Courtney McGrailThe Church must become bolder in speaking up about environmental destruction says Fr Seán McDonagh SSC
Fr Seán McDonagh SSC
In the New Testament, Jesus as the Word and Wisdom of God is active before the dawn of time in bringing creation to birth out of the chaos. Through him the Universe, the Earth, and all life was created (John 1: 3-5).
All the rich unfolding of the universe – from the initial glow of the fireball through the shaping of the stars and the Earth as the only known green planet of the universe, right up to the emergence of life and finally humans with their varied cultures and histories – are all centred on Jesus (Colossians 1: 16-17). The Incarnation (God assuming a created human form) is an extraordinary affirmation of the goodness and intrinsic value of all creation.
According to the theologian Karl Rahner, the Incarnation is the perfect union of the infinite and the finite. Through the Incarnation the finite has been given an infinite depth and is no longer a contrast to the infinite, but that which the infinite himself has become in order to open a passage into the infinite for all finite reality.
The corporeality assumed by God, which is the human nature of Jesus, has now become the passageway to God for all creatures and all creation. Because of the unity of creation, what took place in Jesus affects and transforms all creation.
All creation
Christ is the first-born of all creation and as such can be seen as an older sibling to all creatures, not merely human beings. Our world and even the wider universe are already transformed when viewed from the perspective of the incarnation.
Through his resurrection Christ is more deeply wedded to the life of the world. In his risen body he is still part of creation but no longer confined to a given cultural and historical period and a particular body.
The risen Lord is now present everywhere in creation. The preface for the Mass of Easter Sunday rejoices in this fact when it states that the resurrection “renews all creation”. The significance of the resurrection of Jesus goes far beyond the remit of the human community and touches all creation.
The scriptures reveal that God is always actively on the side of the poor and the exploited Earth. God’s presence in this context is experienced as compassion, solidarity and consequent empowerment. This presence often appears to be powerless in the face of injustice or ecological devastation. But it is this powerless presence which, after all, is involved in the cross of Jesus. God’s power is revealed in its most extraordinary manifestation in the suffering and death of Christ on the Cross.
The Korean Jesuit theologian Cho Hyun-Chul writes it is “not divine omnipotence but divine vulnerability that will transform the whole creation into the new creation as was manifested in the resurrection of Jesus, the beginning of the new creation”.
God’s love revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus has a cosmic dimension and includes all creatures and in a special way creatures that are facing extinction.
Christians, as the midwives of God’s reign, must speak the truth about global environmental destruction in a much more forthright and unambiguous way.
Resurrection above all brings hope, because it guarantees that creation has a future in God. Based on this foundation, the various Christian traditions should be encouraging new ways of living which are much less destructive than those in place in our throw-away society.
Pathways
The theological pathways to achieve this reconciliation in the Christian tradition are through imitating the self-emptying and unselfishness of Christ.
As is clear from St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (1:20) and the Letter to the Ephesians (2:26), this will often involve pain, suffering and the way of the cross when challenging the demands of others. It will involve standing with victims, including the suffering Earth and other species, against the architects of the current destruction.