‘Johnny goes to Hollywood’ (Micah 1; Mark 2:23-28)

The prophets’ task is to call the people to repentance. This is the pendulum of sacred history. There is a compulsive force in us which wants to turn away and forget its dependence on our origins.

We can put it in a different way. The sign of this oblivion is too much ‘we-talk’ in history. ‘The world is ours.’ ‘It is my world.’ ‘It is our property.’ ‘It is my right, it is our right’, it is ‘our democracy’, etc. And we act and consume according to this principle of autonomy. The problem is that autonomy which ignores the fact that life is framed by laws outside the ‘we’-s and the ‘I’-s, ends up in a painful confusion.

In the light of the crisis of our planet, one can but agree that the vast extension of the ‘ego’ into nature and the cosmos needs to be stopped. Our endless ‘we’-talks and selfish actions must be corrected, otherwise the pendulum of history will swing to the opposite extreme, as prophet Micah warns. ‘Therefore, I will make Samaria as an heap of the field, and as plantings of a vineyard: and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley, and I will discover the foundations thereof. And all the graven images thereof shall eb beaten to pieces, and all the hires thereof shall be burned with the fire, and all the idols thereof will I lay desolate.’ (Micah 1:6-7)

But can the age of our expanding ‘narcissistic ego’ be stopped? Can we correct our sickly autonomous mindset and arrive to saying: this is God’s world, too? At least, that God is also a habitant in this city and culture of ours, with His own rights in it? Still, we have our churches, as God’s embassies, from which our awakening might come: ‘Hear, all ye people; hearken, O earth, and all that therein is: and let the Lord God be witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple’ (Micah 1:2-3)

Perhaps, imperative to listen to God’s rights is a further meaning of the sabbath-law of which Jesus speaks. The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. The correction of our ‘we-talks and actions’ comes from befriending the ego with the Authority lying behind it: ‘the Son of Man is master even of the sabbath.’ (Mk 2:28) It’s time for untamed ego-s to return from Hollywood.
 
21.01.2020