A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
For the world in its present form is passing away. (1 Cor 7:31)
Before I returned to in-person mass, I would watch services from Magnificat.TV, a Spanish Catholic media network from the Franciscans of Mary. On the Solemnity of Mary this year, we watched a recorded session from Father Javier Martín, F.M., where, during his homily, he called the motivations for respecting the planet from a ticking clock variable “selfish.”
“‘We have to care for the planet, that we do not rise more than one-and-a-half degrees [Celcius] because it all goes to hell,’ some say.”
“‘Because everything will flood.’ Is that the motivation that a Christian has to follow?” Father Martín continued. “The motivation that we have to follow is to respect the rights of God, who is the creator, and therefore, the owner of everything he created.”
As both an environmentalist and a Catholic, this seemed like a bizarre argument to me. Of course we should respect the rights of God when it comes to creation, but how can we just ignore the impact of disasters like floods on human-centric problems like inequality?
I was reminded of that homily when going over today’s readings, which position our seemingly infinite scale of time against the eternity of God.
Today’s readings point to the indifference of time in all forms—past, present and future—to the eternity found in the kingdom of God. The first reading, while focusing on the details of marriage, also ends by stating that we treat those who are in a positive state as if they’re not, since “the world in its present form is passing away.”
This ties into Luke’s Gospel, where Christ skewers the present conditions of the misfortunate against the fortunate. It parallels directly with the first reading in how we treat the present as its opposite, since that world will soon be gone.
While the upcoming day of joy Christ presents in the Gospel is of the future, it is also understood to take place outside of our conceptions of time, with the day immediately preceding the Kingdom of God.
For urgent problems like anthropogenic climate change, it is not enough to say that the rewards in the kingdom of Heaven will soon be great.
Even the past—where Christ tells of how one’s ancestors treated both false and true prophets—is still just an example of how the present moment is limited in scope compared to the equality in Heaven.
However, I do not think the takeaway from these readings is that we treat this coming equality as inevitable. Inevitability suggests that there is no rush to restoring the unequal ills of the Earth, since the kingdom of God is both perfect and will be the end of said inequality.
For urgent problems like anthropogenic climate change, it is not enough to say that the rewards in the kingdom of Heaven will soon be great or that we are totally absent from that greatness right now. Nor should we just expect equality to come later for those currently facing hunger or persecution.
As Catholics who are called to address urgent problems affecting the disadvantaged, it is important to recognize that pernicious inequality that Christ so clearly condemns in the Gospel. The inequality in climate change, for instance, is evident in the reality of climate refugees and environmental racism.
Respecting God’s creation calls us to respect one another as fellow creations and to care about threats to our survival, like flooding. It is not selfish to care about addressing those inequalities; that fight brings the equality promised by the kingdom of God to as close a level as we can get it in this life.
Fighting climate change—or, as the Gospel highlighted, hunger and persecution—requires not only recognizing the eternal reward for the disadvantaged in Heaven, but also ensuring that whatever time we have left on Earth avoids the sins of ancestors who spoke well of false prophets.
