John's Gospel and climate debate
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Email07.02.2011
Fr John McKinnon has written in the Winter issue of Compass Theology Review on the contemporary Church problem of sexual abuse as illuminated by the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel can also be applied to the fractious issue of climate change.
John reveals how the Jewish religious establishment closed its mind to the message of Jesus, and in a similar way the modern Catholic Church has displayed an unwillingness or inability to see obvious internal problems concerning sexual abuse.
In a parallel application of John’s Gospel, a truthful debate on climate change seems beyond many Australian leaders in politics, business, unions and the mass media. The end result has been disputes, angry citizens and wasted energies that could have been channelled into changing the way Australians live and do business.
It has been the instinct of the big end of town to defend business as usual and close ranks when it comes to any criticism of a carbon-based economy. An institutional obsession with defending the established order has led to confusion and failure to address the underlying problem about the direction our economy is taking.
A spontaneous hostility towards those who rock the boat is its default position. This scapegoating of those with a divergent vision is akin to the Jewish leaders who declared that it is better that one man die than have the nation destroyed as they pictured it.
The prolonged meditation of John’s Gospel on the significance of Jesus in challenging the established Jewish religious elite has lessons about the institutional motivation and tactics of Australian civic leaders opposing action on climate change. They entrench their power in customary attitudes to development and jobs.
Their shared vision becomes like a mini-culture. It dominates the way they exercise institutional influence which is often markedly different from the way they act as responsible individuals.
McKinnon teases out the Gospel incident of Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath which was seen as breaking the law and disrupting the comfortable religious status quo. The way Jesus redefined God and God action gives clues on how to forge a new national vision of a carbon neutral Australia.
We can judge the present fossil based economy and job market as becoming life denying for the people. The earth’s evolutionary depositing of fossil deposits embodies God given wisdom. Scientists tell us that these deposits are a result of earth cleaning the atmosphere to make a welcoming place for habitation. Human induced increases in greenhouse gases do the opposite.
The Gospel of John has many harsh things to say about religious leaders who have gone astray. Their dismissal of Jesus even grew into murderous intent, blind within a closed ideology. They misconstrued authentic interpretation to only see what they wanted to see.
This reaction is similar to the attitudes of industry barons who want to keep expanding a fossil based economy, fooling themselves with claims of loyalty to an economic ideology of exploitation. They have taken much of the political, union and media leadership along for the ride. As John’s Gospel shows, incongruous alliances arise like that of the priests and Pharisees.
John’s indictments continue and have parallels in the carbon debate. The religious leaders resorted to ridicule of Jesus as being possessed by a devil and out of his mind. When the blind man who had been cured mocked the leaders for their abstruseness they dismissed him as incapable of teaching them and threw him out of the synagogue. Fear of exclusion was even used to brow beat his parents into silence.
Jesus challenged the leaders to see the truth promising that the truth will set them free. They had become slaves to a system of group think. But they resisted a transformation that was based on truth, justice and compassion being satisfied within themselves.
In an ultimate indictment, Jesus declared that they had chosen the devil as their father, and he was the father of all lies. In the climate change debate, many society leaders seem hostile to truth and have chosen the path of lies.
The crowd has a major role in John’s story of Jesus versus the religious leaders. The crowd observed the events and heard the arguments but Jesus challenged them not to be mere spectators. He felt compassion for them, shepherdless, but they had to make a choice between an old or a new way of life.
The crowd could be free indeed if it the accepted the truth without fear. When it comes to the carbon debate, it is the crowd who will ultimately win the day as they demand truth from political, business, union and media leaders. They want true light shed on the way to create a carbon neutral way of living for Australia.
Fr Charles Rue SSC is the Coordinator of Columban Justice Peace Integrity and Creation (JPIC).
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Reply #1 on : Mon January 16, 2012, 10:38:38
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