Just as in the days of Moses, as we heard in our first reading, the people long for a great leader who will speak the words they need to hear and lead them in the way they need to go. When times get tough and fearful, that craving for a great leader, for a messiah, becomes even stronger. When we don’t understand what’s going wrong or how to fix it, we desperately want to find someone who does. And both Kevin Rudd and Barak Obama were able to convince the public that they were the one, the one with the intelligence and diligence to comprehend what was needed, the one who could rise above the power of vested interests and do what was needed, the one in whom we could put our hope.
Fourteen months later, Kevin Rudd is losing a bit of his gloss. His intellectual powers remain undoubted, but his capacity to rise above the power of vested interests and make the tough calls is increasingly being questioned. While much has happened on climate change issues, the power of the fossil fuel industry and its associated unions has ensured that the changes are more cosmetic than structural or systemic. Whether Barak Obama is able to do better remains to be seen. On another issue, overseas aid for reproductive health programs, Kevin Rudd came off distinctly second best this week, because he and Barak Obama had both made the same promise in their election campaigns, but Barak Obama has signed it into legislation in the first week while Kevin Rudd still has it bogged down in “issues under review”. Now in truth, all that means is that they had different sets of issues that were their first priority for symbolic first actions — the apology to the stolen generations and the signing of Kyoto protocols for Kevin Rudd, and the overseas aid issue and the closing of Guantanamo Bay for Barak Obama — but comparisons are never kind. One looked like a man of words, the other like a man of action. And the people long to be led by a leader who takes action. No one doubted that Kevin Rudd was a man of action after ten days in office. Barak Obama will have to prove himself over the long run too.
In tonight’s reading from the gospel according to Mark, we heard of one of the opening incidents in Jesus’s public life. We are still in the first chapter of the gospel, and all that has happened so far is that Jesus has been baptised by John, gone walkabout in the wilderness for forty days, and then called some disciples. This story is the first scene of his active public ministry. He turns up in Capernaum, and on the Sabbath day he goes to the synagogue and begins teaching. And the people are blown away by what he has to say. They too begin to make comparisons. “This bloke is different,” they say. “He’s not like the teachers we are used to, the scribes. This bloke seems to have some real authority.” They were impressed. When he spoke, they wanted to listen. They were looking for a leader who gave them some hope, and this bloke looked pretty promising. If it had been an electoral campaign, he was off to an excellent start.
But almost immediately, opposition forces rise up. If you speak inspiring words and promise hope of real and lasting change, the forces that benefit from keeping things as they are will not long remain silent. “Have you come to destroy us?! Who do you think you are? We know who you are!” Real and lasting change often demands that the sleeping dogs be disturbed, and the sleeping dogs will not be roused without seeking to bite your head off. When Jesus starts talking in ways that stir up hope of a new day, the demonic forces that ruled the old day are roused in opposition. And it is then that the measure of a true leader can be taken. Will he back down? Will he maintain the rhetoric but negotiate a compromise that appeases the demonic status quo? Will he point the finger and blame someone else and refer everything to a committee? Or will he stand true and back up his words with actions?
Jesus confronts the demonic spirit head on, silencing it and breaking its power over the one it had spoken through. And the people marvelled all the more. “What is this?” they asked one another. “A new teaching, and with authority! He stands firm against even the most devilish powers, and they back down before him.” And “at once”, Mark tells us, “his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.” When the people see that a leader is not just words, but integrity and action, that will happen. We are so not used to it, that it causes us to sit up and take notice.
Have you noticed how often in the first three gospels we are told that Jesus was teaching, and that while he was teaching something like this happened, and that then the people marvelled at the authority of his teaching, and yet we aren’t told anything about what he actually said while teaching? This story is not at all unusual in that regard. Why? Almost certainly it is because there was such an integrity, such an integration of what he said and what he did that telling us what he did is enough. What he did tells us what he said. And when we see that in a leader, we sit up and take notice.
Kevin Rudd is looking a little shaky on that score at present, but let’s not be too hasty to condemn. The forces arrayed against real change are formidable, and it will be some time before we can judge whether his choices of which battles to fight were the right ones in the overall context of the war at hand. Barak Obama is looking astonishingly messianic at the moment, but he hasn’t had to prove himself yet, so by all means believe and hope, but let’s not do so blindly. The forces of greed and war and oppression are at least fifteen times more powerful in the nation he takes on, because they are backed up by at least fifteen times as many people. Let us pray for both of them that the extraordinary hopes invested in them might give them the courage and audacity to turn those hopes into realities more often than not.
But for us, we gather here around this table tonight, not because we are Australians or Americans, not because we are Labor or Liberal or Democrat or Republican, but because we have put our hope in Jesus, in the leader whose actions have consistently backed up his words and whose integrity and courage have continued to cause us to marvel for two thousand years. We gather here because we have found in him the leader who can enable us to see how we too are enmeshed in the demonic ways of darkness and give us the hope and the courage to follow him in breaking free and finding new life and hope. And we gather here, because here at this table, Jesus is present, and here his words and actions become one. Words are prayed and a lives are offered, and evil is confronted and brokenness is embraced that wholeness might be known, and he and we give ourselves to one another that salvation might be tasted and the tormented might be set free. And we gather here because it is here that we are fed and nourished for what lies ahead, for the journey of turning our words into actions, that our covenant might be lived out and that we might be the people Jesus has called us to be as we go into the world as his ambassadors, representing and promoting Christ’s values of life, love, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, and sustainable stewardship in the places where we live, work and play.
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