I was drawn to think of the question “What does a cruciform faith look like in a world nearing crisis?” due to a recent article that succinctly and clearly lays out the existential threats humanity faces. Even if you don’t believe in climate change, there are a whole host of other catastrophic scenarios in which civilisation may be radically disrupted for example the “drift of billions of tonnes of soil from lands that feed us into the blind depths of the ocean”. Although I have written a little about this before, Julian Cribb, a distinguished science writer with more than thirty awards for journalism, enumerates the dangers more eloquently in his article. He says “It is time not only to think the unthinkable, but to speak it: that the world economy, civilisation, and maybe our very survival as a species are on the line.” Prof Jem Bendell makes the case in a research paper that “There will be a near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of (citizens).” Catastrophe is “probable” and extinction “possible”.

It seems rather ironic to me that some of the predictions of imminent end times, where any proposed date has not already passed uneventfully, might be proved correct for entirely different reasons to what their owners had in mind. Perhaps their imagination of a wrathful God burning up the earth is more about God letting us face the consequences of our own failings to steward the earth as He intended. We are tenants on His property and to put it bluntly, we’ve been trashing the place. We’ve misunderstood subduing the earth probably willfully and perhaps our “punishment” will be to have to keep living in the ruins we’ve created — except of course it will be the young and those not yet born who will suffer the worst of it and therein lies a problem.

Sadly, on many issues and the future of the planet in particular, I notice a broad divide between young and old. While self-centredness is not in itself a new phenomenon, I theorise that a diet of hyper-individualism from an early age has resulted in what appears to me to be a decreasing lack of concern for the fate of future generations.

The question I have is if Jesus were to show up demanding that we make major lifestyle changes to limit the damage to the planet and give our descendants a chance, would we listen? Some would, but I think there would be a huge inertia for Him to overcome. After all, if two millennia ago, we couldn’t accept God’s unconditional mercy and forgiveness and selfishness locked a large part of society into scrambling to protect the status quo at any cost — even the murder of Jesus, then with hyper-individualism, how much more difficult might it be now for Christ’s message to resonate?

Regardless of whether or not it’s too late to prevent catastrophe, I think we are compelled as Christians to do what we can and not collapse into despair, burying our heads in the sand. To not do so on the grounds that it probably won’t make any difference would be like revealing Anne Frank’s hiding place to the Nazis on the grounds that she’ll probably be found later anyway. To live cruciformly is to show by our example what it means to be tenants on God’s property, treating it with reverence and care and encouraging others to do likewise. It is not to find reasons to do the bare minimum, but to go the extra mile to be as good a tenant as we can be.