Sermon for the Nativity of John the Baptist
“What manner of child shall this be?”
“What manner of child shall this be?”the neighbours of Zacharias and Elizabeth ask, highlighting the strange and yet compelling character of John the Baptist whose nativity we celebrate today and whose feast day marks the anniversary of the landing of Giovanni Caboto, englished as John Cabot, perhaps, though by no means for certain, in Newfoundland in 1497. Thus he has become the patron saint of what later became Canada.
To state this obvious fact of history is regarded by some as politically incorrect; regardless, it is a feature of this country of displaced peoples which is about more than just the encounter between various European cultures and the so-called indigenous peoples, a term which historically would be utterly meaningless to those whom it is meant to describe. That history is about more than just economic and cultural exploitation though that is inescapably part of the story. That is hardly new as one can see from Bartholomew de Las Casas 16th century work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, or Voltaire’s classic critique of his own 18th century European culture in Candide. There is no right side of history which is not to say that there aren’t lessons to be learned about good and evil and about right and wrong. History as an intellectual discipline is inherently revisionist which requires, I think, a recognition of the complexities and the vagaries of the contingent world of human actions and motives rather than forcing history into some sort of ideological strait-jacket such as the idea of progress. Such things on all sides are really a kind of blindness, a lack of awareness and a failure of the ethical imagination. It is invariably a kind of judgmentalism.
There are the ups and downs of history but there are also those moments of the breakthrough of the understanding into “the fullness of time”, an awakening to the truth of our lives in God. There are profound and providential things that happen in the course of history even in and through our follies and sins, despite all our certainties.
Thus the conjunction of this feast with the Gospel for The Fourth Sunday after Trinity about the parable of “the blind leading the blind” is particularly compelling. It concerns our awareness, our vision of the mercy of God, which alone counters our self-certainties and self-assurances, our judgmentalism. This is our blindness. Instead, we are called to Christ who, theologically speaking, is not simply the icon of any one particular culture as the native peoples of Canada themselves amply show; they are, after all, largely Christian. Abusus non tollit usum is an older medieval principle; the abuse of something does not take away from its proper use. Therein lies the real question with respect to the historical interaction of cultures past and present, something articulated very well in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease about the clash between British Imperial culture and the Igbo tribal culture in parts of Nigeria in the twentieth century.
