To Hope and Act with Creation
This Sunday’s readings speak of redemption, justice, and equality. The Gospel has Jesus commanding the eyes of a blind man to be opened. My favourite Eucharistic Prayer asks that our eyes might be opened to the needs of our brothers and sisters, that we might serve them truly, after Christ’s example and at his command, so that the church might be a witness to truth and freedom, justice and peace.
In this time to reflect on care for creation, these words are important. Caring for our mother the earth, so that all might share her goodness and future generations be equally sustained is, as Pope Francis has said, essential to our mission. He laid this out in his encyclical letter Laudato Si’, in 2015, and his exhortation Laudate Dominum, last year, had a tone of frustration. Quite reasonably, he wondered whether anyone had been listening.
I looked again at today’s reading from Isaiah: ‘the scorched earth becomes a lake’. We are scorching the earth in this age of climate change and global warming. Can our eyes be opened so that we leave as much for future generations as God has given us?
I have always liked the Letter of Saint James. Not long after the piece we heard today, James goes on to encourage his readers to act in light of their faith. He said that faith without doing justice is meaningless; I think he might have appreciated the theme of this year’s Season of Care for Creation: ‘to hope and act with creation’. If we act out of hope we might commend our work to God, doing what we can, where we can.
As well as his exhortation, today, to the radical equality of the gospel, James goes on to ask why wars begin. It is, he says, because we want things we have not got. Again, the message of the season for care of creation is to tread lightly on the earth.
As Jesus said, our lives are not made more secure by possessions. We all need to think about what we take from the common treasury that is the earth, and about the sort of public policy we support. It often seems to me that political argument can get into a zero-sum game: if you win, I lose. That’s not going to get us very far. We all need to learn to listen. And as people of faith we might remember that doing justice is never going to turn out badly.
Jim McAloon
