Where is the chaos
in your life?
In truth, chaos
can take many forms. In the story of the
patriarch Noah in the Book of Genesis, God’s decision to allow the waters of the flood to ravish the earth
becomes a moment of primordial chaos for Noah and his family; God, who was
victorious over the waters at the time of Creation, seems to turn his back on
all of his creatures in the great deluge.
In the end, however, God’s promise to Noah is clear: there
shall not be another flood to devastate the earth. God sets
his bow – a rainbow – in the clouds
as a guarantee, to remind God of the covenant
he has made between himself and all
living beings. Thus, in Psalm 25,
the psalmist can sing that your
compassion, O Lord, and your love are from old… Here, chaos manifests in
the form of human sin, and the psalmist must beg the Lord to teach him God’s paths and show sinners the way. Humankind can be victorious over chaos only through
the grace of God.
Even Jesus, fully
human, encounters chaos, first and foremost in the desert, where the Spirit
drives him for forty days in Mark's Gospel. There, Jesus
will be among wild beasts and perhaps
experience the very human fears associated with them, so that he might know
intimately the human struggle to open to the fullness of God. But when Jesus emerges from the desert, he is
ready to put an end to the chaos: This is the time of fulfillment, he says The
kingdom of God is at hand. Unlike
the flood, meant to destroy all, Jesus came to save all, as the First Letter of Peter states: Christ suffered for sins once, the righteous for the sake of the
unrighteous, that he might lead you to God.
Jesus suffered once for all the
sins that would ever be committed, for all the sin conceivable in
humankind. His death and resurrection
offer an eternal end to the chaos of human existence, and salvific hope for all
peoples. In the final analysis, humankind
is victorious over chaos only through the grace of God. We have but to open to that saving grace.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordle.net
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