Ken Sehested
The original blessing of God’s delight in Creation echoes through this blessing given by Isaac to his son: “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine” (Genesis 27:28). Such luscious, material bounty is bound up with and parallels the maintenance of covenant faithfulness with the Heaven’s insistence.
But a fraud is perpetuated by Jacob (suggested by his mother and Isaac’s wife, Rebekah), who disguised himself as his brother Esau, Isaac’s first-born.
The subsequent history of human racketeering is recorded in this complaint of the Psalmist:
“[P]ride is the necklace [of the wicked]; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out with fatness, their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth” (73:6-9). That text rang in my ears like a shrill siren last night while listening to our president’s address to the nation.
The function of Lent’s penitential posture is to halt the momentum of this mugging and restore the bountiful, flourishing intention of Creation’s promise. It is not, as theological sadists would have us believe, a season for self-flogging and disgust over our frailties. But it does entail disquiet as we recognize and confess the ways our hearts have been kidnapped by frivolous pursuits and perilous habits.
Such work involves, as Jesus noted, a kind of dying. But its purpose is not punishment or retribution, but an invitation to a new life of flourishing instead of rivalry, of freedom shorn of the impulse to dominate, socially expressive of the kind of compassion, justice, and mercy which we ourselves have encountered in a compassionate, just, and merciful God.
The peace of Christ entails the unraveling of the “peace” of bloody-handed potentates who enforce an order requiring the cheap labor of the many for the wealth of the few. The “peace” of capitulation to tyrannical rule. The silencing of voices protesting their own subjugation. The reign of despots, of course, requires the collaboration of a cast, drawn from the sanctioned, willing to do the dirty work in exchange for leftover luxury.
Greed-driven shysters, “from priests to prophets” (cf. Jeremiah 6), commit abomination—and do “not know how to blush.” Having subdued the abused by a reign of terror, these swindlers, claiming the authority of Heaven’s own jurisdiction, proclaim “peace, peace,” but there is no peace because the wounds of the people have been left untreated, covered over with pious prater, left to fester and putrefy at the very moment when the elite gorge on ill-gotten gain.
How then are we to be amended? Such is the focus of our Lenten journey, and Bro. Cohen provides some hints:
“O, gather up the brokenness / Bring it to me now / The fragrance of those promises / You never dared to vow / The splinters that you carried / The cross you left behind / Come healing of the body / Come healing of the mind / And let the heavens hear it / The penitential hymn / Come healing of the spirit / Come healing of the limb / O troubled dust concealing / An undivided love / The Heart beneath is teaching / To the broken Heart above / And let the heavens falter / Let the earth proclaim / Come healing of the altar / Come healing of the name.” —“Come Healing,” Leonard Cohen
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