After Bondi: What Kind of People Will We Be?

It's been a little over a month since the horrific attack on the Jewish community. Families and worshippers came together to celebrate the resilience of their community, to pray and to connect at Hanukkah by the Sea, and were met with terror and tragedy. 15 people were shot and killed, the youngest victim was Matilda, a 10 year old child. The two gunmen responsible, it appears, were driven by a hateful, dehumanising ideology.

In the wake of this tragedy we are left with deep grief for the loss, pain and fear being experienced by the Jewish community and all those impacted by the terrible act of violence we witnessed at Bondi beach.  

And as we reel at events locally, we are also seeing headlines around the world filled with growing instability and polarisation. The sense that the global order is shifting is becoming harder to ignore. A commitment to international law, human dignity, and shared responsibility feels increasingly fragile.

Late last night our Federal parliament rushed through new laws in response to the terrorist attack; and in NSW this week, laws passed by the State government have been met with a series of protests with concerns that civil liberties are being excessively curtailed.

We are left asking questions about what all this means for our common life and how our faith calls us to respond. What does it mean to follow Jesus, and his way of courageous, transformative and hope filled love, in the midst of tragedy, division and uncertainty?

Love of Neighbour 

In the middle of the horror and grief following the attack at Bondi, there were powerful acts of selflessness and bravery. Including Jessica Rozen, the pregnant mother, who threw herself on top of a child she didn't know to shelter them from the gunfire. Boris and Sofia Gurman, who gave their lives trying to fight the gunmen, became their first victims. And Ahmad Al Ahmad, the Syrian born Australian father who ran toward danger at Bondi to save the lives of others. In their actions - and those of many others, including members of the community, police and medical personnel - we see glimpses of how love for our neighbour  can guide us when the world feels disordered and aching. 

This may seem obvious to many of the people that will read this and follow Common Grace - as a nation and as a community we need to reject all forms of hatred, including antisemitism, that would treat any human being as less than any other. This is acutely true for those of us who are followers of Jesus. One of the most transformative and profound elements of the Christian faith is its insistence, since its inception, that all are created in the image of God, and equally worthy of love and dignity, regardless of culture, creed or distance. 

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10 :25-37) is a story that was given to the Israelites of the ancient near east. In it, Jesus centers not the priest or the Levite but the Samaritan - an outsider whom his hearers had been taught to distrust. It is the Samaritan who draws near, who sees, who is moved with compassion, who binds wounds and refuses to turn away from another’s suffering. Jesus insists that this is what love of neighbour looks like, a love that crosses every line of difference, a love that refuses the easy temptations of fear, suspicion or tribal loyalty, a love that sees the humanity of the other before anything else.

We see the early church picking up this same boundary-breaking vision of Jesus and carrying it into what it means to be God's people - called to be one in Christ (Galatians 3:28), formed not by exclusion but by reconciliation, entrusted with the ministry of healing a fractured world (2 Corinthians 5:17-19), and for our love to extend even to our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48).

Throughout history, these teachings have revolutionised Western civilisation, and the world - helping to build the moral foundations that led to societies that (notionally at least) believed in freedom, flourishing and safety for all. Martin Luther King Jr’s struggle for civil rights is emblematic of this, reminding us that “Darkness can not drive our darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive hate; only love can do that.”

I labour this point, because right now, for our communities, for our nation and for the world, knowing, believing, repeating and pursuing this truth is as important as it's ever been.

Growing Division

Social cohesion is fraying. We are becoming more divided. We are increasingly tempted to see the world through the lens of 'us' and 'them'. We create space for fear to take hold when we decry 'the other' as the problem.

The Jewish community, long before Bondi, had been feeling a growing sense of fear in the face of increased harassment and vandalism. Similarly, Islamophobic incidents were rising sharply, and have continued to in the weeks since Bondi. Our First Nation's peoples feel that they have become increasingly politicised and targeted since the failed referendum. Our politics, while not as bad as some of our counterparts overseas, is becoming more polarised; this has been evident in rhetoric of many of our leaders as they responded to these terrorist attacks. Too often national unity and compassion are being eschewed for blame and point scoring. And it seems that in many of our Churches and Christian communities, we are more willing to import and defend some of the most divisive and inflammatory ideas coming from our US peers. 

In the middle of these trends, I want to turn back to these ancient teachings, this eternal truth. We are all, each and everyone of us, worthy of love. I want to see with eyes that behold the image of God in others first, before it sees what makes us different. Before I see demarcations between Jew and Palestinian, right wing and left, conservative and progressive, rich and poor, immigrant and native born, I want to first see people deserving of love. I want to live in the kind of love that drives fear away, and in doing so creates space to engage and empathise. 

A Church that Embodies its Calling 

My hope is that it’s not just a handful of us that are yearning for this, but that there is a growing community, a movement of people, who not only believe these truths but seek to embody them. People who stretch their circles of compassion far beyond their 'in-group', however they define it. People who commit themselves to caring for those in need, and who work to shape our society and our politics to reflect that same generous love.

While I long for every Australian to live this way, I know that this is who the Church is called to be - a community shaped by grace, grounded in love, and formed by the One who breaks down walls of hostility. Our communities and our country need us to model this generous, boundary-breaking way of being, and help them to find it too. I know, if we do this, we can become a witness to a better path, a signpost pointing toward the healing and wholeness God desires for all. 

Ahmad al Ahmad was recently interviewed by CBS about how he feels about the praise he receives for risking his life to defend strangers. He responded by saying there are 'no strangers, just human beings like me and you.' 

"What I want to say, for everyone around the whole world, not only in Australia, I want to say please stop the terrorism and stop the hate. Feel in love with all humanity, whatever religion. We are all human beings."

His message and his actions feel like a modern parable.

In the coming year, may we be a people who return again and again to this ancient calling: to see the image of God in every person, to reject hatred in all its forms, and to live the kind of neighbourliness that courageously, compassionately and sacrificially responds to the pain of our world. If you feel this tug as I do, I invite you to walk this path with us at Common Grace as we seek to live this love in public - so that all people and all creation may flourish as God intends.