September 14th: Laudato Si

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

John 3 13-17

It is easy to fall into the trap of condemning the world. I think of the truth in the lyrics of King Austin’s calypso, Progress…’Today, when I look around the world, what do I see..’ There is much evil to condemn. To approach the world from the perspective of saving it, is much more demanding. Louis Armstrong’s response to critics of his song ‘What a Wonderful World’ was ‘it’s not the world that is ugly…it’s what we are doing to the world’.

Psalm 8 speaks about the glory of the heavens and the work of God’s hands. In Genesis 1, God created the world and we hear repeatedly, ‘God saw that it was good’. But since the sin of our ancestors Adam and Eve, we have witnessed man and our world in a state of brokenness. This Gospel passage tells us that our mission is to continue Jesus’s work of saving the world.

With respect to the world, we are called to work tirelessly, as Pope Francis exhorts us in his Encyclical Letter ‘Laudato Si’, towards nothing less than a conversion of mind and heart.