19.02.06 Michael Good Night and Good Luck Mark 2: 1-12 Isaiah 43: 18-25
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Good
Night and Good Luck
In 1950s Cold War obsessed America CBS broadcaster Ed Morrow courageously resisted Senator McCarthy at the risk of his own career, reputation, and ultimately of being drummed out of America as a communist or a fellow traveller. Accusation by association – the rule of fear. It was ironically just like this in communist countries. People were not allowed to form friendships or be seen leaving work at lunchtime with the same colleagues or even in groups of two. Karen Armstrong describes the same thing when she went to a Catholic convent in the 1960s – they were not allowed to have friends or talk in twos – the rule of the two.
Two things happened in Britain this week which are strongly reminiscent of the McCarthy era in America – the indefinite suspension of habeus corpus and the passing into law of the invented crime of the ‘glorification’ of terror.
Habeus corpus is the legal form which the New Testament understanding of Christian freedom takes in British law. It means that the government is never to assume responsibility for the bodies of its citizens and is required to bring the body of an arrested person before a public court within twenty four hours of an arrest. Habeus corpus is the foundation of our freedoms as the British people and it was torn up this week as the government pushed through a bill which allows for detention without charge or court appearance for 28 days.
Glorification of terror – doxa – the word means praise. Its normal usage is scriptural and liturgical – how did the government come up with this perversion of Christian language to create a new crime – a crime so vague it can include people praising anyone who resists a government in a way that is perceived to be illegitimate anywhere in the world? Supporting the ANC, supporting the Sandinistas, supporting Christians and others who resisted communism in Eastern Europe could all have been seen as suspicious under this ridiculous legislation. Rule of fear – authoritarian. Media only add to this by accusing MPs who vote with their consciences against the whips of undermining good – by which they mean strong – government.
The people against whom these pieces of legislation are aimed are of course Muslims. How did Muslims get into this position? Not without the aid of the West. We bombed and occupied Iraq and used the same excuses in 1920 as in 2003 and ministers trotted out the same line about foreign insurgents and how they needed us to stay or the country would descend into lawlessness.
How to undercut this cycle of terror crime, hate, judgement, persecution & prejudice?
Isaiah in our reading today shows the way – despite Israel’s idolatry and the imperial ambitions which had led her astray God will do a new thing and forgive her, wipe away her sins. And Jesus shows in this story of the paralytic what that forgiveness looks like. When do we ever hear ‘strong’ leaders speaking of forgiveness or themselves asking for forgiveness for their own misdemeanours and high crimes, or even confessing to these.
Confession and forgiveness – we do these every Sunday but they are the most radical things in the world. They challenge so much that we take for granted in political and social life. Fear is the opposite of forgiveness – a climate of fear breeds a culture of hate. We fear those we can’t forgive for not being like us. And those who are not like us make us feel better about sticking to our in-crowd – this is the social function of the scapegoat makes people feel right about staying in their comfort zone. Paradoxically having scapegoats creates solidarity – even if it is the wrong kind, and so by creating solidarity through scapegoats leaders hope to garner support, or votes. But of course there is no real security in this strategy – the more scapegoats the West creates the more people will hate the West and the more they will attack the West.
Jesus was of course the scapegoat to end all scapegoating. He was arraigned on a series of charges before the Sanhedrin at his trial. The first charge they found two witnesses to agree on was that he had declared that he intended to destroy the Temple. The beginning of his challenge to the Temple is to be found in this story.
Jesus’ act of public forgiveness in the story of the Paralytic challenges everyone’s comfort zones because the whole economy – religious and spiritual – in Palestine in Jesus’ day was built on debt and conditionalities. Economic debts piled up because of the Poll tax, which was collected on behalf of the Roman authorities by the Jewish authorities whose HQ was the Temple. It as if Colin Finlayson, our church treasurer, were also Her Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes. For those who could not afford to pay the Poll tax spiritual debts also piled up because the indebted poor could not pay the Temple tax either and were therefore prevented from receiving forgiveness of sins. Their poverty, as the poverty of people in our own society today was associated with illness and disease, with malnourishment and associated diseases, as well as their exclusion from the Temple, and from Jewish public life;
As
NT scholar Dominic Crossan puts it
There
is… a terrible irony in that a conjunction of sickness and sin,
especially in first century Palestine. Excessive taxation could leave
the poor people physically malnourished or hysterically disabled. But
since the religiopolitical ascendancy could not blame excessive
taxation, it blamed sick people themselves by claiming that their sin
had led to their illnesses. And the cure for sickness was,
ultimately, in the Temple. And that meant more fees, in a perfect
circle of victimization.
Jesus is charged at his trial precisely with challenging the Temple and it is on this day, with this healing that this challenge, and the murmurings against him begin – healing sins without reference to the Temple and its priesthood. If sins could be freely forgiven then the whole economic structure of the Temple, and hence of the Jewish authorities who governed and collected taxes on behalf of the Romans, was threatened.
Our government apparently feels the need to reinvent the cycle of fear and victimage that Jesus undercuts with his announcement of forgiveness in the name of the war on terror. Just like the Cold War in the McCarthy era governments seek to defend the Western financial system, authoritarian government and the denial of liberties of their citizens by stoking up a climate of fear.
We
sang this morning ‘He came down that we may have….fear?’ No –
he came down that we may have love, and as St Paul truly says
‘perfect love casts out fear’.
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