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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.
plague. In the first few centuries of our era, when serious sickness would strike a town or city, the well-to-do would run for the hills (part of the problem was often low-lying, foetid air in a town). The Christians would stay and nurse people.
Famine, blight and pestilence – all of them were meant to lead God’s people to repent of their evil ways (4.6–11). But it didn’t work. So now even worse things will happen. Many of the other prophets would have agreed. Some today are eagerly jumping on this bandwagon in order to vilify their pet hates: it’s all the fault of those ‘other’ people of whose lifestyles we disapprove.
These range from the cause-and-effect pragmatists (it’s all because governments didn’t prepare properly for a pandemic) to the strikingly detached moralizers (it’s all because the world needs to repent of sexual sin) to valid but separate concerns (it’s reminding us about the ecological crisis).
moralistic leap (‘Bad things happening?’ Say some people, ‘That’s because of abortion/gay rights/whatever’). Not a good way to go.
Try explaining to someone dying of coronavirus in a crowded refugee camp that all this is because of sin. Blame the victim, in other words. That’s always a popular line.
The book of Job rattles the cages of our easy-going piety. It reminds us that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth – more pains and puzzles in heaven and earth – than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Even our ‘Christian’ philosophy.
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.
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 fact, the modern myth that the early Christians expected ‘the end of the world’ very soon is a straightforward misreading of the relevant first-century texts.
Jesus himself, in several sayings, saw his forthcoming death not only as ‘salvific’ in the traditional sense of ‘saving souls’, but as ‘kingdom-bringing
God can and does use all kinds of events to alert us to things we need to see but might ignore. Yet when that happens, we should not
interpret them behind the back of the incarnate Son.
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?
These people, prayerful, humble, faithful, will be the answer, not to the question Why? But to the question What? What needs to be done here? Who is most at risk? How can we help? Who shall we send? God works in all
things with and through those who love him.
If we know anything about Christianity, we know that this – victory over all the dark powers inside us and outside, security in the present age and the age to come, all because of the outpoured love of God in the death of Jesus – this is what it’s all about.
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.
Once again, I insist: God can do whatever God wants, and if he chooses on special occasions to do, or permit, certain things for certain purposes, that is entirely his business, not ours.
Paul says that the followers of Jesus are caught up in the same ‘groaning’. We are painfully aware of a big gap between the people we are right now (weak, frail, muddled, corruptible) and the people we shall be
at the very moment when we discover that we ourselves are ‘groaning’ and don’t know what to say or do, at that same moment we find that God himself, God the Holy Spirit, is ‘groaning’ as well, groaning without words.
when we go around in masks, when churches are shut and people are dying with nobody to pray by their bedside – this is a time for lament. For admitting we don’t have easy answers.
It is all too easy to grasp at quick-fix solutions, in prayer as in life. 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.
Their strong belief in God’s promises for life beyond the grave gave them a fearlessness which enabled them both to keep cheerful in the face of death and to go to the aid of sufferers whose own families and communities had abandoned them for fear of the disease.
and pastors should remain at their posts: as good shepherds, they should be prepared to lay down their lives for their sheep. Likewise civic and family leaders should only flee from a plague if they had made proper provision for the safety of those left behind.
We need to think globally and act locally – but, in doing both, to work with Church leaders from around the world to find
In all this, I return to the theme of Lament. It is perhaps no accident that Psalm 72, setting out the messianic agenda which puts the poor and needy at the top of the list, is followed immediately by Psalm 73, which complains that the rich and powerful are getting it their own way as usual. Perhaps that is how we
