In the passage from Daniel, it seems that King Nebuchadnezzar, while prospering according to all our normal criteria, has lost his humanity. What is his sate of mind before we see him physically parted from human culture? His is praising the world that he has “built . . . by [his] mighty power and for [his] glorious majesty.” His humanity is restored not by his own efforts, but by the opening of his vision and his heart. He sees the ephemeral nature of all created things, and the majesty of God. Almost Job-like, it is recognizing the truth of things, the precarious of his own being in the scheme of things that allows—perhaps is—the restoration of his reason, and the return of his identity. But now he has a new identity, one in proper relationship to God. Where are we? Do we, like the king, confine ourselves to a small world of our own making? Does the world we make rob us of our full humanity?
In the First Letter, John insists that to love is to know God, to live in Christ, and for Christ to live through us. Indeed, we know God because the nature of God is love, and God has revealed Godself to us in Christ. However, confession of Christ consists not merely in words of affirmation or belief in certain propositions—that is to miss the point. Confession of Christ is lived out in the fruit born of union with him. We who are “in Christ” are in Christ inasmuch as we love, and that cannot be our own doing, but God’s.
Yet, as we see in the periscope from the Gospel of Luke, that we resist Christ; a large part of us wants him to “Let us alone!” Christ has the power to remove the forces within us that continually set ourselves against others, and thus against God.
Is there an environmental message in all this? Actually, what part of his is not an environmental message? The environment includes the complex web of relationships of which we are a part—form the elements and other living creatures to other members of the human family, and with them (as well as through them), God. When we turn in towards ourselves, self-congratulatory, empire-building, we forget our radical dependency, our mutual creatureliness, our own deepest identity; in short, we lose our humanity to the fragmentation of our imaginings. What is Eden but a return to the respect, mutuality, and love for all beings that God calls us to in Christ Jesus?
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