Volume 6 Issue 3 Who is Jesus? What is Jesus? March 2014 By Nancy Robinson, Associate In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was
God. (John 1:1) a publication of the Peace and Justice Committee
Touching the World with Love
SISTERS OF THE HOLY FAMILY OF NAZARETH AND
MEMBERS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF THE HOLY FAMILY
I would like to put emphasis on Jesus as Creator. When we think of Jesus as Creator, we confront a startling and distressing realization: The tree cut and fashioned into a cross was the glory of his creation. We nailed him to it. His gift carefully and lovingly created….living, beautiful, fruitful, life-giving…. we ‐ nailed ‐ him ‐ to ‐ it. This was a terrible moment. Creation manipulated to execute its Creator… ….a vicious rejection of love, beauty, fruitfulness, abundance. When we think about creation….and especially when we think about our Earth, it is essential to consider Jesus…..who he is, and what we do to him as we relate to Earth. Do we crucify him still as we treat creation with the same rough dismissive utility that cut that tree and fashioned that cross? What he gives in love and holds in being moment to moment, we often mindlessly use with no hint of gratitude…but with rapacious, thoughtless destruction. As Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth,
we stand opposed to the abuse of children
and vulnerable adults.”
(General Chapter, 2010 Decree 5)
Globe Image courtesy NASA 1
Jesus as Creator, continued
I think many of us have experienced rejection of a gift we’ve given with great thought, effort, excitement…..only to have it dismissed…not noticed….not appreciated. How much harder that moment would have been if the gift was mindlessly abused…perhaps even used to hurt us? If a lover gives a diamond….how deep the pain if the diamond is used in betrayal? As a weapon? A commodity? Traded away for trinkets? Turned into dust? If Jesus handed me a flower and said to me, ”Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed as one of these.” (Matt 6:28-30) ...would I not cherish that moment forever? Would I not press that flower into a book and look at it as something intimately bound up with the Lord? Would I ever see another flower in the same way? Would I understand what he told me? He himself had dressed that flower and loved it into splendor. Would I realize that the flower depended upon the soil and the rain and that each depended on exquisite processes imbedded in the workings of Earth to bring it to its fulfillment? Would I realize that the Lord’s loving, energetic, creative genius is active moment-tomoment as he holds our universe and all of its complexities in being? As I went through my life from then on……how would trash dumps, abandoned strip mines, blown-off mountaintops, debris and junk of every kind in the oceans, and along the shorelines, towers of belching smoke, disappearing species, animals suffering and glaciers melting..., affect me? How would I feel when I heard scientists worry that earth itself is shifting out of balance because we’ve failed to cherish it? If I could meet the Lord again, what would I say to him? How would I explain that, however mindlessly, I had participated in the spoiling his innumerable gifts? Out of himself he brought
forth the cosmos and entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does
not come from him. Of
everything, he is the inmost self.
Hindu: Chandogya Upanishad
Is it possible that he feels the pain as Earth groans under the whip and lash of human activity? Do we crucify him still? Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis all have warned us that destruction of the environment is sinful. If human sinfulness crucified Jesus, did he see his beloved Earth ravaged as he hung on that tree? Are not grasping for power and domination sinful? If carelessness and destruction bring harm, are they not sinful? As we think about Jesus’ infinite ‘generativity,’ can we find ways to tend to the wounds that we have inflicted on the Lord of creation? Can we learn to love creation and see it through his eyes? “Crucifix in Alps,” Dan DiLeo, photographer. Used with permission, courtesy of Catholic Climate Covenant. www.catholicclimatecovenant.org 2