Today’s readings: 2 Chronicles 36, 14-16.19-23; Ephesians 2, 4-10; John 3, 14-21.
There is a purpose in all that exists, a purpose inherent even to our life and our existence. This is not blind fate or chance or a form of determinism. It is God’s love that gives us all the space to be who we are and to become who we are meant to be. In the second reading from Ephesians, St Paul writes: “We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant us to live it”.
We are free to refute this love, or even to take it for granted and remain untouched by it. The story of humanity is deeply marked by traditions of religious wisdom as well as by systematic atheist propositions. It is a story that not always mirrors God’s sustaining love, and often it is difficult to reconcile what we say of God and the shape the world takes.
Yet we all probably acknowledge the iconic significance last week of Pope Francis in Iraq speaking of God’s love in the midst of the ruins left by ISIS. It was like Roberto Benigni saying “Life is Beautiful” while narrating Auschwitz.
In the history of humanity there were dark patches when it was hard to reconcile a loving God with the world. Yet we can find a myriad of luminaries who made a big difference in these darkest of moments. Evil and adversity always pose huge challenges to faith. But true faith is when beautiful things blossom out of ruins. Otherwise, we tend to remain confused and keep asking with the Jewish author Harold Kushner “why bad things happen to good people”.
God is always destabilising and cannot be put in our straightjacket thinking that bad things should happen only to bad people while the good ones enjoy His protection. On this fourth Sunday of Lent, the first reading from Chronicles tells the story of how God’s people, losing focus and despising God’s wisdom and His prophets, ended up being conquered and taken in the Babylonian exile.
The Babylonian exile is not to be interpreted simplistically as God’s punishment. Reasonably it is more likely to be seen as the consequence of wrong choices. As the story goes, when no remedies were left, God “roused the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia” to lead the people back to where they belonged.
Cyrus was a pagan king but proved instrumental to open the way out of the exile situation, giving the people the possibility of experiencing again God’s love in adversity. In today’s readings he contrasts heavily with Nicodemus in John’s gospel, a staunch religious figure conversing with Jesus who, in spite of his religious background, remained imprisoned in his old ways, failing to grasp that God sent His son to save the world rather than to condemn it.
In both cases of Cyrus and Nicodemus, the context was one of historical significance, demanding boldness and wisdom of discernment. Just like our contemporary situation, when in the midst of what is so confusing and destabilising, we are called to discern where we are exactly heading and what remedies God may be providing all along. As Pope Francis often asserts, our task is not always to conjure up solutions but to initiate processes. That is what Cyrus did and that is what Jesus was proposing to Nicodemus.
Although undoubtedly our age is a post-Christian one and our culture has become secularised, I would be extra cautious to conclude that all of a sudden we’ve all become wildly unbelievers and godless. Yes, much has changed, and we believe more in ourselves, in progress and technology, and less in the need to relate to the creator. It would be more opportune to avoid stereotype judgements on our age and instead seek to recover the sense of a good life and realise in depth how the choices we make impact not only on the quality of life but even on the world at large.