Thought for the Week: Keith Denerley on elective procedures
‘The world is, by and large, a beautiful place.’
An article in the Friend last autumn made me sit up. It was musing on the prophesy of the last days in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus teaches there that the time is shortened ‘because of the elect’. The chosen ones. Does that mean me? You?
Life abounds in paradoxes. On the one hand, the fact that prophets exist suggests that the future is fixed (‘God knows it’); on the other, for practical living we have to believe that we have at least a modicum of free will. Certainly the Sermon on the Mount teaches us to trust and not to be anxious, as if to say ‘There’s plenty of evil to be tackling at this moment – just get on with it!’
I realised that I had imagined myself as one of the elect, standing waiting to be rescued at the Great Deluge. The article jerked me not to just stand there, but to be actively doing something to hasten the ‘coming of the Kingdom’. I had slipped into thinking of God ‘up there’ pulling strings, forgetting the New Testament teaching of God in me, a realisation that really does turn one’s world upside down. How often has one been asked ‘Why does God allow wars, murders, famines and such?’. The only response, really, is that we live in a world in process of creation, in which our human race is co-creator, the locus of the Spirit of God. ‘Why was this man born blind?’ the disciples asked Jesus, to be told ‘That the works of God may be shown in him’.
Watching the marvellous programmes of David Attenborough, I find myself confronted with a mystery. For all its wonder, the world is not ‘All things bright and beautiful’; its underside is ‘red in tooth and claw’. Birds sing to claim territories, stags rut to improve the stock, and plants elbow each other aside for light. Insects, birds, fish and mammals all prey on each other. The authors of Genesis knew this, and saw the world as ‘fallen’, while poetic prophets such as Isaiah dreamt of a time when ‘the wolf shall lie down with the lamb… and the toddler put his hand in the viper’s den’.
Perhaps in a way this happens in a zoo? Does a garden regulate the competition in the plant world? Will we all become vegans in time, and replace meat by plant protein? When in school I heard that ‘the lion shall eat straw like the ox’ I used to add mentally ‘and like it!’ – I won’t buy artificial bacon until it tastes like bacon. But much more importantly, can humans cease to behave like beasts? I have to believe ‘Yes, in time’. The world is, by and large, a beautiful place; good does, by and large, overcome evil; without the love of parent we wouldn’t be here at all. ‘Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love’, taught Siddhārtha Gautama. While the end is delayed for the sake of the elect, let the elect make best use of the opportunity.
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