“Sydney Under Siege” – that was the headline of Friday’s Sydney Morning Herald!
“Sydney Under Siege – terror plot foiled, high alert for the next 18 months. Top terrorist recruiter Mohammad Ali Barayalei is behind an Islamic State plot to murder Australians on video, police say, sparking the nation’s biggest every counter-terrorism raids and prompting warnings of a high alter for a further 18 months!”
That was the lead story, and right above the headline you can see a picture of a scary-looking bearded man (presumably Mr Barayalei) with the words “Go on, kill them” written next to his picture, with an explanation following, explaining that these were “the orders from [him] that triggered the raids across Sydney” this week.
And this is the Sydney Morning Herald – not exactly the gutter press (or it’s not supposed to be). One can only imagine what the Daily Mirror would have done with this story had it still been in circulation.
It’s not that I’m suggesting the dangers facing Sydney-siders, as outlined in the Herald article, are not genuine – far from it! On the contrary, if you’ve known me for any length of time you know that I am regularly under criticism for being ‘obsessed’ with the Middle East and for my prophecies of doom – that the seeds of destruction that we have been sowing in that part of the world for so many years now are eventually going to come back to bite us! Well … now it seems that indeed the chickens are coming home to roost!
It’s not that I want to compare myself to Noah but I do have some sense of what it’s like to be under criticism for giving dour predictions that a great storm is coming when most people look up and can’t see a cloud in the sky! Likewise, I appreciate what it was like for Jeremiah – constantly prophesying doom for your people but desperately hoping at the same time that you’re wrong.
And maybe I am wrong. And maybe there’s still time. I certainly hope so but this last week has not given me a lot of encouragement.
In addition to the raids and the planned beheading and associated images that were splashed across our TV screens this week we had a horror story from a local Christian school – the Maronite College of the Holy Family in Harris Park – where Sister Margaret Ghosn said threats were made from a car outside the school.
“They said, ‘We are going to kill all of you here,’ “ Sister Margaret said. “They were threatening to kill all Christians.” The car reportedly had a flag, similar to those brandished by Islamic State jihadists, hanging out the window.
On the other side of the equation, I read today on Australian news site, Mamamia, that a young hijab-wearing Muslim girl was confronted by a group of white Australian men this week who tried to remove her face-covering by setting fire to it and burning it from her face while she was still wearing it! Apparently the girl was an international student and now she wants to go back home, and who can blame her?
It’s been a big week this past week, with the raids and the violence and Prime Minister Tony Abbott farewelling our troops as he sends them back into Iraq, telling them that what they are doing is “right, just and necessary”, forgetting to add ‘if I’m ever going to get to meet the President of the United States’!
It seems almost ironic that today is the United Nation’s ‘International Day of Peace’, though it does seem appropriate that this falls on my wife’s birthday.
Yes, it’s Ange’s birthday today and our wedding anniversary on Tuesday! It was also, as you may know, a special day of remembrance on Friday. It was the international “talk like a pirate” day.
It is fortunate that ‘talk like a pirate day’ didn’t fall on a Sunday or I’d have to give my sermon in a pirate’s voice, and that would make it harrrrd to take me seriously.
Yes, it’s been a big week, though I must not neglect to mention some of the wonderful times I’ve had this week. For one thing we had a wonderful family dinner last Monday night, celebrating dear Imogen’s 17th birthday! The other great highlight for me, of course, was our night of film, food and friendship at the Imam Husain Islamic Centre that took place on Friday.
Even though there were only a handful of us non-Muslims there it was a great night! I appreciate, of course, that it was short notice and that Friday night is a difficult night for many of us and I am hoping that our next get-together, which is scheduled for next Sunday here in our church building, will be an event we can all attend. For now is the time for us to join hands with our Muslims sisters and brothers, for if not now … when?
Now I appreciate that not everybody in our city takes that view. Indeed, I appreciate that for many people in Sydney this is a time for building fences and not bridges! This is a time for drawing a line of demarcation between Christians and Muslims, between Arabs and Australians, between the bearded and the unbearded (or however you want to term it) – between US and THEM!
And I suspect that some churches will want to be in the vanguard of wanting to reinforce the distinction between US and THEM – and that many Christians will wince when I refer Muslim people as my brothers and sisters, and this despite the fact that the Lord Jesus Himself was entirely explicit on this subject!
‘Who is my brother?’ the lawyer asked Jesus (as recorded in Luke chapter 10, verse 29). Do you remember that passage? Do you remember that question and the answer Jesus gave? Our Lord was quite explicit!
“Neighbour” is the word we normally use to translate the Greek term ‘plesion’ but the words are entirely interchangeable when taken in context.
The context, you may remember, was a broader religious discussion centring on that most fundamental of religious questions – “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” – to which the answer was “Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself” – words that were straight from the Torah – the law of God (from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 to be exact).
The lawyer though, we are told, was looking for a loophole (as one might expect for a man in his profession) and so he asked Jesus “but who is my neighbour/brother?”
As I say, the terms are entirely interchangeable in context, and if you look at the original “love your neighbour as yourself” quote from Leviticus it is clear that the neighbours being referred to are your fellow Jews, and so it is not without justification that the lawyer looks to Jesus to define for him some line of demarcation whereby he can distinguish between neighbours and non-neighbours – between us and them.
And Jesus tells the man a story:
“A man fell victim to robbers as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. They stripped and beat him and went off leaving him half-dead” (Luke 10:30)
Yes, we know this story – it’s the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’ – and if, like me, you’ve been hearing this story read and sermonised upon since your youth you will know what comes next. Various good religious people come upon the scene and they ‘pass by on the other side’, and the preacher at this point starts postulating what possible reasons could have made these good religious folk hesitate to help somebody so obviously in need.
- Perhaps they were running late for their synagogue service?
- Perhaps it was because they feared that the man might be dead and hence ritually unclean if they touched him?
- Perhaps they feared that the criminals who had attacked this man were still lying in wait and would pounce on them if they hung around?
- Perhaps indeed the whole thing was a setup and the apparently half-dead man was really in good health and acting as bait?
These and various other scenarios are ones that many of us will be familiar with. It was my friend Stephen Sizer though who pointed out to me earlier this year that Jesus has already told us exactly why these clerical figures didn’t stop to help – it was because the man had been left ‘stripped’ and ‘half dead’.
The assailed man was naked and unconscious, and because he was naked and unconscious these good religious Jews had no way of telling whether the poor man was one of us or one of them!
These are the ways you distinguish between us and them. We distinguish people by their clothes and by their accents. That’s as true in today’s context as it was then!
Whenever you see a woman in a hijab – she is one of them! Conversely, whenever you hear that lovely earthy Aussie – ‘how ya goin’ mate’ – ah! He’s one of us!
I remember during my one and only trip to Israel in 2004, the “Foreign Correspondent” TV team were good enough to allow me the services of their driver who drove me around and ferried through various checkpoints in his taxi without every once being stopped by the heavily-armed soldiers at those checkpoints.
I asked the driver (whose name was also David) why the soldiers never stopped him. He told me it was because they knew he was Jewish and not Palestinian. “But how can they tell?” I naively asked him, as I didn’t think his complexion make it obvious? He told me that Palestinian taxis always had more bling in them (hanging from the rear-view mirror, etc.) and that if the soldiers had any doubts they only had to casually greet him, as once they heard his accent it would remove any doubts.
This is how we tell if someone is one of us or one of them – we listen to the way they talk and we look at the way they dress (and the way they deck out their taxis). Jesus makes clear though that the man in the parable not only has no taxi but no clothes and he cannot speak, and hence he has no way of communicating to those who might be in a position to help him whether he is a neighbour, a brother, a sister, a friend, one of us or one of them – in other words, whether he is worthy of their time or whether he is somebody else’s problem.
The man in Jesus’ story is naked and unconscious, and so the good religious Jews can’t tell whether he’s a Jew or a Palestinian. He could even be a Roman for all they know! He could have been an Australian!
Well … he probably couldn’t have been an Australian as a 1st Century Australian would have had a distinctive complexion, and he definitely would have been ‘one of them’ (as he generally still is in white Australian society today).
We get the picture though, don’t we, and the really startling thing that comes out of this whole passage for me is the realisation that the people Jesus was dealing with had exactly the same issues that we have!
These first century people who came and dialogued with Jesus were part of a community that lived in fear of ‘the other’. Jerusalem was indeed a city ‘under siege’ and so the Jewish community there had developed a very strong ethnic and religious identity with a very clear sense of who they were and who was not one of them. And they knew who they were obligated to love and where their obligations stopped!
The hero in Jesus’ story of Luke 10 was, of course, a Samaritan, and he was definitely ‘one of them’!
“But a Samaritan traveller who came upon [the beaten man] was moved with compassion at the sight. 34 He approached the victim, poured oil and wine over his wounds and bandaged them. Then he lifted him up on his own animal, took him to an inn and cared for him. 35 The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the instruction, ‘Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back.’”” (Luke 10:33-35)
This ‘outsider’ is really too good to be true, and this is the sting in the tail of the story. He is one of them and yet he knows how one of us should behave better than we do ourselves. Just when we thought that we knew where to draw the line between light and dark and good and bad and us and them we find one of them clearly displaying the presence of the Spirit of God better than any of us. And we had been so sure up to that point that God was one of us!
The bottom line is that it is a lot easier to build fences than it is to build bridges, and if Sydney is really ‘under siege’ then what else can we do but ‘batten down the hatches’ and cower in fear as we prepare to defend ourselves against our Muslim neighbours. But (as the Apostle John reminds us) ‘perfect love casts out all fear’ (1 John 4:18), and the challenge that Jesus gives us is that we live in love and not in fear, and these two stark alternatives will take us in very different directions.
I must confess that last Thursday I went to bed with a dire sense of foreboding, having watched the same news stories run again and again on various news media, seeing the same images of scary bearded men and angry Muslims protesting and hearing John Kerry (speaking live to the US Congress) mentioning the Sydney experience and using this as a further justification for the bombing of Iraq.
And I could see in my mind’s eye images of ‘Sydney Under Siege’ breaking down into clearly demarcated sectarian communities where each sect lives in their own area, has their own language, and where nobody crosses over onto anybody else’s turf, until suspicion and hatred and sectarian violence consume us all!
It doesn’t have to be like that. We don’t have to give into fear. We can follow Jesus and go the way of love – moving beyond us and them and recognising that in the end it’s just us! For we are all in this together. We are all God’s children – all of us!
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 21st of September, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
