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

by N.T. Wright

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.

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. We have our modern equivalents.

The world is full of conspiracy theories anyway: some in America think it’s all China’s fault, some in China have said it’s all America’s fault, and no doubt there are a thousand other ideas running around, spreading themselves as easily as the virus itself and in some ways just as dangerously. The blame game is easy – especially when it’s always someone else’s fault.

Refreshing

Some people think they know exactly what’s gone wrong and what God is trying to say through it all.

Ahem...john piper

Some are saying, eagerly, that this is the sign of the End. The ‘End-Times’ industry has been massive in America over the last couple of generations. Spin-off versions are popular in most other countries, too. Former highlights include Hal Lindsey’s famous The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They construct a horror-movie scenario out of bits and pieces of the Bible, strung together with the string of fundamentalist piety. It’s basically Platonic: ‘going to heaven’ is the aim, leaving the world behind to its Armageddon. And now the coronavirus is hailed as the sign that it’s all about to happen.

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.

The book of Job doesn’t really have a ‘resolution’. Not a satisfactory one. There is a short ‘happy ending’, but it’s only partially happy: Job gets more sons and daughters to replace the ones he lost, but does that make it all right? God has revealed his power and might to Job, and Job realizes he can’t compete; but does even that make it all right? That might conceivably just leave you with the Stoics: It’s all fixed, you can’t do anything, you might as well put up with it.

Yet this is anything but straightforward. 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.

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 not only drew on that story. He lived it. He died under it.

Wow

John 9. Jesus and his disciples come upon a man who had been blind from birth. His disciples ask the standard question, not that different from the question many people are asking today about the coronavirus: Teacher, whose sin was it that caused this man to be born blind? Did he sin, or did his parents? 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. 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.

We have seen how the Gospels present Jesus as standing at a moment of great transition. He is summing up the whole ancient prophetic tradition and re-expressing its message in terms of the last great warning to Jerusalem and its inhabitants. Turn now, he says, follow God’s way of peace rather than your crazy flight into national rebellion against Rome. If you don’t, it will mean disaster. This becomes perhaps most explicit in Luke 19, as Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey – in tears, lamenting the destruction that will come on the city because the people had indeed refused his way of peace.

Jesus is always the one that pulls me back.

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.

See section above

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.

A lot of the talk about ‘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. This is what it looks like, he was saying as he celebrated parties with all the wrong people. This is what it looks like, he was saying as he went up to Jerusalem that last time and solemnly announced God’s final judgment on the city, the system, and the institution – the Temple – that had refused God’s way of peace. This is what it looks like, he said as he broke bread on the last night with his friends. This is what it looks like, he said as he hung on the cross, with the words ‘King of the Jews’ above his head. This is what it looks like, he was saying three days later to his astonished friends in the upper room.

Amazing

For us to try to read God’s secret code off the pages of the newspapers may look clever. We may even get a reputation for spiritual insight – but actually, we are doing it because we have forgotten where the true key to understanding is now to be found.

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.

If God wants to alert us to things that are wrong in the way we have been running the world – and that seems to me highly likely – they will come to us Jesus-shaped.

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 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.

We in the modern West have split apart the doctrines of providence (God’s overall supervision of everything that happens) and atonement (God’s forgiveness of our sins through the death of Jesus). The New Testament refuses to do that. Jesus himself refused to do that. But this habit of mind has become so engrained that it is possible for theologians and popular Christian writers to talk about what we might or might not say about a major pandemic on one side of the room, as it were, and to assume on the other side of the room that this provides an occasion for us to say that Jesus died for our sins so that we could go to heaven if we trust him.

Theology of Making (Yale University Press, 2020).

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. These things happened from time to time, as they had done nearly two millennia earlier, bringing Jacob and his family to Egypt. Luke comments that the famine actually took place in the reign of Claudius (i.e. AD 41–54). We know from other historical sources of more than one serious famine in that period. So what do the Antioch Jesus-followers say? They do not say either ‘This must be a sign that the Lord is coming back soon!’ or ‘This must mean that we have sinned and need to repent’ – or even ‘this will give us a great opportunity to tell the wider world that everyone has sinned and needs to repent’. Nor do they start a blame-game, looking around at the civic authorities in Syria, or the wider region, or even the Roman empire, to see whose ill-treatment of the eco-system, or whose tampering with food distribution networks, might have contributed to this dangerous situation. 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?

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. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . the meek . . . the mourners . . . the peacemakers . . . the hungry-for-justice people’ and so on. We all too easily assume that Jesus is saying ‘try hard to be like this, and if you can manage it you’ll be the sort of people I want in my kingdom’. But that’s not the point! 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. After all, so often when people look out on the world and its disasters they wonder, why God doesn’t just march in and take over. Why, they ask, does he permit it? Why doesn’t he send a thunderbolt (or perhaps something a little less like what a pagan deity might do, but still) and put things right? 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. They are the way God wants to act in his world. They are more effective than any lightning flashes or actual thunderbolts. They will use their initiative; they will see where the real needs are, and go to meet them. They will weep at the tombs of their friends. At the tombs of their enemies. Some of them will get hurt. Some may be killed.

I am victim to thinking i haave to aadopt traits

I suggest, then, that from the time of Jesus onwards we see Jesus’ followers telling people about God’s kingdom, and summoning them to repent, not because of any subsequent events such as famines or plagues but because of Jesus himself.

There is a sense in which this is the deeply Christian version of Socrates’s principle: he didn’t claim to know much, but he knew that he didn’t know and so kept asking questions. Translate that up into fully Trinitarian life and this is what you get: 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.

This is comforting

We expect God to be, as we might say, ‘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.

Dare we then say that God the creator, facing his world in melt-down, is himself in tears, even though he remains the God of ultimate Providence?

‘God himself co-operates for good with those who love God’. This is anticipated in the RSV (‘in everything God works for good with those who love him’). It is suggested as a second alternative in the margin of the NIV (‘in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good’).

some apologists try to do on the intellectual level: ‘God is sovereign; he can do what he likes; therefore whatever happens must be what God wanted, so we must be able to say why.’ That wasn’t how God established his kingdom, and it isn’t how that kingdom now works.

It is altogether more appropriate, then, to recognize that God has in fact delegated the running of many aspects of his world to human beings. In doing so, he has run the risk that they will grieve him to his heart or shock him out of his mind. But when this happens, he will hold people responsible.

Of course, once you have a major National Health Service, as we do in Britain, the inclination is to suppose that the State now runs ‘health’ and the churches can go back to being ‘spiritual’, to teaching people to pray and showing them how to get to ‘heaven’. 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. The Church has often gone along for the ride, sliding off into a Platonic rejection of ‘the world’ and offering an escapist ‘evangelism’ and ‘spirituality’. Yet when government funding is cut, and the health services can no longer do what they need to, churches should be the ones – but often are not – to raise their voices in protest and to step in and help. We have a long track record on medical work, much longer than any other society or company. Suddenly to be told that we cannot and must not do it, but must leave it to ‘the professionals’, feels like being told that we cannot and must not be the Church. Others claim to know best (though actually the scientific advice is worryingly diverse) and we aren’t wanted on the patch. We should not be afraid to take the high ground. This is part of the work of holding the world to account in the power of the Spirit.

For the last three hundred years the western world has regarded ‘religion’ (the very word has changed its meaning to accommodate this new viewpoint) as a private matter: ‘what someone does with their solitude’. The Christian faith as a whole has been reduced, in the public mind, to a ‘private’ movement in the sense that – so many say – it should have no place in public life. Thus I can still go shopping in the crowded little off-licence (in America, the liquor store) on the corner; but I cannot go and sit in the ancient, prayer-soaked chapel across the street. Worship becomes invisible. Shutting churches will appear to collude with this. By saying that we will temporarily abolish corporate worship and join with others only on live-streamed services from the vicar’s living room, we may seem to be agreeing that really we are just a group of like-minded individuals pursuing our rather arcane private hobby. 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.

I find myself caught between these two viewpoints, both of which seem to me right. I totally understand that we need to be responsible and scrupulously careful. I am appalled by reports of would-be devout but misguided people ignoring safety regulations because they believe that as Christians they are automatically protected against disease, or that (as I heard someone say on television) ‘you’ll be safe inside church because the devil can’t get in there’. (I wanted to say: Trust me, lady, I’m a bishop: the devil knows his way in there as well as anybody else.) That is the kind of superstition that gets Christian faith a bad name. Equally, the debates about locking churches can easily stir up lesser controversies, between those for whom the building and all its bits and pieces has been a vital part of their spirituality, and those for whom all such things are irrelevant since one can worship God anywhere. Both sides here may learn from the present crisis, and we do well to hold one another in charitable prayer.