God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath

by N.T. Wright

In most of the ancient world, and many parts of the modern world too, major disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, fires, plagues) are regularly associated with angry gods. Something bad has happened? Must be because ‘someone’ has it in for you. In the old pagan world of Greece and Rome, the assumption was that you hadn’t offered the right sacrifices; or you hadn’t said the right prayers; or you did something so truly dreadful that even the old amoral gods on Mount Olympus felt it was time to crack down on you.

Most of the modern West is implicitly Epicurean. Stuff happens, but we want to scramble for comfort, so settle down, self-isolate, plenty of Netflix. This too will pass.

Whenever anyone tells you that coronavirus means that God is calling people – perhaps you! – to repent, tell them to read Job. The whole point is that that is not the point.

Jesus, in other words, doesn’t look back to a hypothetical cause which would enable the onlookers to feel smug that they had understood some inner cosmic moral mechanism, some sin that God had had to punish. He looks forward to see what God is going to do about it. That translates directly into what he, Jesus, is going to do about it. For he is the light of the world.

The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the centre of the picture and work outwards from there. The minute we find ourselves looking at the world around us and jumping to conclusions about God and what he might be doing, but without looking carefully at Jesus, we are in serious danger of forcing through an ‘interpretation’ which might look attractive – it might seem quite ‘spiritual’ and awe-inspiring – but which actually screens Jesus out of the picture. As the old saying has it, if he is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all.

Trying to jump from an earthquake, a tsunami, a pandemic or anything else to a conclusion about ‘what God is saying here’ without going through the Gospel story is to make the basic theological mistake of trying to deduce something about God while going behind Jesus’ back.

the announcement of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, come not through wars, earthquakes, famines or plagues. (Or domestic accidents.) They come through Jesus.

So how is Jesus to engage with Martha, Mary and the critical crowd? He doesn’t turn the tables on them and suggest that all this happened because they were sinful and now ought to repent. He just weeps. And then – with the authority born of that mixture of tears and trust – he commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb. If there is a word for our present situation, facing not only a pandemic but all the consequent social and cultural upheaval, I think it might be right here.

They ask three simple questions: Who is going to be at special risk when this happens? What can we do to help? And who shall we send?

There is a pattern here. Those who have long pondered the story of Jesus will recognize it. We expect God to be ‘in charge’: taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of ‘being in charge’ would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples’ feet.

Believers, at this point, may not have words to speak their lament. But they may still have work to do, in healing, teaching, poor relief, campaigning and comforting. These things grow out of lament. As with the church in Antioch, we may not be able to say ‘Why’, but we may glimpse ‘What’: Who is at risk? What can be done? Who shall we send?

I have urged that we should embrace lament as the vital initial Christian response to this pandemic.

Islamism. In the same way, the rationalistic analyses of ‘evil’ offered by some (‘God allowed the Holocaust to create an opportunity for some people to develop the virtues of heroism, self-sacrifice and so on’ – or perhaps ‘God allowed the Holocaust in order that the modern State of Israel would arise’) serve as recruiting agents for new forms of radical atheism. They would offer the dark, disturbing picture of a god who deliberately allowed a dangerous virus to escape from a Chinese laboratory or market in order that, by killing millions of innocent people, God could issue a general call to repentance to those who were left, and create a stage on which some people (the doctors and nurses) could develop and display heroism. If that’s your ‘god’, many of our contemporaries would rightly think, don’t expect

us to want anything to do with him.

This is well set out in Rodney Stark’s famous book The Rise of Christianity (1996, Ch. 4). Stark makes a compelling case that the way the Christians behaved in the great plagues of the early centuries was a significant factor in contributing to the spread of the faith.

Ever since the eighteenth century the ‘secular’ world has done its best to take over, and to claim the credit for, a great deal that the Jesus-followers used to do.

First, church buildings are not an escape from the world, but a bridgehead into the world. A proper theology of ‘sacred space’ ought to see buildings for public worship as advance signs of the time when God’s glory will fill all creation.

Part of the answer to the question, ‘Where is God in the pandemic?’ must be, ‘Out there on the front line, suffering and dying to bring healing and hope.’

The danger with e-worship is that it can turn into P-worship – the Platonic vision of ‘the flight of the alone to the alone’. Since

In the early days of the Church, the Roman emperors and local governors didn’t know much about what Christianity really was. Yet they knew this strange movement had people called ‘bishops’ who were always banging on about the needs of the poor. Wouldn’t it be nice if people today had the same impression?