Image: Noah Buscher BY DR SEBASTIAN SALASKE-LENTERN 38
Every year at <strong>Easter</strong>, I can only marvel at the great gift of Jesus’ resurrection and how our Risen Lord is able to transform our lives in His gentle and loving way. Until a few years ago, I only saw this mystery at work in the lives of us humans. However, I have come to learn that the resurrection transforms not just the fate of humanity, but of God’s entire creation. According to the Gospel of John, God’s eternal Word, God’s Son, becomes incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth to save the entire world (John 3:16-17), including but by no means limited to humankind. This is the same Son through whom all created things come into being (John 1:1-4) in the power of the Holy Spirit. In his books Jesus and the Cosmos (JC) and Ecology at the Heart of Faith (EHF), the late Australian theologian Monsignor Denis Edwards builds on the theology of the great Karl Rahner when he explains that in the incarnation, the “dynamic creative power of divine being is radically united” not only with the specific human being Jesus of Nazareth, but through Him “with all of creation” (JC p. 131). In his death, Jesus hands the entire created world into the mystery God. And finally in the resurrection, “God adopts creaturely reality as God’s own reality”, which Rahner interprets as the embryonic onset of the divinisation of the entire cosmos (EHF p. 87). Jesus becomes “in his very humanity, what he had always been in his [divine] dignity, the innermost centre of creation” (JC p. 131). This means, as Pope Francis explains, that “the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end” (Laudato Si’ no. 100). Such a view of the resurrection, according to which our Risen Lord is present to us in even the tiniest part of the world around us, which He gently transforms from within, can give us motivation and hope for one of the greatest tasks humanity has ever faced: healing the damage we have done to our planet and learning to live in harmony with God’s creation. While this task can seem overwhelming, we can trust that it will lead us into a deeper communion not only with God’s creation but with Jesus Christ himself. And we can trust that our “effort to build a world of justice and ecological integrity” cannot be in vain, as it “will be taken up and transformed in Christ” (EHF p. 91). Find out how you can get involved in the care for God’s creation in your local community or the wider Diocese of Parramatta at parracatholic.org/laudatosi Dr Sebastian Salaske-<strong>Lent</strong>ern is the Peace, Justice and Ecology Coordinator for the Diocese of Parramatta and a member of the Mission Enhancement Team (MET). “At the end, we will find ourselves face to face with the infinite beauty of God (cf. 1 Cor 13:12), and be able to read with admiration and happiness the mystery of the universe, which with us will share in unending plenitude. Even now we are journeying towards the sabbath of eternity, the new Jerusalem, towards our common home in heaven. Jesus says: “I make all things new” (Rev 21:5). Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.” Pope Francis – Laudato Si’ , no. 243. Image: Riccardo De Luca, Shutterstock 39
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