A sermon on Genesis 29: 15-28 & Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52 by Nathan Nettleton

A while back I was reading an article in the paper about some new cop shows on TV and how they hadn’t kicked off with the sort of ratings the networks had hoped for. The article was saying that it appeared that they had failed to attract the sort of audience that the well established cop show Blue Heelers attracts, and it was comparing the style and content of the shows for clues as to why. The new shows were smart, young and sexy, city based, and somewhat morally ambiguous, in that the lines between good and evil and who was on which side were not always too clear. Blue Heelers on the other hand is based in a rural town and good and evil are always pretty clear cut. The conclusion drawn was that Aussie TV viewers don’t like dealing with moral ambiguity, preferring to have clear-cut goodies and baddies who stick to their sides of the dividing line. No doubt many Christians hear that as good news. After all we like to define the line and stick to the right side of it, and the God of the Bible is always on the side of the honest and straightforward. Or is that just the gospel according to Blue Heelers?

Many, many times throughout the Bible, God is identified as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This title served to remind the people of their great forebears who were the foundation of their nation and of their faith. It is a little like what we do with the remembrance of the saints at the beginning of our liturgy – we remind ourselves who we have received the flame of faith from, honouring them and the God who we have known in them. But Jacob was not the sort of character who would fit easily into the company of our saints. And I don’t think he’d fall on the right side of the good and evil divide on Blue Heelers either. Jacob is a morally ambiguous character if ever there was one. Jacob seems to have swindled and scammed his way through much of his life. Two weeks ago we heard the story of how he took advantage of his brother’s moment of desperation to swindle him out of his inheritance. You may also be familiar with the story of how he later pulled an elaborate scam, aided and abetted by his mother, to swindle his brother again; this time disguising himself to deceive his dying and blind father into giving him the special blessing that was reserved for Esau as the older brother.

In tonight’s episode, the boot is on the other foot and it is Jacob who gets conned. Put aside for a moment your distaste of stories from ancient cultures where women are commodities to be traded on the bridal market for the best dowry payment available and men can have as many wives as they can support. Jacob has worked unpaid for seven years as a dowry payment in order to marry Rachel. In today’s money, even on a Baptist minister’s pay, that would be over a quarter of a million dollars worth of dowry. But his prospective father-in-law knows that he is going to have more trouble marrying off his less attractive daughter Leah, so he pulls a scam to con Jacob into marrying them both and paying top price for each. Jacob of course is outraged when he wakes up after his wedding night to find that he’s married the wrong woman, but it is very much part of the deliberate irony of the story that Jacob is outraged over being treated exactly the same way as he has treated everyone else. When we hear him yell, “Why have you conned me?”, we’re supposed to think, “That’s a bit rich, coming from you mate!”

Jacob goes on to swindle his father-in-law back, by making deal that all the rarer spotted sheep and goats born would be his wages and then using a combination of black magic and genetic selective breeding to build up a massive flock at the old man’s expense. This bloke would not be one of the good guys on Blue Heelers, and yet you’ll have trouble finding any record of God condemning his behaviour. On the contrary, God is willing to be identified as the God of Jacob. God seems to be on side with Jacob in scam after scam. You might even say that Jacob has scammed his way into the good books with God. So what are we to make of this divinely sanctioned moral ambiguity?

Well, before you dismiss it as just one of those odd Old Testament stories that came long before Jesus came and made everything clear for us, let’s look at tonight’s gospel selection of quotes from Jesus. In the version we heard, he said that someone spiking the drinks at a party was a good illustration of the Kingdom of heaven. A more literal translation has a woman hiding some yeast in a sack of flour and it works its way right through the dough. To our modern ears that sounds rather innocuous, but everywhere else in the Bible and in other literature from the time, yeast is always a symbol of corruption. The translation we heard was an attempt to put back the shock value into what Jesus was saying. It was a troubling, morally disturbing image. But Jesus only exacerbates the discomfort with his next illustration. The Kingdom of heaven is like when someone finds treasure on another person’s property, conceals it and sells everything to buy the field. In Jesus’ time, the rabbis used to argue over exactly this scenario, as to what a person’s responsibilities were if they found such treasure. Was it dishonest to conceal it in order to gain it? Was that cheating another out of what was rightfully theirs? Now Jesus doesn’t actually address that question here, but it is a deliberately morally ambiguous story that he uses to illustrate the way people respond to the Kingdom of heaven. And it is certainly not the only time he does it.

I’m not going to try to deconstruct the rights and wrongs of all Jacob’s scams or all Jesus’ ambiguous illustrations tonight, because I can’t. But I do want to use the question they raise to ask whether we are often prone to being over-simplistic, in a Blue Heelers kind of way, about issues of honesty and righteousness and how God views them. You see, the odds were stacked against Jacob. He was a second son in a culture where that made you a second class citizen, and his father clearly favoured his older brother. Maybe lying and cheating and scamming were the only ways he could undermine the structures that were set against him.

The world is made up of the strong and the weak, and the strong write the rules. Lying and cheating and scamming are always against the rules, but maybe these are the only resources the weak have. Power structures are, of course, always constructed so that only the powerful can exercise power. What options are left to the weak? Those in power always claim that God is on their side. But the Bible repeatedly claims that God is on the side of the weak. So if honesty is constructed to ensure that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, perhaps God has to oppose honesty. God may have to be in favour of scamming, if scamming helps balance out the scales. Perhaps if that’s the only way to level the playing field, God has to take sides with the liars and cheats.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit with the Blue Heelers audience here. I am uncomfortable with this sort of ambiguity. It is too demanding. It asks us to make too many hard choices, and leaves us too uncertain about whether we are getting them right. If you just have to keep the rules, whoever made them, then it is all clear cut and easy.

But the reality that Christian love and integrity may sometimes put us on the wrong side of the rules has never been more apparent to me than it is becoming in this country in the last few years. The dilemma of being a Christian in a country whose government is setting up concentration camps and trampling over basic human rights used to occupy a file in my brain labelled “other side of the world before I was born” and was peopled by heroes like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But now it is my own country in the present day. If you think the term “concentration camps” is unfair, our own Aussie Macquarrie Dictionary defines them as “guarded enclosures for the detention of political prisoners, racial minority groups or refugees.” So now it is us who has to face the agonising question of whether to be a law-abiding citizen is now to be complicit with a massive evil. And if we conclude that it is, then we have to decide whether our dissent should be in word alone, or whether we can cross the line of Blue Heelers type morality and participate in devious, illegal activities in favour of justice and mercy.

I’m not able to offer an answer here, because it is too complex. Breaking the detainees out of the camps and hiding them will probably not improve their situation. The stresses of being a hunted fugitive are probably just as bad as the stresses of being in the camps, so I personally don’t think there is much grounds to advocate that. But I am not going to condemn those who shelter the runaways either. When government policy is evil, our allegiance is to Christ before it is to our country, and if that puts us on the wrong side of the law, so be it. Elizabeth Gaunt who we regularly name among our saints was executed for sheltering fugitives from an unjust law. Once we have rejected the law as no longer able to help us discern right from wrong, and crossed into illegal territory, we are in the uncomfortable space of having to weigh every action on its merits, usually without adequate information. We will, as Paul said in our other reading, have to depend on the Spirit to help us, not only when we don’t know how to pray, but when we don’t know how to act. I am confident that God will back underground action that is genuinely motivated by a hunger for justice and mercy, but we also need to take care not to get hooked on the buzz of being on the wrong side of the law, and just become rebellious for the fun of it.

I’m sorry I can’t be any clearer in my advice and guidance here. We are in troubling times, and most of us have never before had to deal with the idea that we are living under a government that perpetrates massive human rights abuses and employs a well oiled propaganda machine to maintain popular support. I don’t know what that is going to mean for us in the days ahead. But I do know that the stories of Jacob suggest that sometimes God is on the side of those who, in the face of injustice, have nothing else to resort to but deceiving, cheating, and scamming.

And just maybe, such tactics are not even beyond God. Down through history there have been many theories of how our salvation was brought about by God. How did God manage to use Jesus to fix the problem that humans are too addicted to sin to be saved? Many churches will offer only one answer: substitutionary atonement – someone had to be punished and Jesus took our place to get us off – but even in the Bible that’s only one theory among many, and a very minor one at that. One of those old theories which is very much discredited now, is that God made a deal with the devil and then cheated. The theory that God is the scammer and the devil got conned. You can see why that theory didn’t last. Those who write the rules could never allow that one to set the tone for human behaviour! But we are gathered here around this Table at the invitation of one who was executed as a criminal. And we stand here in the company of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Elizabeth Gaunt, and Thomas Helwys, and if we’re keeping that company we’ve clearly already crossed the line. So let’s eat and drink and pray with them, so that with them we might have the courage to walk the way of the cross and become the body of Christ offered for the life of the world.

Questions for consideration

• In what ways do conventional notions of honesty and morality contribute to perpetuating injustices?

• What do you remember Jesus saying about the law (both positive and negative) and how does his attitude inform our attitude to the laws of our society?

• How do we now regard those who complied with the laws and instructions of Nazi Germany? How do we now regard those who resisted and contravened those laws?

• How might we act in the face of unjust and oppressive laws in our own country?