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

by N.T. Wright

First, the Stoics. Everything is programmed to turn out the way it does. You can’t change it; just learn to fit in. Alternatively, the Epicureans. Everything is random. You can’t do anything about it. Make yourself as comfortable as you can. Then the Platonists. The present life is just a shadow of reality. Bad things happen here but we are destined for a different world.

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.

The Christians would stay and nurse people. Sometimes they caught the disease and died. People were astonished. What was that about? Oh, they replied, we are followers of this man Jesus. He put his life on the line to save us. So that’s what we do as well. Nobody had ever thought of doing that kind of thing before. No wonder the Gospel spread. Even when the Romans were doing their best to stamp it out.

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.

For other Christians, this is simply a way of saying: This is a moment of opportunity! Now that everybody is thinking about death rather than wondering which cupcake to buy, perhaps there will be a massive turning to God.

In the Hebrew scriptures, the greatest disaster of all was the Babylonian exile. And the great prophets interpreted that event in terms of the large-scale punishment for Israel’s sin.

And if that’s how it works on the large scale – or how it worked with the Babylonian exile, at least – then on the smaller, personal scale it sometimes looks as though it ought to be the same.

Then go to Psalm 44, which specifically denies the ‘good-brings-good, bad-brings-bad’ viewpoint.

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.

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.

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

The book of Job is a standing reminder that the Old Testament operates on at least two quite different levels. There is the story of Israel – or rather, of God-and-Israel. This is the covenantal story: the narrative of how the Creator God called a people to be his partner in rescuing the human race and restoring creation. It tells of how that people – themselves ‘carriers’ of the disease that had infected the whole human race, the proto-virus called ‘idolatry and injustice’ which is killing us all – how that people themselves had to go into the darkness of exile so that, somehow, new life might emerge the other side.

Seen from the perspective of a first-century Jew, these scriptural traditions all belonged together. Jesus and his first followers drew liberally on that whole story to explain what was now happening.

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.

When people asked him for ‘a sign from heaven’, he saw their request as a sign of unbelief. They wanted things to be obvious. The only sign he would give them, he said, was another prophetic sign: the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12.39). Jonah disappeared into the belly of the whale – and then came out alive, three days later.

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.

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. So he heals the man. This is the now time. Not the time for speculating about previous sin.

When he does talk of wars, famines, earthquakes and the like he doesn’t say ‘So when these things happen you must think carefully about what you and your society should be repenting of’. He says ‘Don’t be disturbed; the end is not yet’ (Matt. 24.6). If people had paid attention to that, we should have had less alarmist teaching about ‘the End-Times’, whether the Hal Lindsay variety, the LaHaye and Jenkins kind, or the present new wave.

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

This provides a vital answer to the question which lies behind a lot of the speculation and argument about how to apply the Bible to great and disturbing events of our own time. The New Testament insists that we put Jesus at the centre of the picture and work outwards from there.

‘What is God doing in the coronavirus pandemic’ assumes that God is ‘sovereign’, and it assumes what that ‘sovereignty’ will mean. Jesus, though, was unveiling a different meaning of divine sovereignty. This is what it looks like, he was saying as he healed a leper, or as he announced forgiveness on his own authority to a penitent woman.

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 historical point here is that once God’s people have rejected him, they have blown their last chance to avoid the destruction that Jesus had warned would come upon the nation and particularly the Temple.

If there is One God, and if he has come in the person of his own son to unveil his rescuing purposes for the world, then there can be no other signs, no other warning events, to compare with this one.

From now on, the summons to repentance, and 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.

When we talk about ‘the kingdom of God’, or God’s ultimate future, from whatever angle, the New Testament insists that this is not a matter of saved souls ‘going to heaven’ and leaving ‘earth’ behind for good.

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.

So how do the Gospels describe the Jesus who thus embodies the renewed and rescuing sovereignty of God? What is this ‘rule’ supposed now to look like? Here we encounter the thing which makes the Christian message so distinctive, and which must colour all our attempts to understand or interpret current events.

Jesus’ own unique saving vocation has thus redefined power and authority for all time. What most of the western Christian tradition has managed to ignore – because it has separated out ‘salvation’ on the one hand from ‘power’ on the other, as though the two were not intimately related! – is that the ‘atonement’ theology of that punch-line comes within the redefinition of ‘power’, and vice versa.

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.

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

So here is the paradox, which I suggest as a vital clue for how we should approach the whole question of understanding our present predicament. The Jesus who has prayed, who is taking charge, who knows what he is going to do – this Jesus weeps at the tomb of his friend (John 11.35).

Come back to the tomb of Lazarus, with our present coronavirus questions ringing in our heads. Martha and Mary, and then the bystanders, both say in effect that it’s Jesus’s fault.

The question echoes down the years, with every new tragedy. Why did God allow this? Why didn’t God step in and stop it?

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.

First, we’ve leaned how Jesus redefines what it means to say that God is in control, that God is taking charge.

Second, as Jesus brings to a peak the Old Testament prophetic tradition, so he rounds it off by drawing the full significance of it all on to himself and his forthcoming death and resurrection.

The New Testament refers back constantly, as do more or less all Jewish writings, to the great foundational events of Passover, the time when God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt.

Now the thing about Passover – one of the things about Passover! – is that when Israel was enslaved in Egypt nobody ever said it was as a result of their sin.

It was around this time that travelling prophets arrived in Antioch from Jerusalem. One of them, named Agabus, stood up and told the assembly what the Spirit had revealed to him. There would, he announced, be a great famine over the whole world.

So what do the Antioch Jesus-followers say?

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?

Here we stumble upon one of the great principles of the kingdom of God – the principle that God’s kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings. That is part of the point of being made ‘in God’s image’.

This is the kind of thing that Paul has in mind, I think, when he later writes to the Roman Christians that God works with and through those who love him to bring all things to a good end (Rom. 8.28). We will come back to that.

The Spirit was given so that individual believers, and still more the believers when joined together for corporate worship, would take up their responsibilities as God’s eyes and ears, his hands and his feet, to do what needed to be done in the world.

After all, the programmatic statement of God’s kingdom in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) isn’t simply about ‘ethics’, as people often imagine in our shrunken Western world. It’s about mission.

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.

The answer is that God does send thunderbolts – human ones. He sends in the poor in Spirit, the meek, the mourners, the peacemakers, the hungry-for-justice people.