Thursday of the Third Week of Lent
Apparently, the phrase “seeing is believing” was pretty much lost on the crowd who watched Jesus drive the demon out of the mute man, thereby healing him. They were amazed by Jesus’ exorcism. But instead of seeing it for what it was—namely, proof that Jesus was bringing forth the Kingdom of God in their time—they went in for the idea that Jesus was casting out demons at Beelzebul’s (aka Satan’s) command. For them, Jesus was hardly the Son of God. Quite the opposite. He was doing Satan’s bidding!
Of course, this is an utterly ridiculous interpretation of what Jesus was doing and who he was. Moreover, as Jesus points out, the crowd’s reasoning didn’t make any sense either. As Jesus points out to them, if his ability to cast out demons proved that he was in cahoots with the Devil, then surely all who performed exorcisms were also working for the Devil. Jesus knew very well that the folks spouting this nonsense trusted exorcism as a legitimate form of healing and trusted those who performed them.
For some reason, these folks didn’t want to see what was right in front of them. Maybe that was because they were afraid of Jesus. Or maybe they were afraid of what he promised. Maybe they liked things the way they were. Maybe they weren’t enthused about Jesus’ upside-down kingdom (to borrow the title of a fine book by Donald Kraybill about how in the Kingdom of God everything is flipped). The first are to be last. Instead of fighting our enemy, we are to love them. Being rich in this life is bad news in the next. And so forth.
Yesterday, I happened upon a video I won’t soon forget. It was embedded in a Washington Post story about the fast-disappearing shoreline along stretches of beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In the video, a two-story house that is perched on stilts (to protect it from rising waters in a storm, for example) finally succumbs to the rising sea and pounding waves. In case you are interested, you can watch the video here. It is, indeed, incredible to watch the house collapse and get swallowed up by the sea. Others appear to be headed for the same fate. And that is why homeowners along the shore are spending hundreds of thousands of their own dollars to move their precious homes inland.
As I watch that video again I have to ask if we can see what is happening to God’s creation in front of our very eyes? Or are we like the folks in Luke’s Gospel who would rather turn the truth on its head and pretend that the oceans are not rising, shorelines are not disappearing, and houses are not falling into the sea?
As I bring this reflection to a close, I am reminded of the response to the Psalm today: “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” Is God speaking to us today about the peril that God’s glorious creation is in? Can we hear God’s voice? I pray that, we can.
-Susan Trollinger