The Eyes of the Blind

I was too busy to get my head into writing a Christmas post this year, but this is almost it.  After all, there are 12 days in Christmas, right?

This Christmas I've been thinking about something that's not strictly a Christmas story - Jesus' inauguration message in the Nazareth synagogue, as told in Luke 4.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.'

Jesus' message, reading from Isaiah 61 with a little import from Isaiah 58, was initially well received by his fellow townspeople.  Then he explained to them that it meant they would have to overcome their own blindness and prejudice and they threatened to throw him off a cliff.

This Christmas I've been thinking about what this message means for Christians in our age, and for me as a wealthy Australian Christian, someone who is meant to be sharing and continuing Jesus' mission.

Jesus is proclaiming five things.  In the manner of such lists in Jesus' rhetorical style (and that of other Biblical writings) the list is constructed like a mirror.  The first and last items mirror one another, as do the second and fourth, and all four centre around the third, middle item.

good news to the poor

        freedom for the prisoners

                recovery of sight to the blind

        set the oppressed free

the Year of the Lord's Favour.

 

Good News for the Poor

Every Christmas you will see stories of people (often churches, but not always) doing nice things for poor people.  This year I saw a story about someone who has set up a charity which provides haircuts on the street for people who are homeless.  There was footage of their street salon out on the footpath, and comments from some of the customers about how much they loved the service and how good getting a haircut felt for them.  Then on Christmas Day, along with footage of carol-singing and organ music in the cathedrals and the vibrant Hillsong crowds, there was the Wayside Chapel and the Salvos putting on Christmas lunch for people who couldn't afford to put on their own.

All this is nice and not to be sneezed at - it's better to have a meal and a haircut than not to have them.  However, I don't think this is the good news for the poor that Jesus had in mind, which is why he paired the phrase with 'the Year of the Lord's Favour'.  It's likely that in using this phrase Isaiah and Jesus had in mind the Torah system outlined in Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15.  

Just as every seventh day was a day of rest, every seventh year was a year of forgiveness. Debts were to be cancelled, slaves released, and the land, labourers and working animals given a year off.  After every seventh sabbath year (that is seven lots of seven years, or the 50th year) there was to be a year of Jubilee in which property was redistributed - ancestral lands would be returned to their original owners so that wealth inequalities were negated and the community would restart on the basis of economic equality.  The word 'jubilee' is drawn from the Hebrew word for a shofar or ram's horn trumpet - the year was to be announced with celebratory music.  It was a festival of rejoicing for the community, a reminder of the Lord's abundant favour.

There is no evidence that the Jubilee was practiced regularly in ancient Israel.  Nor is it practiced in modern Australia, or anywhere else in the world.  Yet this was the 'good news' Jesus announced to the poor in Nazareth that day.  The notion itself seems absurd - a young carpenter, speaking in a village synagogue on the eastern edge of the mighty Roman Empire, announces a wholesale redistribution of property.  Yet this is what we are called to.

As I have said elsewhere, the kind of charities that feed homeless people, provide them with clothes or bedding, wash their clothes or cut their hair are nice and well intentioned, better than the imprisonment that is often the lot of very poor people, but ultimately naïve.  The way to solve homelessness is to provide people with safe, accessible housing that they can afford, and if necessary the support they need to deal with their associated issues.  To not do this is to accept, even to plan for, their ongoing homelessness.  

Jesus is calling us to do better, to work for a world where there is no homelessness.  And this is, at its very heart, redistributive, because we have no shortage of housing in our country, nor any shortage of housing finance.  Our problem is merely that these housing resources are poorly distributed, that some of us are well, indeed palatially, housed while others sleep on the streets, or on their friend's couches, or in flea-pit boarding houses.  We have a tax and financial system that encourages this.  We need to blow the shofar and redistribute these resources to those who have none, and celebrate as we do so.  

This will be the Year of the Lord's Favour.

Freedom for Prisoners

For various reasons I haven't been going to church much in the past two years, and the only public Christmas celebration I've taken part in has been Carols for Compassion, an event at which we gather outside a place of immigration detention and celebrate the Jesus who was also a refugee, as we call and pray for the release of the captives within.  In 2020 we sang outside the Mantra Hotel at Kangaroo Point, which was being used as a detention centre and at one stage held 120 men, most of them detained since 2013.  In March 2021 the centre was handed back to its owners and returned to use as a hotel and 50 of the men were released into the community after over a year of sustained protests from within and without. 

But other men were transferred, some to detention in Melbourne, others to the grossly misnamed Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation (BITA), a high-security prison tucked out of sight near Brisbane's airport.  So in 2021 we sang outside BITA, alternately praying for the men, calling on our government to release them and lamenting that we were still doing this after so long.

This is what Jesus calls for when he calls for freedom for prisoners.  But its mirror statement is much broader - freedom for the oppressed.  Because while some people are in literal prisons with fences and barbed wire, others are imprisoned in different ways.  The 50 men who were released, and thousands of others living in our community, live with a threat over their heads - they are not Australian residents, at any time (and without warning) they can be re-imprisoned or deported to the homes they have fled.  In the meantime they have no entitlements in the community and rely on the charity of friends.

Australia's First Nations understand all too well that the unconscionable imprisonment rates of First Nations people are just part of the broader oppression they live with every day.  It includes routine police harassment but also poverty, poor housing, low levels of education and poor health.  This is not just a phenomenon that arose by chance.  It is an integral part of Australia's history, the story of stolen land, stolen lives, stolen wages and stolen children that leaves their community poor and traumatised.  

If we want to free the prisoners, it goes hand in hand with freeing people from this oppression - with recognising their land ownership and compensating them for its loss, with telling the truth about the massacres and forced displacement and reckoning with what needs to be done now, with placing resources and decision-making power back into the hands of First Nations communities and walking with them as they forge their own path.  It goes hand in hand with treating refugees and asylum seekers justly and supporting them to make a new home here.  

This will be the Year of the Lord's Favour.

Sight for the Blind

Both these movements for liberation - the redistribution of wealth, the freeing of poor people from oppression and imprisonment - hinge on the 'recovery of sight for the blind'.  At first sight it's an odd thing to put at the centre of a call for liberation.  Are we talking about a cure for disability here?  

I have a friend who is blind.  I've no doubt that he would love to be able to see, but this is not what occupies his attention.  He has no expectation that it will be possible.  What he wants is a world where his blindness does not shut him out from the life of the community.  He wants documents in a format that his screen reader can translate for him.  He wants pathways he can navigate with his white stick without tripping over stuff.  He wants to work in a workplace where his blindness doesn't prevent him from contributing his considerable intelligence, energy and creativity.  To put it another way, he is asking us to see him. 

It's a hard ask and he has to fight hard and shout loud, because we are holding our eyes tight shut.  Jesus was acutely aware of this.  That's why, in Matthew 13, he quotes Isaiah again.

You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.

The reason we don't solve homelessness is not that we can't, it's that we don't really see homeless people - or if we do, we don't see them clearly.  We see them through a haze of myths which lead us to accept their homelessness.  The reason we don't see the need to declare the Jubilee Year and redistribute property is that we live by the myth that its current distribution is already fair, that those who have the wealth are entitled to it while those who don't could get it with a little hard work.  

The reason we don't release the captives is to some extent because we literally don't see them - they are locked behind bars in an obscure prison hidden in the industrial zone behind our city's airport.  But more fundamentally, we don't see their claim on us as legitimate, we have willingly allowed ourselves to be convinced that it is they who have perpetrated the injustice by not following proper immigration procedures while they were fleeing for their lives.  We don't see their faces or hear their stories.  We only see the faces of, and hear the stories told about them by, their jailers.

Jesus could heal the ordinary kind of blindness and there are many stories of him doing so.  This kind, however, is much trickier.  We like our blindness and are attached to it.  We keep our eyes tight shut, terrified of what we might see if we opened them.  

And indeed, the reality is confronting.  It is not a peacefully sleeping baby in a manger, watched over by his serene parents.  It is a child born homeless, carried hastily across the border in the dead of night to escape a massacre perpetrated by a ruthless dictator intent on ensuring the Year of the Lord's Favour would be indefinitely postponed.  Following in his footsteps in not easy.  It is so much easier to retain our blindness, keep the captives where they are and convince ourselves that Herod has our interests at heart.  

This is why the call must be repeated each year, why we continually have to learn to see and hear new things, to repent of sins we did not know we were committing, to inch our way, like my blind friend, carefully step by step towards a light we struggle to see, guided by the sound of trumpets we can barely hear.  If we can just step closer and open our eyes we will see that the sight and sound have a beauty deeper and more real than all of our illusions.

May the light shine bright and the music sound clear for you in 2022, the next installment of the Year of the Lord's Favour.