January 28 2013
OUR WORLD TODAY.
When the GOOD NEWS is not seen as good news.
1 John 5: 19: “The whole world is under the control of the evil one”.
Ever looked closely at Jesus’ 12 disciples? They were supposed to be Jesus’ support group, especially Peter, James and John. But were they? Here’s what I gather from the gospels.
When Jesus told them that he had to suffer, their reaction was one of outright denial. When Jesus wanted to talk to them about the events leading to his death and resurrection, the disciples switched the topic. They completely refused to entertain the reality of his death, and closed their minds to that possibility, that’s why Luke, in a fit of exasperation, wrote: “The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them and they did not know what he was talking about.” (Luke 18: 34.) They had their own ideas about what should happen with Jesus and what Jesus should do. Their reasoning had no room for the raw reality of the cross. As unsuspecting children they went along with Jesus on the dark road that ended in death. When in Gethsemane the night of utter terror began to descend upon Jesus, they not only failed to assist or comfort Him in any one way; instead they repeatedly caused extra trouble for him. In that garden, in that frightful hour of surrender to God’s will, the disciples were found sleeping; when the soldiers approached to arrest Jesus, they started to fight back, taking the risk that at any moment this quiet, nocturnal garden would become the place of a horrendous murder scene. Later on they completely abandoned him. The Good News that Jesus had to die was for them no good news at all. They did not want a dead Jesus: they wanted an army general Jesus who would lead them as a King David to chase out the Romans and make the disciples the leaders in a new nation.
What has this to do with today? The dozen disciples then is the church today. Jesus’ constant mission has always been to announce the coming of the kingdom, the new creation. It was misunderstood then, and it is misunderstood now. Jesus plea to “Seek first the kingdom”, that is to strive for the welfare of the world that God loved so much, is almost universally ignored by the church. The GOOD NEWS that the kingdom’s arrival, the coming of the new creation, is at hand, is simply not popular, because it involves immense inconvenience. That Jesus had to go through death to achieve life is well understood, but that his beloved cosmos too has to suffer death to become liveable again, is often simply ignored: to go to heaven is a much easier option.
The bible says that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one”. Think about that for a moment: not God but Satan calls the tune. Jesus died to bring the world under his control again, but that will only happen when he returns. The bible tells us that before that takes place, Satan will turn the screws on us: the ‘good news of the kingdom to come’ is not good news for our current comfortable conditions. The disciples did not want to hear the bad news about Jesus in their time: the church today is no different, in spite of Revelation 18: 8-9: “Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine…. The kings of the earth- the G 20 – who committed adultery with creation and shared her luxury, will weep and mourn.”
Secular authors are not so shy to say the sad news. Clive Hamilton in his book Requiem for a species: Why we resist the Truth about Climate Change, writes that the prospect that our children and grandchildren will live a life of insecurity, misery and suffering within a few years, is difficult to imagine and even harder to accept. Of course we too don’t want to see the ones we love face death, mourning or famine, but the Bible pulls no punches, because 1 John 5: 19 says that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” The evil one’s only aim is to do and bring evil.
Frankly we all have been his willing co-workers in a 500-year-long planet-wide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth, killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. Now the bills are coming due: our ever-increasing economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse. Even as our economic and environmental systems are disintegrating – we just experienced the hottest decade ever and the longest recession – it is impossible to quit our quest for economic growth. All the world’s economies only have one mantra: drill, drill, grow, grow: simply insane!!
Yet in doing so, we only follow the patterns of history, because civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter in his The Collapse of Complex Societies, and others, such as Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have outlined the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. They cited the examples of empires, the Roman, the Mayan and Easter Island, to name a few. The difference this time is that when we go down, the whole planet goes with us: that’s the trouble with acting globally. All signs point to a final collapse, because there are no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations left to conquer. We’ve are at the end.
That’s what secular writers tell us time and again. And so does the Bible. Of course: none of us, myself included, can possibly go back to a life style without a carbon foot print, without making Climate Change worse. So the inevitable outcome is collapse. That is the God’s Truth. Societies tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. It looks like that moment is imminent.
We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less, or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. When I was born in 1928 there were 2 billion of us. Now there are more than seven billion of ever more greedy customers. What we consider as normal is totally abnormal in a finite earth. The last half-millennium has been completely unreal, an anomaly, something not in tune with the laws of creation. It now looks that we will come to the point where large parts of the Earth will experience crop failure resulting in mass starvation and breakdowns in order. That is what lies ahead because of our failure to deal with climate change.
Only the Christian gospel tells us the truth, and that truth sometime happens to be painful. Once the Lord comes back, we have to do it differently: so get used to it and start that process now.
The disciples refused to deal with the reality of Jesus’ crucifixion. By and large the church also fails to deal with the reality of the pending death of the earth. Our world has to die because it is in the power of the evil one. Somehow we must refuse to be his willing helpers. I believe a discussion on that difficult issue is in order, because refusing to acknowledge our destructive ways means aligning ourselves with the Enemy.
Indeed sometimes the Good News may look like bad news.
In next week’s column I will explore “How then shall we live?”
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