Evil, the Bible, & Black Earth Rising

In Black Earth Rising lawyer Michael Ennis (John Goodman),
works with Kate Ashby (Michaela Coel)
to investigate the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide

 Then [Jesus] told them a parable:
“The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 
 And he thought to himself,
 ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 
 Then he said, ‘I will do this:
I will pull down my barns and build larger ones,
and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹
And I will say to my soul,
Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years;
relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 
 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.
And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 
 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves
but are not rich toward God.”

 Luke 12:16-21 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

In April the African nation of Rwanda will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of a genocide that defies understanding.  After decades of peaceful coexistence the ethnic group known as the Hutus began slaughtering the minority Tutsis, who were their neighbours, their co-workers, even their husbands and wives. The carnage unfolded in a variety of ways but the principle weapon of choice was primitive – the machete.

It is still incomprehensible that the other nations of the world stood by and did nothing to stop the killing which resulted in anywhere between 800,000 and a million deaths.
 Hundreds of thousands more were tortured and raped. There are an estimated twenty-five to thirty thousand children in Rwanda today who were conceived and born as a result of those rapes.

The grim details of this atrocity came back to me as we watched the dramatic Netflix series called Black Earth Rising. I remember as well that at the time I was the minister of a congregation in Sudbury and I preached about the inaction of world leaders. Later Bill Clinton admitted that 300,000 lives might have been saved if the United States had intervened. Canadians were there as a peacekeeping force but could do little to stop the carnage. General Romeo Dallaire eventually wrote a book called Shake Hands with the Devil:The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda in which he addressed both human failure and the existence of evil. There is a Canadian Dallaire surrogate in the series.

Black Earth Rising is compelling but it takes work to follow because of the many twists and turns in the plot. I was struck by a scene with a gruesome outcome in which a preacher uses a parable of Jesus often called the Parable of the Rich Fool as his text. One of the subplots of the series is the desire for wealth at any cost, the cancer of greed.

Once again I was reminded of how religious themes often find their way into films and television series, as well as novels. Sometimes it is difficult to comprehend the extent of evil and how it takes hold in individuals and societies. It is important to look back at times to ponder its destructive existence. So often we do not comprehend the extent and religions, with all their flaws, give us a context to grapple with the inexplicable.

Have you watched the series? Do you remember the unfolding of the genocide?

Our grandchildren are reminding us about the importance of living with respect in Creation. Today's Groundling blog.
https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2019/02/living-with-respect-in-creation.html