Each year we celebrate Australia Day, a festival prompted by the raising of the British flag in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. The event has become contentious, but whatever of that, an event it certainly was: and it is extremely unlikely that any of us would be here today unless it had taken place.
Frequently, when people compare that moment with similar earlier moments in North America, a contrast is made between the ethos of the Australian ‘First Fleet’ and the ethos of the so-called ‘Pilgrim Fathers’. It is said that religion, for good or for ill, animated the English travellers who were on their way to becoming Americans: whereas religion, in the gaolers or the gaoled, was at best incidental in the Australian moment.
What we can say with some confidence is that, so far as the native Americans
or the native Australians were concerned—the people who had been
on their continents for much longer than there were identifiable European
countries—the newcomers who waded ashore did not look much like emissaries
from heaven. Indeed, they must have seemed to be, as they quickly proved
to be, very bad news indeed for the ancient inhabitants of these enormous
regions.
I am noting this, not to get into some argument about colonialism or land
rights, but prompted by the gospel for Australia Day (Matthew 5:1-12),
which, unflinchingly, speaks about the terms of blessedness, of a happy
condition, of something to make the heart beat faster.
What on earth, do you suppose, could Governor Phillip, or his toughened officers, or his dislocated prisoners, or whatever local inhabitant may have skirted the bay—what could such people possibly have made of that refrain which we sometimes call ‘The Beatitudes’, the ‘All-Flooding Blessings’?
Out they spill, these improbable claims: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, and the sorrowing, and those hungry and thirsty for holiness, and the merciful, and the single-hearted, and the peacemakers, and the slandered’. If anyone, then and there, had heard such improbabilities, surely they would at best have kept a poker-face, and grown impatient until this devout charade was over. Sydney, in January, is not very pleasant even now, and it cannot have done much for devotion in the scourging time of 1788.
We cannot go back to their situation: our imagining of it is at best costume-drama, and we seem to see the camera for some mini-series dollying about the troubled scene. But isn’t there something which we do indeed have in common with any such imaginable group—a hesitancy, namely, about the words which may, at best, have been dragged out of our Lord—dragged out, because he had been around for the bulk of a lifetime in almost as unforgiving a country as Australia, and under a foreign occupation which in the end spoke only the language of the sword?
Never forget that Jesus Christ spent the whole of his life in a country under foreign occupation. The Roman Empire (as it had become during his time) could be cooperative when this was in its interest, could cut deals, could establish taxation franchises as, nowadays, franchises for McDonalds are established, could delegate administration to whatever local collaborators were skilled at that kind of thing.
But the bottom line, for the Empire, was always power, and money its instrument and token: the bottom line was readiness to break the vulnerable, to seduce the single-hearted, to carve through the ranks of the peacemakers, to defame and debase those who might promote integrity to the last. The Empire did what empires do: it believed in nothing beyond its own identity and its own resources. It adored itself.
Another way of putting this is to say that it was terrified, as empires always come to be. On the one hand it kept on singing its own praises—boosting the Eagles, invoking its own magical name, strutting and thundering: on the other hand, it could not come to terms with its own absolute vulnerablity, with the fact that it was of course crucified to its own mortality. It was like sundry other empires, earlier and later: Troy’s, Babylon’s, China’s, Portugal’s, England’s, America’s. It was made of brick-dust: and when the brickwork was cracked, the dust all bled away.
There is no particular reason to suppose that when our Lord proclaimed the blessings he would foster, he was, so to speak, behaving like an Australian, and cutting down the tall poppies — ‘goodbye Babylonians, Romans, Americans’. Rather, he was cherishing those great forms of spiritual creativity which can be deployed in or out of any empire, in or out of any democracy or autocracy or aristocracy. He was, without any illusions whatever, singing the praises, not of moral opportunists, but of spiritual visionaries—the non-adapters, the un-realists, as the imperialists would think.
Much later, in the twentieth century of the Lord, another brooding Jew, Franz Kafka, would say: ‘The good is victorious, but not in this world’. Jesus, our Lord, thinking of the peace-makers and the seekers of authenticity, and the hungerers for outright goodness, would agree with Kafka.
It is not in this world that the good is victorious: but victorious it is: and God help any of us who have, by contrast, cast our lot in with the doomed cause of crookedness.
