Injustice
Sermon Notes 16th July 2023
Desiree Snyman
How do you do the right thing when you live in a society that is built on doing the wrong thing? How do you live with justice in an unjust environment? How do you live a lifestyle of kindness and gentleness when those around you thrive on indifference or worse exploiting others with cruelty for personal gain? How do you advocate for what is life giving in a death dealing situation?
Schindler’s List is one example of how to do what is right in the midst of what is wrong. Based on the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, the movie directed by Steven Spielberg tells the true story of Oskar Schindler. Schindler was a German businessman who saved over a thousand Polish Jews from the Holocaust during World War II by employing them in his factory and protecting them from deportation and extermination in Jewish Concentration camps. In order to maintain his business and save as many lives as possible, Oskar Schindler was careful to maintain a close relationship with the SS Officer in his town, often bribing him to keep his Jewish workers safe. An industrialist, a member of the Nazi party, a flawed human being, Oskar tried to live with justice in a situation of immense injustice: “I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org/oskar-schindler). Thomas Keneally said that: “He negotiated the salvation of his 1,300 Jews by operating right at the heart of the system using all the tools of the devil - bribery, black marketing and lies” (jewishvirtuallibrary.org/oskar-schindler). The point about Schindler’s List is the creativity and courage in saving lives in a Nazi Germany that mechanised the death of Jewish people. The example of Schindler’s List serves as a way to interpret the parable of the Sower.
Jesus' listeners were aware that there was no escape from the foreign adversities that stood before them. They were faced with the challenge of adapting to a society tainted by oppressive Roman colonial forces. However, they were determined to discover and experience God's kingdom right in the midst of those difficult circumstances and this is the point of the parable: to experience God’s kingdom in the midst of unsolvable injustice and exploitation.
The political, social, and economic realities behind the parable of the Sower describe the pain and oppression that the Jewish people lived under. Rome conquered Judea, Galilee, and other parts of Palestine in 63 BCE. The Romans imposed tribute upon the Judeans and Galileans. Herod the Great (37-4 BCE) and Herod Antipas (4 BCE-39 CE) were client kings of Rome who taxed the local peasant classes. The Galilean peasantry were thus burdened by four levels of taxation: the Roman tribute, Herod’s taxes, the tithes demanded by the priests and rent for leased land (see Hopkins 2002:204-208).
What we find in the parable of the Sower is not a farming story, but a portrait of the brutal political, social, and economic situation in the time of Jesus. The elite believed that the harvest belonged to them in the form of tribute, taxes, tithes, and rent. The legacy of the Roman empire is civilisation in the form of plumbing, engineering, building, governance, law and above all roads. The Sower sows and some seed falls on the road, some is eaten by birds, some strangled by thorns. The seed falling on the road brings to mind the visceral image of the roman roads taking wealth out of the rural areas into the silos of the city. In the mind set of peasant audience the road siphons produce out of the regions into the city through taxes, tithes, and rent. The anguish of seeing your harvest taken away by the elite is heightened when the birds eat what is sown or the thorns strangle life out of your crop. This is precisely the emotional landscape of a 1st century Galilean peasant farmer, your livelihood eaten away or strangled to death by rent, taxes, and tithes.
There is hope, one part of the harvest belongs to the farmer and when this harvest is shared the kingdom of God is manifest within the challenging realities of political, social, and economic oppression. Yes, large parts of the harvest do go to Rome, the Temple, the Jewish elite, and the landlords living in the cities. The edges of the fields were untaxed and left for gleaning. The harvest that is left untaxed can be shared to make the kingdom visible, by giving to everyone who begs from you (Mat. 5.42), doing to others as you would have them do unto you (Mat.7:12), lending and expecting nothing in return (Mat. 5.42). In other words when the leftover harvest is shared with others in need the kingdom of God has arrived.
There are moments recorded in scripture that bring the parable of the Sower and the abundant harvest to life. The early church in Acts described how they "... had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them among all, as anyone had need" (Acts 2:44-45). The feeding of the multitude when interpreted as a miracle of sharing is another example of an abundant crop being shared.
The parables Jesus tells are not earthly stories with heavenly meanings but earthy stories with heavy meanings. Designed to unsettle the mind the parables are meant to shock our consciousness into the upside-down logic of Jesus’s Sabbath message as summarised in Luke 4: Good News to the poor, freedom to the captives, sight to the blind, Jubilee cancellation of debt, a circular economy of assets shared and liberty from slavery. The question Jesus and his audience had was how to live the kingdom of God and practice Jesus’ politics of the New Heaven and New Earth amidst the military oppression of Rome.
How do we cope in an exploitive world? How do we exercise a choice to share, to care, to have compassion on the least, the lost and the last in a world that abuses the vulnerable as steps on a ladder to get ahead? In Nazi Germany Schindler found a way to save lives in a system designed to kill as many Jews as possible; he is a modern example of the parable of the Sower coming true. And what about us? Can we too envision and live out the vision of the kingdom of God? We are centuries and kilometres away from 1st century Galilee yet the brutality of exploitation by corporate, global capitalism is a subtler mirror of Roman colonialism. Explosive rent strangled the livelihood of Galilean peasants as much as it exhausts the people living in our suburbs. We are all compromised, the clothes we buy are made in sweat factories, the food we eat is harvested by people living in slavery conditions and the taxes we pay finance weapons of destruction. Do we give up because it is all too hard? Or can we be clever, creative, and courageous in manifesting the kingdom of God that is already present in the world by trusting in the lifestyle Jesus exemplified as the best, most prosperous, most joyful way to be human: The Good News to the poor, sight to the blind, freedom to captives, refugees and asylum seekers, the cancellation of debt, the circulation of assets.