Lent is grace under pressure: making coal into a diamond
C S Lewis once said that many today speak of Evolution and ask what is the next step of evolution for Man? But a warning about this question, the next step may not be evolution as it could be devolution! Either way, concerning the matter of evolution, the Christian believer does not view God as a cause among other causes or the horizontal line of causes, but as The Cause, always present and working in the world that operates along a vertical line from the Uncaused cause to the horizontal line of causes. God is the Uncaused cause of everything that exists and happens beause God is the giver of existence and the sustainer of existence, as God is the reason for anything existing at all.
However the diversity of life happened, the entire course of evolution depends on God for its beginning, its continuance and for every activity along the way, on to its final end. Science studies the secondary, observable causes in the physical realm [the horizontal], but we believe those causes are guided by the invisible hand of God who is the primary cause for anything to exist at all [the vertical]. But even evolution can be iconic to something more. Thus, Christians can say that the next step of evolution is the move from being just creatures, fallen creatures, broken creatures to becoming healed, whole, holy and perfect but adopted sons and daughters of God. We are to take and give our natural but fallen selves to Christ, so that we may be transfigured into a Christ-like person through being formed in the fiery furnace of the Holy Spirit which is that grace under pressure which can re-make us as fire and pressure makes a lump of coal into a diamond!
The last two Sundays of Lent of Year B have given us three words which we can use to bring ‘evolution’ into view: repent, transfigure and self. The word ‘Meta’ means to go beyond so that metanoia is the Greek word for repentance that means to go beyond the mind by turning the mind back to its creator; in other words, to go beyond a this-world mindset. Metamorphe is the Greek word for transfigure or transform and means going beyond this world to a new world that is the Kingdom of heaven; one that shines through the humanity of Christ. If auton is the self, then Meta-auton is a going beyond a self that derives its life from fallen nature to becoming a person who derives his life from grace. In other words, we are to go beyond an old mindset to a new one, we are to go beyond this world to a new world and we are to go beyond the old self to a new self called personhood. Jesus reveals that what takes us beyond a this-worldly mindset, a this-worldly view of life and beyond a self that lives just for this world is the arrow of a higher love that pulls us further in and higher up to the really real of the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the Gospel for the 3rd Sunday in Lent, Jesus does something drastic which is like shock therapy. It is an act of divine love which outrages the worldly mindset about religion that uses God or religion as a means for success and power in this life and for this world. By cleansing the temple, Jesus overturns the new and worldly practice of religion and replaces it with the original foundation for religion, namely, Divine Love. The Love that gave us creation, the creation of man and woman, creation of man and woman in the image of God, male and female he created them and this divine love is embodied in Christ himself. He is love, a love that will mean a new priesthood, a new sacrifice and a new temple because he is the New Adam and Mary is the new Eve! So he comes to cleanse our inner temples, our inner sanctuaries and our interior life that is the spiritual form of the human heart so that we may seek and love what is true, what is good, what is ordered and what is beautiful [the transcendentals of Being: Verum, Bonum, Unum and Pulchrum].
Our Lord Jesus goes beyond the worldly mindset of both the Jewish leaders and the Jewish people of his time! He is also calling not just the Jews but also all mankind to worship in Spirit and truth. It is a worship founded on the grace of the Holy Spirit poured into the human heart [Rom 5:4] and as such it fires outwards like an arrow going beyond the this-worldly mind-sets, beyond thethis-worldly ideologies and beyond the this-worldly-self to a transcendental love of God, others and our true, hidden, real and spiritual selves. But why were they so blind to who Jesus is and what he was about?
The reasons for their blindness are the same as those that keep millions of the neo-pagans of today from accepting and living the Christian faith. These, like the priests and Pharisees of Jerusalem in the year 28AD, are so immersed in the affairs of this world that they give no thought to their own eternal future. Their eyes are so fixed on earthly objectives they have set for themselves that they can see nothing else. They are like the ox chained to the millstone and grinding out wheat for today; they never look up or look out but keep their heads down for the next false promise that worldly powers offer them. They choose to be slaves to fear and slaves of today’s Caesars and Pharaohs!
[See You Tube video track from Rush from their album ‘Grace under pressure’ called ‘Enemy from within’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wziJqdq4LcA&list=OLAK5uy_kV4aoLdWbaONKNhQG-so_hd0haUQTyi18&index=4&ab_channel=RushVEVO ]
The priests and Pharisees wanted more than just political freedom from Rome. They had hoped that their Messiah would give them a great world empire, with wealth and power without limit. We live in the 21st Century where again the power brokers and the new pharaohs of our time want to also have a new kind of empire built on a new feudalism where once again the few grab from the many their means of life: food, energy, freedom of movement, rights of life and liberty! Their land grabs, their food grabs, their energy grabs, their health grabs and their power grabs are to be established on the corpses of billions. In the words of Our Lord: “Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather” [Matt 24:28].
Yet, sadly, it is a time when even the centre of the human side of the Catholic Church seems to have been infiltrated by an old ideology from the 20th Century. An ideology that has been re-cooked, re-hashed and re-presented as something new in the ovens of Davos: The Woke ideology. Like its previous avatars in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Maoist China it is trying again to use the young people to promote its green-zero options of gulag-cities and peasant bicycles, its anti-bovine menus and its insect diets, its genetic altering therapy serums, its alphabet-gender soups and its eugenic vision of a bionic or hybrid asexual hominids in sync with either animal or machine constructs to promote what Pope John Paul II prophetically called the culture of death. But this time with the rise of synodos-sanhedrins the Church has been co-opted to be a light bearer to this vision and so we can truly say that the Rhine, the Yangtze and the Volga now ideologically flow into the Tiber!
Check out this reflection on the times in which we find ourselves: