A lot has been said about freedom as people block streets and camp in the grounds of parliament and Cranmer Square, thereby restricting the freedom of others. A colleague of mine suggested that a better term to define the overall goals of the protesters would be ‘personal sovereignty’
However, having had an overload of David Attenborough on summer television I doubt that any primates have such a thing as ‘personal sovereignty.’ Certainly, we have seen aging alpha males defeated and sent to forage for a lonely subsistence in a hostile environment, excluded rather than free.
But by and large primates, including humans, are a communal species. We depend on each other for our survival and there are a variety of ways of organising communities. Not all of them are fair and just and often ‘freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose’.[3]
Worth considering however is the subtitle to Michael Sandel’s book The Tyranny of Merit which is What’s Become of the Common Good.
The common good is a vital part of living in community and we are not truly free without it. To reach towards a common good requires a number of curbs on our absolute freedom that we simply take for granted.
Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18
There are some strange happenings in this reading designed to reinforce Abram’s faith in the future.
Maurice Andrew suggests there is the message that individuals ‘can live anywhere but if they are to be a people they must live together in a specific place.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, with uncertain Maori/Pakeha relations, covenant as promise of land implies that a way has to be found for land to belong to everyone in the most appropriate way, and that this process may take some time. The connection between covenant and land means the land is an essential factor in the relations of the people who live on it. It is not an optional extra.[1]
Luke 13: 31-35
Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, provides Luke’s narrative with continuity, progression, and anticipation. Herod had beheaded John and upon hearing about Jesus, amid reports that he was John resurrected, Herod was perplexed and curious to the point of wanting to see Jesus. Now he wants to be rid of these disturbing prophets by killing Jesus also. [2]
The phrase ‘blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’. Is obviously a prelude to the Palm procession into Jerusalem and Luke continually includes warnings in his narrative of events to come in future parts of the story.
Bill Loader concludes his commentary by saying:
These few verses are rich in historical allusions. They invite us to participate in the movement for freedom and salvation in a world where individuals and communities are governed by other powers.
Among the TV commercials that have been recently recycled, to the point of being annoying, is the road safety series that shows rather tense passengers being driven at speed. An anonymous voiceover declares, ‘my car my rules’.
What disturbs me most about those commercials is that I have sat in a state of numb fatalism in cars driven by people who believe that a driver’s licence is a permit of personal sovereignty within their own car.
Furthermore, even though most people get frustrated with local body bureaucracy, leaky homes clearly demonstrated the necessity for building regulations.
But the fact that humanity has spread across the globe highlights the reality that people have always exercised the freedom to leave what they find oppressive and seek new beginnings elsewhere.
That would appear to be the freedom that Abram sought when he left Ur of Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan. The Bible hints at religious freedom but there are all sorts of other alternatives. It definitely wasn’t personal sovereignty that he was after because he originally left with his father who also took ‘his grandson Lot, son of Haran, and his daughter in law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife. (Genesis 11:31) They only went as far as Haran where Abram’s father died and it was then that Abram, under divine prompting, continued the wilderness journey.
This was also not a journey of personal sovereignty because ‘he took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran.’ (Genesis 12:5)
So, whoever they were leaving and whatever freedom they were seeking it was a journey of an ordered family hierarchical community, typical of many primates.
My Perry forbears made the journey from Cornwell to Taranaki because, although they had an iron smelting business, they also had a large family of boys at a time of high unemployment. So, the stories of vast iron sand deposits tempted them to seek freedom from want.
I suspect mother’s family migrated here because my grandfather had already spent four years in a hole in French mud. So, the possibility of repeating the experience resulted in the whole family seeking freedom from war on the other side of the globe.
Interestingly my grandfather had made a journey of ‘personal sovereignty,’ at the age of sixteen when he swore, he would never wash his stepmother’s dishes again and went to Canada and South Africa. But the instinct for family community eventually took him back to England.
In today’s reading we find Abram was fearful about the future and that must be part of everyone’s journey of hope and quest for freedom. The migrating Perrys didn’t have the knowledge to process Taranaki iron sand but found that wool was as good as gold at that time.
I can imagine people today on the journey of building a business that will both support them and benefit their descendants in the future. Then along comes a pandemic with sickness, death and economic shambles. Governments around the world have imposed restrictions in a world where only the historically literate remember the carts dragged through the streets of Europe to the cry, ‘bring out your dead.
Abram’s hope was restored by his vision of eternity in the stars of the desert night and a complicated ritual that reinforced his belief of a divine promise.
Maurice Andrew notes that the Old Testament is realistic about time and God’s promises are not fulfilled immediately. He goes on to say that delay in fulfilling the promise is a theme that could have been taken up in succeeding periods of Israel’s history. Therefore, this passage, and others, reflects a time of uncertainty and danger as later times are expressed through earlier times and through trusted figures of the past.
This frequently happens in the Old Testament and is an ancient way of grounding an assurance for the future that is also relevant to us.
We too have recent memories of past wars, pandemics, and economic chaos to look back on. Furthermore, our science is able to gaze into the stars of the eternal universe in ways Abram could never have imagined.
All the gospels frame Jesus’ mission as a journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. That mirrors the present anti-mandate, anti-everything protest that ended in Wellington. There is a similar tension with authority with a warning that Herod was trying to kill Jesus. Herod was part of the ruling class that disliked people they saw as troublemakers.
Therefore, we are given a hint that, as Jesus’ popularity increased so, the ruling class became concerned and began to move against him.
That’s where the similarity ends because it is sections of the protesters that want to execute members of parliament and the press while those in authority are anxious not to provoke violence.
In a similar way with a different outcome the temple hierarchy’s fear was that, if too much anti-Roman feeling was expressed at Temple gatherings, the Romans would destroy the temple and the religious heart and focal point of the Jewish people would be lost.
Of course, by the time Luke wrote his Gospel, that had happened. But the significant difference to the Wellington protest was that in Jesus’ freedom journey was not about personal sovereignty.
In the relentless meandering march from the countryside to the capital Jesus made a point of pausing along the way to heal and include the disabled. The Jesus Movement was about the freedom to live in a caring community.
Jesus issued a call to care for each other, a freedom to make the most of the opportunities to be truly human and a freedom to look to the future without fear.
The tradition we have inherited that is spelled out in the Gospels and the Hebrew Scripture suggests that all people are of value, and we must not trade disabled deaths for abled life. The Wellington protesters are people who justify their enthusiasm to return to post pandemic times by claiming that covid does not exist, or at worst it simply kills off those who would die anyway.
In reaction to such suggestions Mia Mingus stated an attitude in her blog that very much fits the freedom Jesus preached and practised.
‘We will not trade disabled deaths for abled life. We will not allow disabled people to be disposable or the necessary collateral for the status quo’[4]
We need to keep that in our mind as we reflect on the recent protests and the comments of those who are frustrated by lockdowns, vaccine mandates and restrictions on making money.
People who regularly suggested that we do not need to worry about Omicron because it only kills those with underlying conditions, or that we need to end all public health measures including mandates so life can go back to ‘normal.’
That is suggesting that it is okay for some people to die, for some people not to be able to go to school, or work, or to shop because it would be too risky for them without public health measures. Those are not very nice thoughts for those with ongoing health issues and as Mia Mingus comment suggests it is well below the standard of what it is to be truly human.
That is the difference between a journey in search of personal sovereignty and the call from Jesus’ journey for the freedom to live within the kingdom of God.
On that journey Jesus did not trade disabled deaths for abled life. He did not allow disabled people to be disposable or the necessary collateral for the status quo.
Quite the opposite, he stopped along the way to heal and include the sick and the lame. He continued the journey despite the dangers made obvious in today’s reading. Jesus sacrificed his own life so his followers could bring his mission, his divine incite, and his Spirit to us.
Furthermore, his execution did not remove the simmering dissent of Jesus’ time that eventually resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem.
Our police are therefore quite right to be reluctant to escalate confrontation and create the spectacles of children being sprayed with water cannon and tear gas.
Certainly, the covid protests are annoying and disruptive but unlike the authorities in Jesus’ time our authorities are very aware of the risks of violent confrontation and the unforeseen circumstances such clashes produce.
Our calling is to cast aside our frustrations and continue with hope be the caring Christ to those around us. To understand that to be truly human we must live in community with each other. The freedom we continually yearn for must always be the freedom to live in a community that cares for all people. As we work though the frustrations life so often puts before us we must never allow disabled people, or even annoying people to be disposable or the necessary collateral for the status quo, or the continued opportunity to accumulate wealth.
Real freedom resides in the Realm of Christ which is an inclusive caring community.
[1] ibid., p.63.
[2] Fred B. Craddock Luke. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 2009), p. 173
[3] Kris Kristofferson, ‘Me & Bobby McGee’
[4] https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/a blog by Mia Mingus.