Lent 2A 2026: At the speed of fear

This week, cities were bombed. Retaliations followed. Leaders issued ultimatums. The language was hard: “pre-emptive.” “Overwhelming response.” “Lay down your weapons or die.”

War moves quickly. Bombs fall en masse. Missiles fly at the speed of fear — and fear spreads just as fast.

In the body, fear bypasses reflection. The heart rate rises. Adrenaline floods the system. Muscles tense. The brain narrows its field of vision. We move into fight or flight.

Something similar happens when fear strikes societies. Public rhetoric tightens. Nuance disappears. Complex histories are flattened into headlines. News cycles amplify threat. Social media rewards outrage. Whole peoples become categories.

Fear narrows. And when fear narrows our vision, the kind of blessing imagined for Abram’s lineage becomes impossible.

In Genesis Abram is called to leave his country, his kindred, his father’s house. Leave the familiar loyalties. Leave the inherited map. Leave the security of tribe. Why? “So that you will be a blessing… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

From the beginning, God’s covenant was not about tribal survival. It was about a global vocation. Israel was not chosen to dominate the nations. Israel was chosen to bless them.

That difference is enormous — domination diminishes the other. But blessing raises the other up.

Something similar is asked of Nicodemus. A religious leader, secure in tradition and status, he comes to Jesus at night — perhaps cautious, perhaps conflicted, certainly unsettled. And Jesus tells him: “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Born from above. Not born merely from familial bloodline or national citizenry. Not born from old grievances. Not born from political reflex. But from above. From a larger vision. From what astronauts call the overview effect. Born from a sense of seeing us, seeing them, seeing everything as an inseparable whole. Born into a wider identity that comes from heaven.

Jesus is not offering minor reform. He is inviting a new imagination — a new way of seeing ourselves with each other — a new way of being human.

Because we have to be honest — the old imagination doesn’t work. The old way keeps us reaching for the same old tools.

History shows us what happens when nations double down on borders and them impose force as the context for peace. Yes, some tyrannies have fallen — and their fall was longed for by suffering people. In this we must not dismiss the deep anguish of the Iranian people under repression, nor the legitimate longing for relief and change. But more often, in the vacuums of power left after international hostilities cease, what breeds is not peace but more chaos and civilian populations that have borne the cost of bombs falling from afar often suffer again under civil instability.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries hold too many examples: wars launched in the language of righteousness, regime changes framed as liberation, interventions justified as necessary for stability. From this history whispers another uncomfortable truth: beneath the language of honour and security there are often more ordinary forces at work — the thirst to control land, resources, energy - the material engines that power modern economies.

And into that reality Jesus speaks: “For God so loved the world…”

The world. In John’s Gospel, “world” does not mean the religious or the righteous. It means our whole conflicted, fractured human species. God’s love does not narrow in the face of hostility. It widens. It embraces Iranians and Israelis, Palestinians and Americans alike.

This is not a sentimental love that wishes everyone would just get along. In John’s Gospel, love enters the world’s violence and refuses to be shaped by it. It absorbs hostility without surrendering to hatred. It extends a hand to the person in front of us working patiently for a space in which truths can be told and heard in safety.

That’s ambitious. But if we are born from above, our perspective cannot be smaller than God’s.

Here in Australia, we are not huddled in bomb shelters. We are not threatened by our own government or fearful of terrorist factions. But we are not neutral either. We are participants in a global order. We are consumers of its narratives. And we shape expectations. The conversations we begin, the possibilities we imagine — these become the norms for our society.

So the question cannot be “Which side are we on?” but, “How do we respond to such violence?”

Abram had to leave the old map to become blessing. Nicodemus had to leave old certainties to glimpse the Kingdom. Perhaps we are invited to leave something too — maybe the reflex to mirror national contempts, or the temptation to collapse complex peoples into enemies, or the comfort of forming simple moral binaries.

Missiles travel fast. But the Kingdom of God is not meant to be built at missile speed.

It is meant to be built on mercy.
Sustained by courage.
Extended through compassion.
And growing whenever we seek out human stories over political propaganda.

Missiles may travel faster than reconciliation.
But our reconciliation to each other is the only thing that will last.

And those who are born from above are called to become a blessing —
not just to our own people, but to all the families of the earth.