Readings 1-22-11

In the midst of a polemic against idols, this beautiful passage from Isaiah juxtaposes the sad fate of beasts of burden who carry the people’s “gods” into captivity, and the God who carries Israel throughout history.

The Ephesian passage encourages us to resist evil and to stand firm in the truth. Our struggles are the more difficult for not being against specific people(s), but rather against subtler (and therefore perhaps all the more insidious) influences. How do we identify and protect ourselves against this evil? We are told only to root ourselves in God, for (I suspect) that is the basis on which we can discern what is true.

The passage from Mark offers us a number of things. First, there is clear resistance to the healing that Jesus’ power of exorcism brings. It is not the vulnerable man who is afraid, but the very powers that possess him. It is even more interesting that the society itself, though threatened by the man possessed, has not only made a space for him on the margins, but wants to maintain that arrangement. Society has found its balance with this structure, a status quo in which that which is uncomfortable or threatening is marginalized, and the society resents interference in that arrangement. In addition to his natural desire to follow the one who heals, we can see good reason that he would want to leave. Yet Jesus sends him back into the community in an uncomfortable prophetic role. For him, that is to follow Jesus.

Can we find anything here that directly addresses our concern for the integrity of Creation? I think we can find it under the umbrella of idolatry. We see in Isaiah that we trust in the wrong things to save us, when God is at hand—and always has been. We carry the weight of the things in which we seek healing and salvation, but quietly and unperceived, God carries us.

I can see in the “rulers,” “authorities,” “cosmic powers,” and “spiritual authorities” the uneasy peace we have bought with practices destructive of our environment and concomitantly, our physical and mental health. Among many others, such practices include the degradation of land and water through the practices of agribusiness, our inhumane (and dehumanizing) treatment of livestock, our high level of energy consumption, the reliance of the health of our economy on a heavily consumerist lifestyle, and the destruction of native ecologies and the species that inhabit and maintain them. Like the community that kept the demoniac on the margins of their society, we maintain the status quo (comfort and convenience) of our society only so far as we keep the consequences of our economic/environmental assumptions and practices on the “margins” of our awareness.