits are far more tenuous in us than we like to think. Put to the test, we may well fail them. When we are no longer prosperous, when we have to struggle for existence, if terrorism becomes a part of life, what would make us stick to these values? Where would we look for inspiration? I hardly think that the story of the Eureka Stockade is going to inspire mateship, tolerance and a fair go for all.

If I wonder aloud about the future of Jesus, it is not because Christianity itself is dying. In many parts of the world faith in Jesus is growing at an astonishing rate. But in places such as Australia, we must now ask, has Jesus Christ a future? Is he going to continue to influence us at all? Are we going to appeal to him for guidance? Is he going to impact lives for good?

Many of our forebears looked to Jesus as their inspiration when they created Australia. He did not seem to be a foreigner then. Can he be brought into the national conversation about the future? My practical aim is to inspire a widespread, adult reading of the New Testament Gospels. I want you to understand some of the issues at stake as we read these documents. I want you to see what a surprising man Jesus is; I want to trace something of his impact on the world; I want to see whether there is a trajectory that suggests that more is yet to come; I want to see whether he can speak with something like his old power, to central cultural issues such as personal freedom, human relationships and the future of our country.

I am trying to stand where you may be, willing to think as an adult about Jesus Christ, but no surer than that. I certainly do not think that I own Jesus in some way. He belongs to us all, even to unbelievers. I aim to be like a committed but sympathetic art critic: someone who stands with you before a portrait, someone who helps you to see for yourself what your own eyes are observing. The critic cannot take your place. Indeed, you will have your own perspective, your own angle of vision, your own presuppositions. Nor do I have the skill, or the time, to tell you everything that may be told.

As we share this experience, I hope that you will tell me what you see, for this is not a one-way event. Nor can I predict the results: I only know that it is vital, never more so than now. The quest for the truth about Jesus and his future has social, political, cultural and personal ramifications.

What do we make of Jesus? Why do I say that we hardly know one of the most famous, the most universal of all men? As usual, there is a history behind these questions. Pretty well for the first time, between the 17th and the 19th centuries, many intellectuals expressed an enlightened attitude to Jesus. Miracles became as implausible as the tooth fairy; people began to study the so-called Jesus of history rather than the Christ of the Gospels – biography, rather than theology. The church worshiped him as both God and man; rationalism accepted his humanity, while rejecting his divinity. This attitude became widespread in the community.

But that created a problem. What do you do with Jesus? How do you explain his sheer historical importance, while denying his divinity? The favourite answer was to turn him into the supreme moralist; to say that he taught us how human life is to be lived.

The difficulty of this is with Jesus himself. He is an awkward person to categorise. Of course his teaching has moral implications, but he is not like a moral tutor, not like a philosopher, not like a hero, not like a pedagogue. He is more like a man carrying a sandwichboard, proclaiming the end of the world.

Jesus made a huge point of saying that the kingdom of God is near. When he said things such as turn the other cheek, love one another or blessed are the poor in spirit, it was because the kingdom of God was near. His call for righteous behaviour had a huge, hurrying urgency about it. What is this kingdom? I can tell you that it was a very tricky phrase in that time and place. It stirred powerful emotions. Hundreds of years before, the people of Israel had enjoyed a successful period of history under the reign of David, who, in turn, saw himself under the reign, or kingdom, of God.

You could say that, in a way, the kingdom of God had come with David. Israel was a rich and powerful empire. But that was long ago. The more recent history of Israel had been one of foreign domination and exploitation – Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and now the Romans. They were an out-of-the-way province of the Roman Empire.

Two major factors shaped the original listeners. The first was their Bible; they belonged to a nation of the Book; they lived in a world in which the teachings of the Book were the staple intellectual and spiritual diet. It provided them with their framework of meaning. It’s hard for us to understand this, because we have lost our sense of identity through history. In our national life there is now a vacuum where most peoples have a history. It’s hard to find meaning, purpose and community without it.

The four authors of Imagining Australia know this. They suggest that we begin to make the story of Eureka our national myth. To me, Eureka seems rather weak on capacity to inspire and shape; how it will sustain humanistic Australian values in the hard years that may well lie ahead, it is impossible to imagine. You know, even appropriating the biblical history of Israel as if it were our own could be a better option. It has been done before. Think of how the biblical story sustained the American slaves.

The Bible was the history book of the nation of Jesus. But it was more than mere antiquity: it was filled with a powerful sense of promise, of time waiting to be fulfilled, of events still to come. It was promise on one side, and faith on the other. In the end it became the history book of Western culture, not just the slaves. It provided for us, until very recent times, the dynamic of hope, in a world without clear meaning, purpose or community.

We have lost it, but we have not replaced it, unless you think that Eureka may do the trick. I spoke of two key factors shaping the original hearers. The first was the Bible, the second was their political situation. Here, all their hopes collided with all their fears. Ancient historian Dr Paul Barnett tells us about the Zealots, who were prone to violent terrorism and insurrection. He says that, in Jesus’ day the Zealot hope was expressed in the slogan “No master except God”. Barnett calls one Zealot, Judas the Galilean, the Osama bin Laden of his day. He led a revolt in 6AD, when Jesus the Galilean was about 10 years old.

Have you noticed that the closer we get to the Jesus of history, the more interesting but less relevant he seems? No wonder men such as Thomas Carlyle and his French contemporary Ernest Renan laid great stress on his ethics and his model life. What else were they to do with him? How else could you explain his influence? When we approach the real Jesus, when you put him back into his times, we can understand him better. But he seems so particular that it becomes impossible to give him any universal significance. That is why his future has become problematic; because he spoke so much about the future.

He was a prophet of the kingdom, which he said was very near in time. Why on earth, then, are we still talking about him? Is it not time to shake off the cultural burden of a failed prophet, this pale Galilean, as he has been called, and to seek fresh heroes, fresh gurus? Or, perhaps, to shake ourselves free from all who call on us to repent and believe? Surely, now we must see that he has no future precisely because he thought so much about the future. His future did not come; it is past; he no longer matters. It is Eureka for us. The wonder is that he has had any influence at all. Perhaps he is less well known than the Beatles, as John Lennon said.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/general/does-jesus-have-a-future/2005/11/11/1131578238972.html#

Dr Peter Jensen is the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. This is an edited extract from the first of his six 2005 Boyer Lectures, titled The Future of Jesus. Further details at abc.net.au/rn