LENT 2020: Day 30

• Lent 2020: Day 30 Tuesday, March 31, 2020:
  Psalm 143; 2 Kings 4:18-37; Ephesians 2:1-10

“Modernity,” writes Catherine Pickstock, “less seeks to banish death, than to prise death and life apart in order to preserve life immune from death in pure sterility.”

And while not the intention, Pickstock argues that this leads to a culture of death.

“Ultimately,” observes Peter Leithart, “as 1-2 Kings shows, the culture of death is a culture of idolatry, the idol that Pascal called the ‘god of the philosophers.’”

This god, this idol, says Leithart, is a “‘watchmaker God’ who set the world in motion, then settled back on his throne — now an easy chair — to see how things would go.

Leithart describes the world of 2 Kings 4 as just such a culture of death: “death permeates the daily lives of the people of Israel.”

The chapter begins with creditors forcing a widow to see her sons for her debt. In our story, the Shunammite’s son “immediately dies from a head wound.” In the first verse following our story famine hits the land, and “Death is in the pot” when they find gourds and make stew.

As Leithart observes, “Israel is plagued with poisonous food, when there is food at all, and economic and social death stalk the land.”

That is a remarkably accurate description of our world.

As we cling to life, and as we call ourselves pro-life, we leave a trail of death all around, if even if we’re wealthy enough to not have to see it.

But we’re seeing it now, all across the globe.

And we’re waking up to the emptiness of the watchmaker god. Fortunately, scripture gives us a different God.