JESUS CALLING
I laugh – bitterly – whenever I hear it mentioned that Australia is a “Christian” nation. Quite the opposite is readily shown to be true.
What the self-styled Australian nation has excelled at, in its few short centuries of existence, is the steady institutionalization not of Christian values – such as faith, love, charity, hope – but of merely half of one of Jesus’s sayings, taken out of context:
The poor you will always have with you.
This, at least, is the foregone conclusion of our political leaders, many of whom style themselves as proponents of the Christian faith – increasingly, as an antagonistic foil to fundamentalist Islam.
During each electoral cycle, civic leaders in this country pride themselves on their fiscal management credentials. Here we see the bald travesty of Christian virtue on display.
What Australia is good at, is transferring Wealth, removing it from the bowels of the Earth, from the land and from the people, so that it might become subject to ownership, satisfying – but never quite – the voracious appetite and petty whims of the profligate, propertied class.
Jesus’s parable of the talents – a zero-sum game in which the poor are punished and the wealthy rewarded (and so on, ad infinitum) – is the passage most relevant to the lives of everyday Australians. The only difference being that here, in Australia, it is the wicked, lazy and unproductive (i.e. landlords) rather than the steadfast and diligent (i.e. workers) who are rewarded by our political masters.
Christians themselves do little, or nothing, to protest this wholescale inversion – this incorrigible perversion – of Christian thought. Meekly, they render unto Caesar and all the rest of it, in this best of all possible worlds (Praise the Lord!). This lukewarm complacency is a salient feature of Australian “Christianity” – as, no doubt, it suits our political masters to promote.
Australia enjoys the Christian feast days, the orgies of idleness, the public holidays. Praise the Lord!
But in “the Lucky Country” (as once we called it), the blood, sweat and tears of the poor go unheeded – unrewarded except with more of the same – and any so-called Gospel (“Good News”) is as good as dead.
James 5:
1Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. 4Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
1 Timothy 6:
Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge [other] people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. (1 Timothy 6: 2-10)
Jeremiah 6:
From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. (Jeremiah 6: 13-15)
These prophets were no doubt murdered, by the rich.
What the self-styled Australian nation has excelled at, in its few short centuries of existence, is the steady institutionalization not of Christian values – such as faith, love, charity, hope – but of merely half of one of Jesus’s sayings, taken out of context:
The poor you will always have with you.
This, at least, is the foregone conclusion of our political leaders, many of whom style themselves as proponents of the Christian faith – increasingly, as an antagonistic foil to fundamentalist Islam.
During each electoral cycle, civic leaders in this country pride themselves on their fiscal management credentials. Here we see the bald travesty of Christian virtue on display.
What Australia is good at, is transferring Wealth, removing it from the bowels of the Earth, from the land and from the people, so that it might become subject to ownership, satisfying – but never quite – the voracious appetite and petty whims of the profligate, propertied class.
Jesus’s parable of the talents – a zero-sum game in which the poor are punished and the wealthy rewarded (and so on, ad infinitum) – is the passage most relevant to the lives of everyday Australians. The only difference being that here, in Australia, it is the wicked, lazy and unproductive (i.e. landlords) rather than the steadfast and diligent (i.e. workers) who are rewarded by our political masters.
Christians themselves do little, or nothing, to protest this wholescale inversion – this incorrigible perversion – of Christian thought. Meekly, they render unto Caesar and all the rest of it, in this best of all possible worlds (Praise the Lord!). This lukewarm complacency is a salient feature of Australian “Christianity” – as, no doubt, it suits our political masters to promote.
Australia enjoys the Christian feast days, the orgies of idleness, the public holidays. Praise the Lord!
But in “the Lucky Country” (as once we called it), the blood, sweat and tears of the poor go unheeded – unrewarded except with more of the same – and any so-called Gospel (“Good News”) is as good as dead.
James 5:
1Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. 4Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
1 Timothy 6:
Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge [other] people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. (1 Timothy 6: 2-10)
Jeremiah 6:
From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. (Jeremiah 6: 13-15)
These prophets were no doubt murdered, by the rich.