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

by N.T. Wright

I was reminded of the ironic quote from Pastor Martin Niemöller. There are several versions of what he may have said, but the point is the same. Speaking about 1930s Germany, he said: First they came for the Jews; but I did nothing because I am not a Jew. Then they came for the socialists, but I did nothing because I am not a socialist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I did nothing because I am not a Catholic. Finally, they came for me, but by then there was no-one left to help me.

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.

Some – including some Christians – opt for Plato. Death isn’t the worst that can happen. We’re heading somewhere else anyway. All right, let’s be sensible, but please don’t shut down the churches. Or the golf clubs. Meanwhile, in the refugee camps, in the multi-storey tower-blocks, in the slums and the souks, the suffering gets worse. And the sorrow rises from the whole world like a pall of smoke, shaping the question we hardly dare ask: Why?

As the historian Tom Holland has argued in his recent book Dominion, much of what we take for granted in social attitudes now was Christian innovation.

The COVID-19 crisis has, in fact, done to the whole world what Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 for New Orleans: in its devastating impact, it shows that the political and social timbers have already been rotting away.

We sometimes have the impression that the coronavirus is providing people with a megaphone with which to say, more loudly, what they were wanting to say anyway.

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.

I think part of the point of Job is precisely its unresolved character.

Alongside this Israel-and-God story there runs the deeper story of the good creation and the dark power that from the start has tried to destroy God’s good handiwork. I do not claim to understand that dark power. As I shall suggest later, I don’t think we’re meant to. We are simply to know that when we are caught up in awful circumstances, apparent gross injustices, terrible plagues – or when we are accused of wicked things of which we are innocent, suffering strange sicknesses with no apparent reason, let alone cure – at those points we are to lament, we are to complain, we are to state the case, and leave it with God. God himself declares at the end that Job has told the truth (42.8). He has clung on to the fact that God is just, even though his own misery seems to deny it.

Jesus’ ‘signs’ (John gives us a neat catalogue of them) were all about new creation: water into wine, healings, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, life for the dead. The other Gospels chip in with several more, including parties with all the wrong kind of people, indicating a future full of forgiveness. All these were forward-looking signs, declaring the new thing that God was doing. Was doing now.

Jesus’ answer puts paid to any easy-going vending-machine theology (one sin in, one punishment out). ‘He didn’t sin,’ replied Jesus, ‘nor did his parents. It happened so that God’s works could be seen in him.’ (John 9.1–3) 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.

Conspiracy theories were thriving in the first century, just as they are today. Jesus pushes them aside. Stay calm, he says, and trust in me.

In other words, if Jesus’ followers are waiting for special events to nudge them into looking for Jesus’ kingdom on earth as in heaven, or to tell them to repent when they were drifting into careless sin, then they’ve gone to sleep on the job.

In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is simply learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer.

The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the centre of the picture and work outwards from there.

Unless we are prepared to see these events – the Jesus-events, the messianic moment – as the ultimate call to penitence, because they are the ultimate announcement of the arrival of God’s kingdom, we will be bound to over-interpret other events to compensate.

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 point is this. If you want to know what it means to talk about God being ‘in charge of’ the world, or being ‘in control’, or being ‘sovereign’, then Jesus himself instructs you to rethink the notion of ‘kingdom’, ‘control’ and ‘sovereignty’ themselves, around his death on the cross.

Lazarus comes out of the tomb still wrapped up in the grave-clothes. Jesus, in John 20, has left his behind.)

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?

God’s kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be.

He was a walking parable of the Gospel of the crucified Messiah.

when the world is going through great convulsions, the followers of Jesus are called to be people of prayer at the place where the world is in pain.

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.

We strain to glimpse your mercy-seat And find you kneeling at our feet.

So what are we saying? Not only do we, the followers of Jesus, not have any words to say, any great pronouncements on ‘what this all means’ to trumpet out to the world (the world, of course, isn’t waiting eagerly to hear us anyway); but we, the followers of Jesus, find ourselves caught up in the groaning of creation, and we discover that at the same time God the Spirit is groaning within

That seems to be the point here. God works all things towards ultimate good with and through those who love him.

So the encouragement and comfort here in Romans 8.28 doesn’t amount to a kind of Stoic resignation. It is a call to recognise the truth of what Paul says elsewhere: that we are called to hard work, knowing that God is at work in us. That work, it seems, takes place not least through suffering with the Messiah in order to share his ‘image-bearing’ human ‘glory’ (8.17, 29).

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?

Paul is not, then, proposing a Christian version of Stoicism. He is offering a Jesus-shaped picture of a suffering, redeeming providence, in which God’s people are themselves not simply spectators, not simply beneficiaries, but active participants. They are ‘called according to his purpose’, since God is even now using their groaning, at the heart of the world’s pain, as the vehicle for the Spirit’s own work, holding that sorrow before the Father, creating a context for the multiple works of healing and hope. Such God-lovers are therefore shaped according to the pattern of the Son: the cruciform pattern in which God’s justice and mercy, his faithfulness to the covenant and to creation, are displayed before the world in tears and toil, lament and labour.

Grief, after all, is part of love. Not to grieve, not to lament, is to slam the door on the same place in the innermost heart from which love itself comes.

It can be hard, bitter anguish to live with the summons to lament. To share in the groaning of the Spirit. But that is where we are conformed to the image of the Son.

Many things, after all, actually bring grief to God. They shock him. Providence is Jesus-shaped: it isn’t an iron grip, relentlessly ‘controlling’ everything. In Genesis 6.6 God sees the wickedness of humans, and he doesn’t say, ‘Well, I have allowed that in order to do something with it’; it grieved him to his heart.

Jesus can see the flood of death and despair coming upon him. Unlike Noah, he will have no Ark. Nevertheless, he will take with him God’s whole creation, through the flood of death and out into the new creation that dawns on Easter morning.

Evil is an intruder into God’s creation. Any attempt to analyse either what it is, why it’s allowed or what God does with it – apart from the clear, strong statement that God overcomes it through Jesus’ death for sinners – is not only trying to put the wind into a bottle; it is supposing that we can imagine an orderly universe in which ‘evil’ has an appropriate, allowable place.

The Church’s mission began (according to John 20) with three things which have become very familiar to us in recent days. It began with tears; with locked doors; and with doubt.

If the earliest disciples found Jesus coming to meet them in their tears, fears and doubt, perhaps we can too.

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.

The generous one-dimensional desire to be a hero, to ‘do the right thing’, needs to be rounded out with the equally generous willingness to restrain apparent heroism when it might itself bring disaster.

The call to Jesus’ followers, then, as they confront their own doubts and those of the world through tears and from behind locked doors, is to be sign-producers for God’s kingdom. We are to set up signposts – actions, symbols, not just words – which speak, like Jesus’ signs, of new creation: of healing for the sick, of food for the hungry, and so on.

Jesus does not need church buildings for his work to go forward. 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 there are cultural pressures in that direction already, it’s important that we should recognise the danger.

When Paul tells the Philippians to ‘Rejoice in the Lord always’, the word ‘rejoice’ doesn’t just mean ‘feel very happy deep inside’. It means, Get out on the street (with proper safe distancing of course) and celebrate! Lots of other people are doing it, after all – in Paul’s day, there were processions and street parties and religious ceremonies going on a lot, in public, and people could see what was happening. Paul wanted the Jesus-followers to do the same. In the Bible the word ‘joy’ signifies something you can hear. From some distance away; check out Nehemiah 12.43.

We need to think globally and act locally – but, in doing both, to work with Church leaders from around the world to find policies that will prevent a mad rush back to profiteering with the devil taking the hindmost.