Awake In Christ, Not Woke Without Him

Saturday of 15th Week in Ordinary Time

We have a bad habit, at least sometimes, of looking at the Scriptures and thinking, “gee, things were sure awful back in OT times. Haven’t we made a lot of progress?” Well, the answer is that apart from following Jesus Christ and His Law, we have not made a lot of progress. We are still the same kind of people burdened with original sin and focus on doing things that please ourselves.

The prophet Micah tells the people of his day, “Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil upon their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance.” That looks like the first paragraph of an editorial in a current newspaper from the Netherlands.

There are more than one way to lose your land, and those poor farmers, at least 30% of the country’s farmers, are learning the lesson. Apparently the World Economic Forum, a far-left One-World-Government organization, has convinced the Dutch government to go all woke, and become the paradigm for environmental activism. So they are telling the farmers that they can’t use artificial chemical fertilizers any more, because they want to reduce nitrates in the soil. Now please understand, I’m an organic gardener. I use natural fertilizers, compost, organic mulch, and natural pest and weed control. But I’m gardening in way less than an acre of land. There’s something totally bogus about thinking we can do that with commercial agriculture. I’m told that these people want to reduce the human population by at least a third. By making people starve to death? By forcing farmers to sell their land to developers?

A lot of this woke stuff is happening, and we certainly can feel sympathy with the psalmist who asks God why He stands far off, and seems to be hiding. There are just a lot of wicked people who are not only tolerating evil like abortion and promiscuity and political corruption, but are promoting one or more of the great civilization-destroying evils. Yes, we have to pray, because only God’s grade through Christ can turn hearts to the good, beautiful and true. But we also must band together, identify problems, and work with each other to make political and economic systems more just, especially to the poor and marginalized.

That’s the way of Jesus Christ, who came to change minds and hearts, not political systems. If you make a law, you’ve perhaps made things worse unless you have changed people to keep the law. No, Jesus does not force people to change. He changes their minds and hearts from the inside, and then they will change their behavior. That is why in the name of Jesus, both Jew and Gentile can find hope.