Culturally there is much happening for us today the 25 April on the 4th Sunday in the Season of Easter – Good Shepherd Sunday. For cultural Christianity today is the feast day of St George. From a secular cultural perspective, for Australians it is also Anzac Day. For us as followers of the way of Christ it is an awkward fit. We may feel ambivalent about occupying this space where both feet are planted firmly in the time and place of the season of Easter but with the spirit of Anzac Day and the feast day of St George on the left and right of us.

Ambivalent means to blow two ways. Maybe this is how we feel. On the one we are impressed by the pageantry of Anzac Day rites, rituals, and observances. For an otherwise secular nation, there is a sense of religiousness about it. There is empathy for all who have lost so much in war, our own nation and our alleged “enemies”. War is a game that no one wins. On the other hand, following the pattern of Jesus, we know that deep down he repudiated violence in all forms. The Wisdom teacher Jesus called into question the myth of redemptive violence and chose to be a sacrifice rather than perpetuate the sacrifice of others.

On Good Shepherd Sunday our ambivalence is held safe within an alternative narrative – the story of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. The story is authentic in its honest admission of the reality of wolves who represent internal and external systems of violence. The question is what is our response to the wolves represented in the text? Do we run away as the hired hands did? Do we fight and destroy the wolves as David in the Old Testament did? Or is there a Third Way beyond Fight and Flight? The way of the Good Shepherd?

  The Third way of the Good Shepherd

 The myth of redemptive violence is the belief that violence ”saves”. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts.

 What is Jesus answer to redemptive violence – the myth of the domination system?

 Jesus rejected hierarchies, called for economic equity, rejected violence, broke customs that treated women as inferiors, broke purity regulations that separated people from each other, challenged the patriarchal vision of the family, and rejected the belief that God requires blood sacrifices.

Violent revolution fails because it is not revolutionary enough. It changes the rulers but not the rules, the end but not the means. What Jesus envisioned was a world transformed, where both people and the Powers of domination are in harmony with the Ultimate God of Love and committed to the general welfare of all people and creation, enemies and friends.

  There are at least three weapons that I notice Jesus promotes in the Third Way

 1.      Dying to self

2.     Prayer

3.     Loving and praying for enemies and seeing them as a gift

Die to self

When we make survival the highest goal and death the greatest evil, we hand ourselves over to the gods of the myth of redemptive violence. In contrast the Good Shepherd willingly lays down his life. We trust violence because we are afraid. And we will not relinquish our fears until we are able to imagine a better alternative. The vast majority of Christians reject nonviolence, not only because of confusion about its biblical foundations, but because there are too many situations where they cannot conceive of it working. ... Millions of years of conditioning in the fight or flight response have done nothing to prepare us for this "third way" of responding to evil.  [Walter Wink Engaging the Powers, pages 145-146].

 Prayer

Wink presents prayer as a spiritual discipline, similar to the disciplines of athletes. The slack decadence of culture-Christianity cannot produce athletes of the spirit. [page 180] Prayer is never a private inner act disconnected from day-to-day realities. It is, rather, the interior battlefield on where the decisive victory is won before any engagement in the outer world is even possible. ... Unprotected by prayer, our social activism runs the danger of becoming self-justifying good works. As our inner resources atrophy, the wells of love run dry, and we are slowly changed into the likeness of the beast. [page 181] When we pray, we are not sending a letter to a celestial White House, where it is sorted among piles of others. We are engaged, rather, in an act of co-creation, in which one little sector of the universe rises up and becomes translucent, incandescent, a vibratory centre of power that radiates the power of the universe. History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. If this is so, then intercession, far from being an escape from action, is a means of focusing for action and creating action. [pages 186-187]

The Gift of the Enemy

Our solidarity with our enemies lies not just in our common parentage under God, but also our common evil. ... We too, like them, betray what we know in our hearts God desires for the world. We would like to identify ourselves as just and good, but we are a mix of just and unjust, good and evil. If God were not compassionate toward us, we would be lost. And if God is compassionate toward us, with all our unredeemed evil, then God must treat our enemies the same way. ... If, however, we believe that the God who loves us hates those whom we hate, we insert an insidious doubt into our own selves. [page 165]

Loving our enemies may seem impossible, yet it can be done. At no point is the inrush of divine grace so immediately and concretely perceptible as in those moments when we let go of our hatred and relax into God's love. ... There is a subtle pride in clinging to our hatreds as justified, as if our enemies had passed beyond even God's capacity to love and forgive. ... If God can forgive, redeem, and transform me, I must also believe that God can work such wonders with anyone.

Concluding comments

Our western culture is presently in the first stages of a spiritual renaissance. And to the extent that this renaissance is Christian at all, it will be the human figure of Jesus that galvanizes hearts to belief and action, and not the Christ of the creeds or the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith. And in the teaching of Jesus, the sayings on nonviolence and love of enemies will hold a central place.

 The Hebrew Scriptures recognise two names for God: YHVH and Elohim. Some Rabbinic teachers indicate that these names are thought to symbolise two aspects of God: justness and compassion. Recognizing that there is often a tension between the two, the Talmud (a type of commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures) describes God as having, as it were, a daily prayer:  "Let my quality of compassion overwhelm my quality of justice".  In the tension between the two, it is mercy and compassion that must gain the upper hand. As with God, so with us. Anzac Day must call forth compassion in each of us: for the survivors of war and the victims of war. But above all compassion must become a daily decision for each of us; compassion must define our morality, identity, and spirituality. Then the Resurrected Body will be seen in the church as compassion is offered through the church for creation, for children, for the vulnerable and for the enemy.

This prayer is for all those who reflect on Anzac Day in anyway, past and present:

Deep Peace of the running wave to you
Deep Peace of the flowing air to you
Deep Peace of the quiet earth to you
Deep Peace of the shining stars to you
Deep peace of the shades of night to you
Moon and stars always giving Light to you.