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

by N.T. Wright

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.

In this ‘Lord’s Prayer’ Jesus-followers pray, not just when a sudden global crisis occurs, but every single day, ‘Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven’. They also pray, every day, not simply when a horrible event acts as a trigger, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’.

Being kingdom-people and being penitence-people comes with the turf. That’s part of what following Jesus is all about. Praying those two prayers – the kingdom-prayer, the forgiveness-prayer – might just alert us to the real anti-kingdom forces at work in our world, our real ‘trespasses’ (against one another, in our political systems; against the natural world and particularly the animal kingdom, in our farming and food-chain systems) of which we should have repented long ago.

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.

The point is that God’s kingdom is being launched on earth as in heaven, and the way it will happen is by God working through people of this sort.

Just to be clear once more, the ‘inheritance’ here is not ‘heaven’, as many Christians have imagined. The ‘glory’ has nothing to do with going to heaven and shining like angels. The ‘inheritance’ is the whole renewed creation, the complete heaven-and-earth reality, renewed from top to bottom, as in Revelation 21, with corruption, death and decay abolished for ever.

It means that, 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. Paul puts it like this, in a three-stage movement: first, the groaning of the world; second, the groaning of the Church; third, the groaning of the Spirit – within the Church within the world.

The thing above all which the Church should be doing at the present time is praying. But this is a strange prayer indeed. Here we are, at the heart of one of the most glorious chapters in Scripture, and here is Paul saying We don’t know what to pray for as we ought. We are at a loss! He implies that this isn’t something we ought to be ashamed of. It is the natural place to be. It is a kind of exile; a kind of fasting; a moment of not-knowing, not being in ‘control’, not sharing what we might think of as ‘glory’ at all. Yet that is the very moment when we are caught up in the inner, Triune life of God.

That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.

The danger with speaking confident words into a world out of joint is that we fit the words to the distortion and so speak distorted words – all to protect a vision of a divinity who cannot be other than ‘in control’ all the time.

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. Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the fear itself, frightened that even to name grief will be to collapse for ever. We have to keep going, we tell ourselves, we have to be strong. Well, yes. Strong like Jesus who wept at the tomb of his friend.

Perhaps this, too, is simply to be accepted as part of what life in Babylon is like. We must, as Jeremiah said, settle down into this regime and ‘seek the welfare of the city’ where we are. Yet let’s not pretend it’s where we want to be. Let’s not forget Jerusalem. Let’s not decide to stay here.