Why do we get caught up in culture wars, arguing about what is sinful and who’s at fault? Worse yet, good church folk are not the only ones arguing about who’s got God on their side. Parties and nations do it too. Religiousity has entered our political realm at full volume.
In today’s gospel reading, onlookers argue about the cause of one man’s blindness: Was it his sin? Or his parent’s? And when Jesus clears the man’s sight, they argue about the source of the miracle: Since the healing took place on the sabbath, surely Jesus’ power could not have come from God. He wasn’t following their rules!*
But the man’s testimony is clear: “Once I was blind, but now I see.” Results are his proof of compassion. And once again, Jesus himself points to actions as evidence of God’s love for this world: Hungry people are fed, blind people see, prisoners are released, and outcasts are welcomed. That, he is saying without argument, is the realm of God, here and now.
During this Lenten season, my eyes are being opened to our thoughtless destruction of God’s good creation by rereading Gayle Boss’s compelling book titled Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. Associating the earth with Noah’s ark full of animals, she writes:
Attention to the amazingness of our arkmates routes us directly to the heart of Lent. The season means to rouse us from our self-absorption. Absorbed instead in the beauty of other creatures, we see how they value their lives, lives woven together across species in beautifully complex webs. The nine-ounce red knot (sandpiper) flies from the southern tip of the world to meet the horseshoe crab at precisely the week she crawls from the waters of Delaware Bay to lay her eggs. Once alive to the exquisite web holding all creatures, we also see the holes slashed through it. By us. We’re enraptured by the animals’ beauty and we’re horrified by the suffering we inflict on that beauty. With Saint Paul we can hear all creatures groaning, including ourselves.
This week, I’ll be offering quotes from Gayle’s book, with hope that our eyes may be opened to the sheer wonder and suffering of the world we live in.
–Marjory Zoet Bankson, Editor of InwardOutward.org
