Bishop’s News - February 2024
Kia ora e te whānau
Somehow, we find ourselves hitting half-way through Lent, with summer almost over.
It seems a long time ago now but I was fortunate this year to have a prolonged break in January (and then less fortunate to have the customary round of re-entry Covid). As I re-entered I began to put the news on again, and this was a bad move as almost immediately I was set to flee back into the hill country with my tent. Israel-Palestine; Ukraine-Russia; US electioneering; climate; our own internal politics and the lead-up to Waitangi: an engulfing sea of misery.
Out the other side as I reflect on this sense of overwhelm, I can see that we as humanity tend to follow at least one of three coping mechanisms or behavioural responses when faced with an engulfing tide of threatening or disturbing events.
1. The first response is that when we are faced with a raft of polarising complex issues, we double down on one issue, becoming the righteous warriors for one cause with sometimes little regard to the consequences for others. In doing so we become part of the problem. We reconcile the actions of those on ‘our side’ of the issue as justified, even when those actions cause harm to others. We can see this at work for example in some of the responses on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The challenge with this is, as a friend said to me once, ‘in order to make an omelette you need to break eggs, but people are not eggs, and you shouldn’t break them.’ There are no winners in the Israel-Palestine conflict; there are no winners when we tear each other apart in the name of standing up for injustice.
2. The second response to overwhelm is where we put our heads in the sand and act like no problems exist; filling our days with distractions and the numbness of entertainment. One of my colleagues calls this ‘bread and circuses’ and apparently it’s from the Roman satirist Juvenal but I wouldn’t know as I’m too busy watching Netflix.
3. And the third response is in which we become so overwhelmed that we enter a nihilistic depression and see no point in anything. That’s a dangerous place to be in which all moral bets are off.
But as I struggle with our present reality I want to encourage us to find a different approach. I’ve been reflecting a lot recently about how St Paul says (in Ephesians 6:12) that our struggle as humanity is not with flesh and blood – i.e. each other – but with spiritual principalities and powers that we can’t see. Anything that causes us to act in a spirit of division; to join in as a group to behave in ways that we wouldn’t dream of as individuals; that in this there may be an element of spiritual power at play, as well as a sociological one.
I think you can see this play out in the kind of factional mob hysteria that often lurks at our door: I’m sure each of us can think of recent situations where ideology has got in the way of one group treating another who thinks or behaves differently with common human courtesy. Perhaps we can see some of this at work at the moment in the discussions around the role of Te Tiriti in which you were surprised at the level of vitriol that has emerged around this discussion.
But whether spiritual, sociological or something else, there’s a better, more powerful thing above all this, and that is the death and resurrection of Jesus. The creator of the world giving of himself in a self-emptying ethic of love, enthroned to death. So instead of giving our allegiance away to principalities and powers of division, stubbornness, a lack of compassion, nihilism, and denial, let’s commit again to the power of our Saviour Jesus and bow our knees to no-one else.
