The beginning of the end of the polycrisis

We will have been thinking about the coming of the true King. Through the Advent season, we’re sure to have looked back with joy to the announcement of His birth. We’ve likely looked, also, to the future with longing for the day of the return of the King, when all things will be put right. And perhaps we’ve had the space, held between joy and longing, to lament the darkness.

Advent and Christmas are annual reminders that we are uniquely placed as Christians to see both the beauty of creation and its brokenness. Celebrating the One who came to redeem and who will come again to restore all creation, we share both the Creator’s joy and His lament, in the sure expectation of a world-made-right.

This past year we may have felt heartened by signature of the Global Oceans Treaty – to protect 30% of the world’s oceans – and levelling off (tentatively and belatedly) and maybe falling emissions in China, and the slowing of deforestation in the Amazon. But also rightly lamented the coming and going of yet another inconclusive climate COP, failed Plastics Treaty negotiations, another widespread “bleaching” of coral reefs, and the intensity of the storms in the Philippines and Jamaica. Despite some positives, the symptoms of what climate scientist Mike Berners-Lee calls the “polycrisis” – climate change, plastic pollution, so-called “forever-chemicals”, loss of wildlife – persist and deepen.

Yet – in their midst – we have been celebrating, in the birth of the King, God’s great intervention for the rescue of all creation. Matthew’s Gospel begins the New Testament with the words “This is the origin [a word from the same root as ‘genesis’] of Jesus the Messiah”, Mark’s with “This is the beginning of the Gospel” and John’s with “In the beginning”. The Gospel writers hail a new beginning, one whose central victory we celebrate at Easter, and which reaches its end (and the dawning of a new beginning!) with the longed-for return of the King.

As New York Episcopalian Tish Harrison Warren puts it: “We celebrate [at Christmas] that Jesus came in His incarnation … but all our longings meet their end in Christ coming again, bringing healing, peace, joy, and unimaginable wholeness in His wake. The final return of Christ is the undoing of cancer. It is the utter dismantling of … racism. It is the delivery of justice for the victimised, for the weakest and most vulnerable whom the powerful have brutalised with seeming impunity. It is the regeneration of dead coral reefs. It is the end of global pandemics. It is the vindication of the falsely imprisoned. It is the weeping of children giving way to their eternal laughter. It is the death of death.”

In this time of polycrisis, it is more important than ever that we celebrate the true story of the creator-redeemer. Though our society may not know it, this true story is what we all desperately need. We need it, though not because it is a story of escape from this world. But because it is a story of, in the renewing power of the Holy Spirit, beginning to live rightly in the world, participating even in its restoration. It’s a story of living in such a way as to be at home in the final world-made-right. We need this story because it’s the story of the beginning of the end of the polycrisis.

So then, amid the carols, mince pies and (let’s face it) probably a too-heavy dose of sentimentality, let’s again celebrate with joy the coming of the light in the darkness, the beginning of the new beginning. As holders of the true story of the world, we look again to the end of the beginning, the day on which all that has been lost will be restored. And perhaps, too, as the New Year dawns, ask afresh how we may live our lives so as to be aligned with the work of the King, the redeemer of all creation.