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We are so fortunate that God has come to Earth in the form of Jesus. If we want to know what God is like, we need only look at Jesus.

How did Jesus treat people? He went to the outcast and the poor. Most importantly though, he went to those who were hated and despised by mainstream society.
I’ve recently been reading the Australian novel, The Songs of Jesse Adams. This fascinating story is about what it could be like if Jesus came to Melbourne in the 1960s.
What has struck me about the story is something that is not often emphasised by Christians of a social justice persuasion. It is the magnitude in which Jesus seemed to upset and offend those who had a vested interest in the status quo. Everywhere he went, those in power felt threatened by this upstart young preacher who had the audacity to claim the most outrageous things about himself, and who had the gumption to love those who didn’t deserve it: the morally loose and low lifes of society.

In the novel, Jesse Adams, the Christ figure, manages to offend people at the very top of power, from the Premier of Victoria to the head of a major commercial television network. And he does it by going to the poor and resolutely resisting the lures of power, wealth and fame that any up and coming star who is supposedly in their right mind would jump at.
What this novel shows us is that Jesus is no moralist. He doesn’t go around telling society it is going to hell by pointing out its sins. What he does though is expose the folly of selfish power and violence by living out a life of absolute love, and it is his love of those considered unworthy of and beyond love that Jesus is most comfortable with and the powers that be are most uncomfortable with.

Jesse Adams shows this by spending his time in places like King’s Cross in Sydney, amongst the low lifes, the alcoholics, druggies and corrupt. Interestingly, when Jesse does his equivalent of turning the tables over in the temple, it is done in the form of going to a porn cinema and ripping the projector out of its socket, dragging it bouncing down the stairs and throwing it into a fountain. He does this straight after talking to a young woman who has been lured into porn. Continue reading

This is a slightly reworked piece I wrote in 2009 for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This year marks the 25th anniversary of that most momentous of occasions in world history. If it has some meaning for you, I hope you take a lot out of it.

1989 was a big year for me, and for the wider world. It was the year I left my teenage years behind. It was also the year that the brutality of government repression in Tiananmen Square rocked the world, U2 came to town and rocked the tennis centre for seven nights straight, and Hawthorn went back-to-back.

The biggest news by far that year though happened in November when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, literally overnight. For 28 years the wall had separated Berliners from each other, dividing not just a nation but whole systems of government, as well as of course families, traumatising them in the process.

This is all very personal for me, having German parents who grew up during a world war which saw their country devastated both from within and without.

Continue reading

I’m finally back online after changing hosting companies. Gradually I’ll be getting the old theme back as well as all of my articles and links, as well as the bookstore. I’ll still be posting new articles during that time. Stay tuned over the next few weeks.