As a child it was always an awesome experience to watch my dad skillfully fixing things around the house – leaking taps and drains, creaky chairs and furniture, damaged toys, broken window panes – all victims to use and abuse in a family with 10 kids. We still lived in a time where nothing was thrown away or discarded. We were too poor. There was one rule of the game: waste not, and if it’s broken, fix it! Our throw-away society was not yet born.

So it marvels me the fix-it mentality has also become a mantra in our wasteful, affluent and pampered society. We don’t just fix things to make them last longer. We want to fix life itself to make it fit our choices and specifications. Money, science, technology, intelligence (both natural and artificial) have given us a sense of ownership and mastery over life.

But we have outgrown the phase of fixing life. We are now in a new phase. We want to define and modify life to fit the specifications we choose. We no longer adapt ourselves to reality but we want to adapt reality to fit our choices. We are no longer defined by what we receive but by what we achieve.

We can control and even determine climate change. We literally flatten mountains and create valleys. We engineer cabbages and carrots, grow cube-shaped melons, breed factory-friendly chicken, sheep and cattle. We can create and programme fish, fowl, mind and soul. We can create, clone, multiply or modify life at will. Even more, we can create autonomous, self-regulating or self-perpetuating intelligence, rendering ourselves totally redundant and irrelevant.

Our hope lies in a Saviour who has not come to fix the world, but to save it by embracing and taking upon himself its brokenness

Soon the world, nature, and society will become a perfect ‘clockwork orange’. Existence will finally be perfectly in sync and highly efficient. It will be a self-sustaining, harmonious nirvana of peace and harmony in a universe where humans would become simply irrelevant and non-existent. We will have turned ourselves into a super intelligent, self-regulating and self-maintaining mechanism, needing neither God nor others.

The greatest victory will have been achieved. We will have fixed all the ills, pains, suffering, wars and conflicts, tragedies and failures that make our lives so human and miserable in one stroke. The only hitch in this scenario – the fly in the ointment – would be that humanity would have simply disappeared in the process. And with it all meaning and meaningfulness of life.

Life will become all form and no substance, all function and no purpose, all prose and no poetry, all achievement and no fulfillment, all surface and no depth, all calm but no harmony, all sound but no music, all movement but no direction. We will have indeed fixed life for good, killing it in the process.

Is so-called progress becoming a self-destructive migration from soul to body, from loving belonging to fake self-sufficiency, from mutual solidarity to lonely autonomy, from relationships to mutual exploitation, from humanity to clockwork existence? Are we journeying away from being fragile yet warm and loving creatures, children of a loving Creator and heading towards becoming a cold, dead abyss of eternal clockwork mechanisms, artificially ticking away towards the horror of lonely meaninglessness?

No, life is not a problem to be fixed, but a messy, warm and loving togetherness to be lived. This is the best piece of good news that Jesus came to give us: it’s OK to live a life that is not artificially fixed. Our hope lies in a Saviour who has not come to fix the world, but to save it by embracing and taking upon himself its brokenness.

That’s what saves us!

 

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