A WORLD THAT NEEDS OVERCOME
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
It’s astounding how settled we are in this world. To be clear, my astonishment is not expressed to generate some form of bent asceticism: a holiness that defines and locates itself within abstinence and moralism. Rather, I am addressing the acceptance of the world’s oppressive and dominating orientation. Those who claim a Gospel so often settle for that which is void of any good news. Whether it be the blind acceptance of neoliberal capitalism that exploits the poor or an imperialist justification of endless war and weapons profiteering, we are far too comfortable accommodating ourselves to empire.
We have mined, resourced, and combusted the earth into a state of catastrophic imbalance, leading to disastrous flooding and weather phenomena. We have anchored the modern imaginary to the failed assumption that the good life can be purchased and financed. “I shop therefore I am,” as one writer put it. We have placed consumption over consummation, further removing us from any true sense of fulfillment and deep joy. The rat race imprisons many. Broken modalities of relationships divide and ruin social bonds. The empty promises of technocracy are revealed for the lies that they are: silicon dreams become nightmares of privacy violation and dehumanizing commodification of personhood. All of this is making our souls sick. But we keep up the march, we put on the smile, and we act like the perilous deathfalls of hubris can be avoided. History knows better, and ultimately, so do we.
The world we inherit (and are so happy to cosign for) is not Gospel. It is a political and socioeconomic construct for wealth and power to seek out its own interests. There is nothing new about this. The world is human society organizing itself without co-suffering, self-giving, radically unconditional love. This leads to the reign of fear and its death, decay, and destruction. Its effects can be felt and seen by those reeling in the wake of its exploitative and subjugative nature. Yet those who are supposed to be salt and light, those who ought to be preserving, revealing, and agitating agents toward the good (justice, peace, and joy) have settled for mere security. Our lives have been reduced to “making a living: exerting effort whose sole end is to secure no more than what one already has, (because) failure to exert such effort results in losing it.” (Simone Weil, The Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour).
So we accommodate systems of domination; we cosign the status quo because, in the words of Bradley Jersak, “folks are so world-weary.” Exhausted, we relinquish and resign ourselves over to that which is established, for the sake of invulnerability. Any obligation, or compassionate impulse, that carries risk and responsibility for a new world, a new way, are too easily set aside. Almost everything is differed to offset discomfort. We then have experts and bureaucrats, voices in the public sphere, to to aid our reasoning: Levites and priests, pundits and politicians, to chaplain us past our neighbor on the Jericho road.
What we need is “the thrill of hope,” as we sing each Christmas, so that the weary world may indeed rejoice. But this hope, this audacious, unrelenting desire, will require an indomitable spirit. Or else, we will settle with (and for) every broken model and mode of human existence. Tenacity is true holiness, but in order to obtain this sanctification, we must humbly confess that we are complicit. If anything impedes another world breaking forth into this world, it is, as Catherine Orr writes, that we “are terribly invested in our own innocence.” Once we loosen our grip on false binaries and dualities, relinquishing our need for an “other” or an enemy to fault for the condition of our shared world, then we’ll be freed to do the hard (but good) work of an examined life. This will become ground zero for a holy dis-contentedness.
Then, and only then, will we become “agents of a dimension that is incompatible with the status quo” (Jacques Ellul). A holy discontent, freed of any dualism, scapegoating, and shallow binaries that conveniently pin the blame on another, will lead us to imagine another world.
Until then, I fear that when a world-weary settler hears the words of Jesus, “I have overcome the world,” they might wonder why that’s even necessary. Woe to us when, lulled by false visions of flourishing, we see no need for the world to be overcome.