Nature reflects the nondiscriminatory nature of God. Scripture speaks of this, as when Christ reminds us: "He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Mt 5:45). Gregory Nazienzen places this observation in a positive light, as evidence of "the abundance of God's generosity" and His care for all creatures. Certainly this is true: nature reflects God's goodness and His concern for creation.
But the natural world that gives us life also brings us death. See New Orleans after Katrina, or the Philippines after Haiyan. In our twenty-first century world we've countered nature's lack of discrimination with the discrimination of man: the wealthy, who can build stronger houses or even have the resources to flee from nature's fury, do not suffer as much from the destructiveness of nature as the poor.
In wealthy countries we are also increasingly distanced from nature as God created it. We live in temperature-controlled environments. We buy our food at grocery stores and expect that grapes should be available year-round. Only occasionally do the whims of nature affect us, as perhaps a moderate increase in the price of milk, or as a water-use restriction due to drought.
What have we lost in the process? Certainly a sense of nature as gift. Certainly a sense of nature as full of surprises. But we have also lost a sense of nature as a sign of God's justice, given abundantly to all regardless of rank or wealth or even moral worth. Sheltering ourselves from the vicissitudes of the natural world also shelters us from the injustice in our human world, because we can no longer empathize with those who still must struggle and strive and contend with nature simply to survive.
Christ, Gregory of Nazienzen, and the prophet Isaiah all remind us to reflect on God's justice as evidenced in nature, and to imitate it. When we have been given good things by nature - sunshine, bountiful harvests, beauty - we are asked to share them, because they are "common to all" as Gregory says. When we have been dealt a blow by nature, we are asked to share in the sorrows of those who suffer, as Christ did - the Savior who descended and "made his grave with the wicked."
Nature reminds us that there is no such thing as the "undeserving poor" - or rather, that all of us are "undeserving poor." God's justice gives to good and evil, rich and poor alike - who are we to second-guess the judgment of God? Especially a God whose justice included giving His own Son to be numbered among the transgressors and killed with the wicked! Nature teaches us that it is not up to us to discriminate based on the moral worth of the recipient of our generosity. It was precisely such attempts at discrimination that led to Christ's own condemnation according to the flawed logic of human judgment.
Nature does not make such discriminations. Many evil people benefit from the bounty of nature; many good people suffer from nature's destructiveness. In a certain way, nature reminds us of the truth that, no matter how good we are on a human scale, compared to God we are still forever unworthy until He makes us so. If God followed the laws of human justice, we would all already have been destroyed several times over for our greed, our pride, our selfishness. If nature wounds us to remind us of this, who are we to complain?
Nature reflects God's desire that we share together our blessings and our sorrows. We are not to withhold our blessings because we deem someone morally unworthy, nor are we to refuse to share another's sorrow because we think he is too sinful to deserve our sympathy. Christ came and showered blessings on us precisely because we were not worthy. He gave us these blessings even though our unworthiness prevented us from recognizing them as blessings!
Nature, like Christ, asks us to take on each other's sorrows and joys. Nature forces us to recognize our interconnectedness with each other and with creation. Nature challenges us to a new understanding of justice: one that recognizes all of humanity's dependence on God, because we are all equal as unworthy recipients of God's grace.
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