Father Dave Issues Boxing Challenge to Tony Abbott
Sydney, Australia — Father Dave Smith — Anglican priest, long‑time youth worker, social activist, and current New South Wales Over‑60s Professional Light‑Heavyweight Boxing Champion — has released a new video renewing his public boxing challenge to former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.
In the 80‑second video, published today, Father Dave responds to Mr Abbott’s earlier refusal to enter the ring with him and addresses the former Prime Minister’s recent public praise of police actions at the Town Hall rally for Palestine — a rally in which Father Dave participated.
“I know you said ‘no’ to my last challenge because you didn’t want to look like a thug, beating up on an old priest,” Father Dave says in the video, “but I think that horse bolted when you applauded the police who attacked peaceful demonstrators. I was there. It wasn’t pretty.”
Father Dave, who has spent more than three decades using boxing as a tool for community building and youth outreach, says the challenge is not about hostility but about accountability, charity, and public dialogue. He’s also clearly not stressed about the former PM’s ability to cause him injury.
“I’m the current NSW professional light‑heavyweight champion for us over‑60s,” he says. “How much damage do you really think you can do to me?”
The video concludes with a renewed invitation:
“Tony, I’m ready to rumble. I know you can fight — so let’s see if you can take my title. We’ll raise money, for Palestine if you’re willing. It’ll be a war where everyone wins… except that you’re gonna lose.”
About Father Dave
Father Dave Smith is an Anglican priest, professional boxer, author, and long‑time advocate for troubled youth and people at risk. He has been nominated for Australian of the Year three times, is Australia’s oldest active professional boxer, and is the current NSW Over‑60s Professional Light‑Heavyweight Boxing Champion. His work has been recognised internationally for its impact on community cohesion, interfaith dialogue, and youth empowerment.
“We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” (Romans 5:3-4)
If you’ve spent any time studying Islam, you know that Muslims hold Jesus in remarkably high regard. Indeed, Jesus’ name appears in the Qur’an more often than that of Prophet Muhammad (PBAH). The same cannot be said of the Apostle Paul, though. Indeed, many Muslims suspect Paul of steering the Christian community off course by focusing too much on Jesus instead of focusing on the God of Jesus.
I’ve always felt that this low regard for Paul is a shame, because if Muslim scholars—particularly Shia Muslim scholars—would spend more time with Paul, they would find in him a profound companion in their own theology of suffering.
Now … my aim in these reflections is specifically to help illuminate the Christian Scriptures, but if there was ever a moment for Christians to deepen their understanding of Islam—particularly of Shia Islam—that moment is surely now.
Only ten to thirteen per cent of the world’s Muslims are Shia, yet they make up ninety to ninety‑five per cent of the population of Iran, and given that America and Israel have now gone to war with Iran, and given that our own prime minister has publicly expressed Australia’s support for this war, it strikes me as essential that we learn something about the people we are possibly preparing to fight.
As you probably know, I’ve travelled to Iran numerous times. I’ve lectured at Iranian universities and have been broadcast on national television there twice. Back in 2006, I helped found the Australia–Iran Friendship Association (in Australia), and in 2019 I fought the amateur boxing champion of Mashhad (in northeastern Iran).
I will never forget that fight, as, after the final bell tolled, all the boxing officials in their white shirts and black bowties lined up across the ring, facing me, and each of them then gave me a red rose and a kiss on each cheek! I went back to my hotel with a big bunch of roses, two red cheeks, and an even deeper love for the Iranian people.
Anyway … I don’t claim to be an expert, but I know enough about Iran to say these verses from Saint Paul would resonate deeply with almost every religious Iranian.
“Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”
On April 3rd this year, we’ll celebrate Good Friday. On August 3rd, Shia Muslims will celebrate Arba’een, and I must say that the first time I attended an Arba’een service, I was struck by how much the atmosphere reminded me of our Good Friday service.
On Good Friday we remember the death of Jesus—an event both terrible and holy. Shia Muslims, in Ashura and Arba’een, remember the martyrdom of Imam Husain at Karbala in the year 680.
I won’t go into the details here, but I would encourage you to read about it or attend an Ashura gathering this August. Let it suffice for the moment to say that nothing is revered more in Shia Islam than Husain’s example of suffering for the sake of truth, which, I believe, was exactly what Saint Paul was also focusing on in Romans five.
Saint Paul could be mistaken for sounding like a motivational speaker – “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” – but there is more to what Paul is saying here than “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” because Paul is not describing the ordinary mechanics of human psychology where, a lot of the time, suffering doesn’t lead to hope at all but leads to depression, self-harm and death! Paul is describing the mysterious way that God can reshape us from within through our most painful experiences. He says, “Suffering leads to hope—when God pours His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 5:5)
Paul spoke with authority on the subject of suffering, and he lists his own sufferings without embarrassment: “Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked…” (2 Corinthians 11:25), and so the list goes on!
You can almost hear Paul’s critics whispering in the background, “God is clearly not with this guy—everything he touches ends in disaster!”, and we can understand that. When life keeps going wrong, we assume we’ve done something wrong. Bad karma. Divine displeasure. God must be against me! But Paul begins his thinking with Christ crucified. And from that vantage point he sees that suffering—when endured in faith and for righteousness’ sake—not as a sign of God’s absence but of God’s presence.
Shia Muslims would not use Paul’s language, of course, but they walk the same path, as their entire devotional imagination is shaped by Husain’s willingness to suffer and die rather than compromise truth.
I have no doubt that the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chose to remain at his desk and embrace his fate rather than flee. I’ve heard that he was warned repeatedly of the imminent attack and replied that if all ninety million Iranians could be moved to safety, he would go with them, but that otherwise he would remain at his post.
The Ayatollah knew that his death would galvanise his people, and I believe it has. If Donald Trump had even a rudimentary understanding of Shia theology, he would never have targeted the second most senior cleric in Shia Islam for martyrdom.
Much of what passes for religion—Christian or otherwise—is little more than an attempt to control the uncontrollable. We want health, wealth, and safety for ourselves and for our children, and we hope that by pleasing God (or “the gods”) we can secure a peaceful life and a happy hereafter.
Saint Paul would be the first to say that if you’re looking for a quiet life, free from stress and pain, following Jesus is not a good option, and Shia Islam isn’t either. But while following Jesus (or following Imam Husain) will not make life easier, it will make life larger and will fill life with meaning, courage, and hope.
“And that hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us.” (Romans 5:5)
“The wind blows where it wills, and you hear its sound, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
We’re in the third chapter of John’s Gospel this week—Jesus’ nighttime conversation with the scholar, Nicodemus—and I can never bring myself to skip over this reading, as it contains my favourite verse in the entire New Testament.
Not the famous “For God so loved the world…”, though that is here. Not even the well-known “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” Though that is also a part of this same conversation. The verse that has shaped my life more than any other is the one we just heard: “The wind blows where it wills…”
I love this verse because it feels like the story of my spiritual life, so you’ll have to forgive me if today’s reflection is a little less scholarly and a little more personal.
The Wind and the Spirit
The wind blows where it wills … and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Jesus is playing with language in this verse. In the Greek of the New Testament, the word for wind and the word for spirit are the same word—‘pneuma’—and ‘ – and Jesus connects the two. The Spirit of God moves like the wind—unpredictable and uncontrollable, but unmistakable when it hits you in the face!
Of course, Jesus and Nicodemus may not have been speaking Greek. They may have been speaking Hebrew, where the same word, ‘ruach,’ also means both wind, breath, and spirit. Or they may in fact have been speaking Aramaic, where the same word, in this case ‘Ruha’, again carries the same triple meaning!
And the pattern continues across the Semitic family of languages. Even in Arabic, I’m told, the words for spirit (rūḥ) and wind (rīḥ) come from the same ancient root. It seems that in almost every language (except English) the connection between wind, breath, and spirit is built right into the vocabulary.
The Spirit Who Surprises
“The wind blows where it wills,” says Jesus, and that seems to have been the story of my spiritual journey.
I grew up in a conservative Christian household and learned early on that I belonged to the “true” church — Protestant, Evangelical, and Reformed—and I was taught early on to beware of those who called themselves Christians but were, in fact, deceived. And of course, that primarily meant Catholics.
The list of the spiritually suspect didn’t end with Catholics, of course. People of other religions, gay people, and — to a degree — women. Not all women were lost souls, of course, but they didn’t seem to be on the same spiritual level as men either
That was the religion of my youth, so perhaps it’s no surprise that by my teenage years I had largely abandoned it. And then, when I was eighteen, I had my own encounter with the Spirit of God, and from that moment forward, my life has been marked by a series of encounters with God’s Spirit at times and in places that I’ve never anticipated.
Early on I met young gay Christian men who were wrestling with their identity, and though I couldn’t share their struggle, I could not deny that it was the same Spirit of God at work in them that was at work in me.
I encountered that same Spirit amongst long-term alcoholic people I worked with at the refuge I volunteered in, in the prison system among men guilty of terrible crimes, and—most surprising of all—amongst members of the local mosque!
I must add too that through all that time the Spirit was educating me through as many women as men, of course, if not more.
I remember ten years ago in Damascus, sitting alongside my friend, Dr Hassoun, the former Grand Mufti of Syria. I said to him, “I feel as though I’ve known you all my life. I think it’s the Spirit of God in me connecting with the Spirit of God in you.” He nodded warmly, even before the translator had finished. The wind of God’s Spirit had blown the two of us together, and it connects us still, even with him now in prison.
The Spirit Who Gives Life
This connection between wind and Spirit is not just linguistic, of course. It is biblical:
At creation, God’s breath (ruach) hovers over the waters (Genesis 1:2).
Human life begins when God breathes into Adam’s nostrils (Genesis 2:7).
It is the wind (ruach) of God that parts the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21).
It is the ruach that brings life to the dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 37).
And it is this Spirit (pneuma) that Jesus says gives us ‘new birth’ (John 3:6)
From the first page of Scripture to the last, life begins when God breathes.
The Spirit We Cannot Control
So much of what goes under the name of religion is, I fear, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Even if we’re not desperately chasing money, fame and fortune, we want security for ourselves and good things for our children. So we pray, we behave, and we try to do right by God, hoping God will do right by us. Religion, in its most generic form, is often little more than an attempt to influence the divine, but Jesus turns this upside down.
‘The Spirit of God moves like the wind,’ says Jesus. You don’t know where it comes from. You don’t know where it’s going, and you certainly can’t control it, but you can trust God’s Spirit because it’s the Spirit of the same God who ‘so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son…’ (John 3:16)
The wind blows where it wills, but it does not blow randomly. It is not fickle, impulsive, or erratic. It is the breath of a God who loves the world—all of it—and more than we can imagine. Breathe on us, breath of God!
“And [the devil] said to [Jesus], “All these I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me.”” (Matthew 4:9)
Baudelaire wrote more than a century ago that “The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.” That feels to me like commentary on today’s news, and yet on the first Sunday of Lent, the Gospels refuse to let us look away. They lead us into the wilderness to the place where Jesus meets the devil face-to-face. And if we’re honest, we’ve been meeting him too, far more often than we’d like to admit.
Perhaps I’m particularly conscious of the demonic at the moment because I’ve been reading “Nobody’s Girl” by Virginia Roberts Giuffre—the autobiography of the woman who was at the heart of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex‑trafficking empire. It is a brutal book, and if you’re thinking of reading it, let me warn you that there are details in the book that, once you’ve read them, you can’t unread, and indeed, the poor woman’s story has left me with images that I’d rather not be carrying.
And the more that story is unpacked, the darker it becomes. It begins with the sexual exploitation of children, and then allegations surface of ritual violence and occult practices. You may have seen the interview with Anya Wick, who says she is Epstein’s niece and claims that their entire family secretly worships Baal. Whether or not her claims are true, the fact that such allegations even sound plausible tells you something about the moral fog we’re living in.
But the most concerning allegations in the Epstein files aren’t about ritual or even sexual abuse. They’re about blackmail—about powerful men compromised and controlled. And it raises the frightening possibility that decisions affecting millions of lives may be shaped, not by wisdom or justice, but by fear, coercion, and corruption.
It does all leave you wondering how someone who goes into office with high ideals and a desire to make a difference reaches that point where they make their deal with the devil – where they hear the whisper, “All these I will give you…” and they bow?
How does anyone get to that point? How, for that matter, does an innocent schoolgirl end up at the centre of Epstein’s sex-trafficking empire? How, for that matter, did our global system ever develop to the point where compromised men can give orders that cost the lives of millions and millions of people and can do so knowing full well that they will never be held accountable for their actions?
The answer, I believe, to all these questions is the same. It happens one step at a time, and the first step towards catastrophe is often a very small one.
The devil says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matthew 4:3). It doesn’t sound particularly demonic. Who would be harmed? Would it derail the universe for Jesus to have a meal? Probably not. It would simply be a small indulgence – a minor deviation from Jesus’ fast.
But small steps shape trajectories. We know the words of traditional wisdom:
“Sow an action, reap a habit.
Sow a habit, reap a character.
Sow a character, reap a destiny.”
Is that what Jesus was doing—shaping destiny through a small act of self-denial?
The second temptation raises the same questions: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down … “ (Matthew 4:6)
If the devil was right, and Jesus was living a charmed life at that stage, what would it have hurt for Him to put His Heavenly Father to the test? A small test. A little spiritual thrill. Jesus refuses, as it takes Him down a path He does not want to take.
In the third temptation, the devil shows his hand, I think. The initial part of the offer sounds good – the tempter shows Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (Matthew 4:8), and he says to him, ” All these I will give you” (Matthew 4:9).
So far, so good, we may think. Who could do a better job of managing all the kingdoms of this world than Jesus? Even so, the sting is in the devil’s tail (so to speak) as he adds, “if you bow down and worship me”, and Jesus won’t go there.
I fear, though, many of our leaders made that bargain – not in one dramatic moment, but inch by inch, compromise by compromise, until they found themselves on the mountaintop with the devil, signing a contract they’d never intended to negotiate.
Sow an action, reap a habit Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny
Journeys into hell begin with a single step, but so do journeys toward holiness!
We’re at the beginning of Lent. In my old parish of Dulwich Hill, we had a wonderful parishioner there in her 90’s who would testify each year that she was giving up sex for Lent. Most of us don’t follow the old tradition of giving something up for Lent, as it seems trivial or quaint. But perhaps we’ve underestimated the power of small steps.
Why not take one small step in the right direction this Lent? Why not practice a little self‑denial and give up chocolate and put the money we would have spent on that small indulgence toward relief work in Gaza, not because chocolate is evil, but because small acts shape habits, and habits, character, and character, destiny.
Our world is in a precarious place. Evil is real, and God is going to need an army of people who have not bowed the knee to Baal. So why not use these forty days to take a spiritual inventory of our souls, to clear out the clutter, to strengthen the muscles of faithfulness, and so to take the next right step in the right direction?
For if the road to hell is paved with tiny compromises, the road to God’s Kingdom is paved with tiny obediences—small acts of courage, small acts of generosity, small acts of truthfulness, little acts of love—and if enough of us take enough small steps in the right direction, then even in our dark world, the light will continue to shine.
“For he received honour and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”” (1 Peter 1:17)
It’s Transfiguration Sunday this week, and these are the words of the Apostle, Peter, describing that mysterious event. It’s not clear from these words how fully Peter understood what happened that day on the mountain, but what is clear is that it was an experience he did not forget. He says, “We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.” (1 Peter 1:18)
Whatever happened that day, the transfiguration of Jesus was evidently an awesome and life-changing experience for everyone who was there. The only problem is, we weren’t there. That was not our life-changing experience, and, speaking personally, I haven’t seen a lot of transfiguring going on around here lately!
I was at the Town Hall rally last Monday evening—the rally protesting the invitation of the Israeli president to Australia—and it was, for the most part, an orderly and peaceful affair. We were packed tight in the Town Hall Square, yet people were polite and apologetic when they bumped into one another. The speakers made clear that our protest didn’t target any race of people but opposed the actions of the government, and when the rally was over, I snuck down the back stairs and avoided the crowd, which is how I missed getting embroiled in the violence!
I was a block away when my partner, Joy, who had gone the other way, called me to say she’d been pepper sprayed! I don’t know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that I wasn’t closer to the action, as there’s no way I could have stood back and watched while those men who were praying were assaulted by the police!
I’ve had the privilege of being in quite a few war zones in Syria. I was in a riot outside of Jerusalem and almost killed. I’ve been in a sinking boat off the crocodile-infested shores of Manus Island, and I think I’ve learnt to handle intense and life-threatening situations with a good degree of self-control. Even so, there’s something particularly unsettling about seeing these things happen in your own backyard—when the police – our police—the people we look to to keep control, lose control!
It’s not the first time I’ve seen it. I saw that mob mentality with police once when running the youth drop-in centre in Dulwich Hill, and I saw it again during the protest rallies against the COVID lockdowns. Even so, I can’t get used to it, and I don’t want to get used to it. It unnerves me, and my question is, ‘Where is Christ in this?’ Can’t the Lord come and calm the mob in the same way He calmed the raging sea?
I was asking myself the same question while we were at the rally—well, not exactly the same question. My question then wasn’t ‘Where is God?’, but ‘Where is the church?’ I could see thousands and thousands of people, and no doubt there were many solid Christian folk there, but where were the Archbishops of Sydney and our other senior religious leaders? We seemed to be on our own, and then I heard that another friend of mine had been punched in the back of the head by the police!
I read our texts this week, and they’re all focused on the amazing experience Jesus and His disciples had on the mountaintop. ‘It was insane!’ says Peter (or words to that effect). ‘You should have been there. It was life-changing!’ And my problem is that I wasn’t there, and I’m feeling a long way from that mountaintop right now. The experience of the numinous and the holy is not my experience at the moment. I’m seeing something much darker happening around us.
And then it clicked with me that that is actually the whole point of Peter’s letter. Peter wasn’t boasting to his mates about what a great time he’d had with Jesus on the mountaintop. He and his people were in a very dark place, and Peter was trying to hang on to some of his memories that gave him hope!
In 2 Peter 1:14 (two verses prior to today’s passage), Peter says, “I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.”
In other words, ‘I know I’m about to die!’ He uses a euphemism – the “putting off of my body” – which in the original Greek is literally “the removal of my tent”, which is a beautiful phrase, recalling the wilderness wandering where everyone lived in tents and where even God had a tent—“the Tabernacle.” Peter, according to legend, was crucified upside down, probably in the mid-60s, when Nero was emperor. It would have been a horrific and terrifying way to die, yet Peter speaks of it as the ‘casting away of his tent’. And we know what replaces the tent. It’s the temple!
Times were dark for Peter, and the believers he’s speaking to seem to be on the verge of giving up. They had come to believe in Jesus, who had died and, three days later, rose again, but now had gone again, and how long was it going to take Him to come back this time? Another three days? Three years perhaps. Well, it had been thirty years! When was He coming back?
The days were dark. Instead of experiencing the reign of God, as they’d hoped by this stage, they were in the reign of Nero! Rome was burning, and Christians were being fed to lions.,Peter was about to be crucified. The holy mountain of the transfiguration must have seemed a long way away and a long time ago, but what Peter was trying to do was to get his people to focus less on when Christ was returning and more on who Christ was, because if Jesus really was ‘the beloved Son with whom God was well pleased,’ He could be trusted to come back exactly when the time was right.
It would have been good to have been on the mountaintop that day with Jesus. It would have been almost as good if Peter had taken a photograph or video to pass on to us—something that we could stick up on our bedroom wall or use as a screensaver on our computer so that when things get dark – when society seems to be collapsing around us and we’re being pepper-sprayed or punched in the head by the people who are supposed to be protecting us – we could look at that photo or video and remind ourselves that the beloved Son ultimately has it under control.
We don’t have a photo or video, but we have the account left to us in the Gospels, and we have this word from Peter, left to us as his final legacy. “We heard the voice come from heaven: “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” “
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter on February 14th, 2026
“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2)
This, it seems, was the beginning and the end of the Saint Paul’s message – Jesus Christ – and not Jesus as some vague spiritual figure, but Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, saviour of the world, and, crucially, … the one who was crucified!
We forget how scandalous the crucifixion is. Lenny Bruce used to say that if Jesus had been born in the 20th century, we’d all be wearing little nooses around our necks, and if He’d been born a century earlier, we might all be wearing guillotines!
We forget how horrific the image of the cross was in the first century. It wasn’t an ornament but a form of torture reserved for terrorists. If Jesus had died in a gutter, kicked to death by a mob, it would have been a more dignified way to go.
The most notorious use of the cross, to my mind, followed the rebellion of Spartacus, the gladiator, who led a slave uprising against the Empire that ended in 71 BC with Spartacus defeated and six thousand of his rebel comrades crucified – their crosses lining the Via Appian outside Rome for a distance of more than 100 miles!
I find it hard to imagine what a horrific scene that must have been, but if you were a resident of first-century Judea, crucifixion would have been constantly in your face! You couldn’t go out to the market without passing a gauntlet of dying bodies. The cross was not a metaphor. It was a horror, and it carried a message from the Empire: “This is what happens to those who stand up to us.”
Crucifixion wasn’t just execution — it was humiliation, degradation, and public shaming. It was never inflicted on Roman citizens because it was considered too degrading for a full human being. It was for slaves, rebels, subhumans … and Jesus.
We preach Christ crucified, says Paul, “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Yes, it’s a crazy message, and, quite frankly, it was very poor marketing!
I remember many years ago hearing a sermon on this verse from someone who was something of a ‘Prosperity Gospel’ preacher—big on teaching that God wants us all to be happy, healthy and wealthy! It was an odd choice of verse, but the preacher claimed that Paul’s ministry in Corinth didn’t get big results because of this—because Paul focused too much on Christ crucified. According to that preacher, Paul learnt, over time, to focus less on Christ crucified and more on the victorious, resurrected Jesus, and that’s when his churches began to grow!
That makes a lot of sense. It’s also a lot of nonsense! Paul did not change his message. He preached Christ crucified at the beginning of his ministry, and he preached Christ crucified at the end. He only knew one Jesus—the suffering, rejected, humiliated Jesus. The Jesus who meets us not at the top of the ladder but at the bottom—in the gutter.
And that’s a problem for the ‘Prosperity Gospel’. If your message is that God wants to make us all healthy, wealthy, and successful, what do you do with Christ crucified?
The answer is that you dumb Him down or you polish Him up. You turn the cross into jewelry, and you take Christ off the cross. You avoid the crucifixion, and you focus instead on the resurrection, the miracles, the glory—anything but the shame.
But Saint Paul refused to look away. “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2)
Why? Because Paul knew that if we are going to meet Christ—the real Jesus Christ, and not the Christ of our fantasies or the Christ of self-help culture—we must meet Him where He actually is – not on a throne, not in a boardroom, not at a self-improvement seminar, but at the bottom, in the gutter, on a cross.
Of course, I’m not denying that Christ can deliver us and provide for us. I’ve seen miracles too. But as one man once said to me, “I’m sick of people telling me how Jesus solved all their problems. My problems didn’t start until I met Jesus!”
Christ crucified did not promise to make life easier. He promises to make us new!
When I work on these reflections each week, my practice for some months now has been to finish up by asking AI to design an appropriate graphic for me, displaying the key verse I’ve been working on so that I can use the image in our Sunday worship.
This week I gave AI today’s verse—“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”—and asked for it to be printed on an appropriate background graphic. AI started working on what I could see was quite a realistic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion as the backdrop to the verse, and then it suddenly stopped, and the image disappeared, and I got an error message:
“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble responding to requests right now.”
I asked AI where the image had gone and received an unexpected response:
“Unfortunately, that specific image style triggered a safety block due to its graphic depiction of suffering. I can’t regenerate it exactly as it was, but I can create a visually powerful alternative that still honours the verse and your message.”
I thought, ‘there you go—Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to gentiles, and unsafe to AI!’
As promised, AI did then offer three alternatives:
A symbolic crucifixion scene with a silhouetted cross and dramatic sky?
A painted sunrise over Calvary with the verse in bold?
A modern liturgical design with a stylised cross and warm tones?
Say no more!
Christ crucified is not easy to come to terms with—a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles, and unsafe to AI. “But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24)
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
“Blessed are those who mourn.”
“Blessed are the meek.”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” (from Matthew 5:2-5)
These are some of the opening lines from Jesus’ ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and they’re amongst the most familiar words Jesus ever spoke. I’ve stopped halfway through the list of blessings, but I suspect you can complete the rest from memory, including the cheesemakers, who should always get an honorary mention.
These are ‘the Beatitudes’, and you’ll find them in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. You’ll also find them printed on any number of posters, bookmarks, and inspirational calendars—often framed by a sunrise, implying that these are words designed to soothe and uplift.
Moreover, I’ve found these verses to be amongst the favourites quoted by preachers of the ‘prosperity gospel’, which claims that God wants to make all of us rich by blessing our efforts as entrepreneurs in God’s own free-market capitalist system.
I remember many years ago I purchased a translation of the Bible that had been published by some of these people. It was called “The Positive Bible,” and it promised “all the good stuff and nothing else”. It also said on the inside cover that you could read their whole translation in about half an hour, which I thought spoke for itself.
You’ve got to cut out a lot of the Scriptures before you can end up with a Bible that depicts God as your business partner. Even so, whatever they cut out, they left these ‘BE-attitudes’ in, as these were the sort of ‘attitudes’ you needed to ‘BE’ if you want to become the healthy, wealthy, and wise person God wants you to BE.
In truth, to get this from the Christian Scriptures, you not only have to cut a lot of the Bible out. You also need to trim down this list of beatitudes, which concludes with “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you” (Matthew 5:11). That’s not even an attitude, and, moreover, what sense does it make to say that you are being blessed when you are being cursed?
In truth, the more closely I listen to these words, the more difficult they become.
The people listed here are not those that we would normally describe as “blessed”, let alone (as some translations would render it) ‘happy’. Indeed, in almost every culture—including our own—these are the people we pity, avoid, and often think of as cursed! How can poverty be a blessed state? How can being sad make you happy?
I think, as a starting point, we need to drop the idea that Jesus is offering us a self-improvement programme here. This is not a list of spiritual techniques for becoming wealthy, successful and triumphant. If anything, these Beatitudes dismantle the idea that prosperity is a sign of divine favour. They point in the opposite direction.
The poor, the grieving and the persecuted are blessed, not because their circumstances make them happy, but because God is with them in their struggle. Their blessing is not their poverty or pain, but the presence of God in their pain.
This is the great reversal at the heart of the Gospel. This is the God that Jesus reveals to us – a God who is to be found not at the top but at the bottom – not in triumph but in struggle. Not in the palaces of the powerful, but among those who hunger for justice and cling to hope.
The prosperity gospel imagines God as a kind of celestial operations manager, rewarding all those who have the right kind of faith with worldly success. But the Jesus who speaks to us here from a Galilean hillside says something far more radical – that God has already chosen where to stand and is standing alongside those who have nothing to offer but their need.
In truth, the Beatitudes aren’t really attitudes at all, and they’re not even primarily about us. The Beatitudes speak to us of the location of God.
Where is God? Not at the top with the successful, but at the bottom with the broken.
Not with the powerful, but with the powerless. Not with those who have everything, but with those who have nothing but their need.
This is the great reversal at the heart of the Gospel. The Beatitudes invite us to look for God in the places we least expect—in grief, in disappointment, in the long and bitter struggle for justice, in the quiet perseverance of those who refuse to give up.
If we find ourselves poor, grieving, or pained at injustice, these words are a promise to us that God is near. And if, on the other hand, our lives are comfortable, insulated, and untroubled, perhaps these words are an invitation to adjust our be-attitudes, and to take a step closer to the places where God has chosen to dwell.
First shared in Father Dave’s blog – January 31st, 2026
“From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Matthew 4:17-20)
We’re at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, and, as in the other Gospels, no sooner has Jesus proclaimed His message than He starts a recruitment program, beginning with Simon (Peter) and his brother, Andrew.
This appears to be the first time Peter and Andrew have met Jesus, yet as soon as He calls them, they ‘leave their nets and follow Him.” And they don’t just follow Him to the other end of the beach. These are their first steps on a long and arduous journey that (according to legend) will lead to both of them to painful and ignominious deaths! The obvious question is, why did they do it?
Of course, neither of them knew that they were stepping out on a path towards crucifixion, but they did know they were walking out on their jobs and their families, so why? The answer is (if I might use Robert Pape’s riff on James Carville’s famous slogan of 1992), “It’s the Occupation, stupid!”
Living as a Jew in first-century Judea was remarkably similar to living as a Palestinian in the same area today. First-century Jews had to deal with the Roman Occupation of Israel in the same way Palestinian people today have to deal with the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. In both cases we’re dealing with a brutal military occupation where the subject people are taxed, abused, and killed with impunity.
Just as every Palestinian growing up in Occupied Palestine today prays for the end of the occupation and yearns for independence, so the Jews of the first century dreamt of a world where there was no Rome – no soldiers on the streets, no tax officials taking their money, and no Empire murdering and abusing their people!
If we were living in Gaza today, and we’d seen so many friends and family killed by the foreign occupying forces, and a young charismatic preacher came up to us and said, “Things are about to change. God is about to act. “Follow me!” I reckon a lot of us would also drop whatever we were doing and say, “Why not?”
They dropped their nets and followed Jesus because they thought they were joining the rebellion. Whenever you’re reading the Gospels, keep the Occupation in mind as an interpretative key for understanding first-century Judea. “It’s the Occupation, stupid.” The point is not that any of us are really stupid, but that a lot of the New Testament doesn’t make sense until we factor in the Roman Occupation as the basic preoccupation of every character in the Gospel drama.
Jesus has proclaimed, “The Kingdom of Heaven has come near” or “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” and whatever else that means, what the people of first-century Judea heard was the end of the Roman Occupation.
“Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” (Matthew 4:17-20) because they thought they were joining the rebellion, and this is confirmed, I think, by the only other recorded words Jesus spoke to those men, apart from “follow me” – namely, “I will make you fishers of people.” (Matthew 4:20)
When I was a kid at Sunday School, we’d sing a song about this verse, and it had actions. We’d sing “I will make you fishers of men” repeatedly, and we’d be symbolically casting a fishing line and reeling it in.
I think our understanding was that we were going to hook in more members for Sunday School. Our hearts were in the right place, but the problem with the fishing analogy is that when you pull in a fish, you don’t normally make friends with it. You kill it and eat it. Moreover, if Jesus was drawing on imagery from the Torah (as He always did), the metaphor of ‘fishing’ in the Hebrew Scriptures was always an image of judgement:
In Jeremiah 16:16, God sends “many fishermen” to catch Israel as part of a programme of divine judgement.
In Ezekiel 29:4, Pharaoh is hooked like a fish and hauled in for destruction.
In Amos 4:2: the prophet warns that the wealthy women of Samaria will be dragged away with fishhooks
The fishing metaphor is generally one implying the conquest and humiliation of your enemies, and I have little doubt that, whatever Jesus might have meant by the metaphor, this is what the boys in the boat would have heard.
Peter and Andrew followed Jesus because they thought they were joining the resistance, and yet they stuck with Jesus to the bitter end! Moreover, I suspect the other ten disciples all signed up for the same reason, and all but one of them stuck it out to the bitter end too (though Judas, of course, had his own bitter end).
Now, I appreciate that the reason you stay in a relationship isn’t necessarily the same as the reason you get into it in the first place. Indeed, any of us who have been in a long-term relationship know that the rationale of the relationship changes over time. Even so, if the disciples joined up to become freedom fighters, why did all but one of them stick with Jesus even after He was humiliated, tortured, and killed?
They thought they were joining a rebellion, and I think they stuck it out because they realised over time that they had joined the rebellion. They just hadn’t realised that Jesus’ rebellion reached far beyond Rome and that it confronted every empire, every domination system, and every power that grinds human beings into the dust.
They didn’t realise when they set out that their revolution would be fought with the weapons of forgiveness and compassion, and that victory would come, not through killing, but through a cross. This is still the rebellion Jesus calls us into today— a resistance that topples empires by transforming hearts, that breaks the cycle of hatred by absorbing it, and that builds a new world with the only weapons strong enough to really change things: truth, mercy, courage, and love.
I haven’t seen my friend, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, in person since the pic below was taken in 2014. Even so, we stay in touch and I had the privilege of having him join us on our ‘Palestine and Global Peace’ webinar last year.
Dr Muzaffar continues to pour his heart into the work of justice and peace, and this latest contribution – urging Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to formally disinvite President Trump to the upcoming ASEAN Summit reminds me that he is still on the cutting-edge.
God bless you and strengthen you, dear brother. You have extended Divine love and justice across the globe for so many years! If only more would listen to your wisdom.
Father Dave with Dr Chandra Muzaffar in 2014
DISINVITE TRUMP
3 October 2025.
Why President Trump should be disinvited.
The International Movement for a Just World (JUST) joins a whole host of Malaysian groups and individuals in appealing to Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to formally disinvite President Trump to the forthcoming ASEAN Summit to be held in Kuala Lumpur from October 26th 2025 to October 28th 2025.
JUST understands the difficult situation Prime Minister Anwar is in. Trump as the current US president, together with some other world leaders, has been invited by ASEAN, not Malaysia, to the Summit. Malaysia is chairing the Summit which is why the Prime Minister of Malaysia is playing the role he has to play.
Nonetheless, president Trump has been so deeply immersed in the on-going genocide of the Palestinian people that any positive gesture towards him, however symbolic, would be viewed with utter repugnance by a huge segment of the Malaysian nation. There are at least three reasons why such repugnance may be justified.
One, the US leadership is not just complicit in the genocide which has already claimed in modest terms at least 66,000 Palestinian lives in Gaza. Through its military, financial and diplomatic involvement in the genocide, the US government under Trump has been one of two principal authors of the brutal, barbaric massacre since early October 2023 (The other is of course Israel). To put it differently, without Trump’s involvement, there would have been no genocide. It is significant that of the 66,000 lives lost, 20,000 have been children. Should Malaysia play host to such a human being with such a cruel and callous record?
Two, in this regard, Trump has not once admonished in public the Israeli government or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for its systematic denial of the most basic rights of the Palestinian people. This includes in the context of the current genocide, their right to food, to shelter, to healthcare, indeed, to life itself. A leader with so little compassion should not be welcomed anywhere in the world!
Three, leaving aside basic rights, Trump, unlike a couple of his predecessors, appears to be totally ignorant of the Palestinian struggle for justice. He has no notion of their deep link to their ancestral land, of their culture that predates the arrival of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the region, of how Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities interacted with one another in the past, and how a distinct Palestinian identity evolved over time. Why should Kuala Lumpur, why should ASEAN, embrace such an ignorant leader who at the same time doesn’t even have an iota of empathy for the Palestinian cause?
For all these and numerous other reasons, JUST would urge Prime Minister Anwar to send Trump a polite and dignified letter of disinvitation to the ASEAN Summit.
