On Sunday, as we celebrated the grace of God and praised God for His goodness, people in North-Eastern Japan were recovering from a natural disaster of truly awful proportions. How do we reconcile a God of grace with natural disasters that beggar the imagination with their loss of life and human grief?
It’s a paradox that causes all of us to wonder at the God we claim to worship. In a recent slate article, Heather MacDonald finds the paradox intolerable.
"God knows that he can sit passively by while human life is wantonly mowed down, and the next day, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be filled with believers thanking him for allowing the survivors to survive. The faithful will ask him to heal the wounded, while ignoring his failure to prevent the disaster in the first place.”
I have to admit, my first thought in response to this was, well, what were any of us doing the next day? Is obsessively watching CNN any less of a paradox? Is ignoring it any less of a paradox? But I take her point; more than that, I feel it. If God is the one whom we praise and worship for his goodness, what are we to make of this disaster?
It was put more thoughtfully by a friend of mine in a text: “Paradox: How do I begin to reconcile the beauty of the waves on Ocean Beach and the immensity of the tragedy in Japan? Is that a question G-d finds impertinent?”
It’s no use simply to say that this is senseless. Everyone will and is trying to make sense out of what seems senseless. Humans will try to make sense of these circumstances. For the people in Japan, they must make some sense of it, or fall into despair. The question is, how will we make sense of it.
In Japan, I have heard two responses repeated. The first is the humanist response which makes sense of the situation through human effort. One young man said that the Japanese people would rise to the occasion and rebuild, because ‘that’s what humans do.’ This is a noble and brave sentiment which I personally respect. However, it doesn’t give meaning to anyone who has nothing to rebuild. It places the individual hope below the hope of ‘humanity-in-general’. Don’t get me wrong, I love humanity in general. But I would be lying if I didn’t say I have hope for myself, and so did the many who died this last week. But this is the secular gospel – make a way for yourself and don’t worry if you fall. There are others who will make a way for themselves. This secular gospel may give meaning and hope to the human race, but not to the individuals who are lost. Andy Crouch has written a very good article on this secular good news on his website.
The second is a more spiritual response (and by spiritual, I don’t mean better.) The most striking and controversial comment in Japan was from the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara. He is a Shintoist and in a surprising admission for a public official, declared the tsunami ‘divine judgment’. In a recent statement he said; “The identity of the Japanese people is selfishness. The Japanese people must take advantage of this tsunami as means of washing away their selfish greed. I really do think this is divine punishment.” (And we thought America had a monopoly on insensitive spiritual leaders!)
Spiritually assigning blame is easy to do if you have the breathtaking boldness to speak for God. People are bad (or not as good as they should be) – and judgment comes. The gruesome curiosity in all this is figuring out exactly why these people got it so bad. Selfishness, homosexuality, devil-worship have all been recent reasons given… many think this is view of the Bible.
The Bible has NO patience for apportioning judgment on victims of disasters, illness or other crises. In fact, when people try to interpret disasters as a specific judgment on a person or people, they are usually proven horribly wrong. The best example in the New Testament is in Luke 13:4, where Jesus assesses a recent building collapse that killed 18 people. People ask him whether this was God’s judgment. Jesus says that the people who died – but all of us should be aware of the closeness of death to all of us. We all walk on a razor edge.
Both the secular and the simplistic religious responses are, in my mind, deeply inadequate and ultimately offensive. So, how does the Bible make sense of these disasters. I have a couple of thoughts, and then a response.
- It is good and right to question God in these circumstances. Through Scripture we see men and women of God asking hard questions of God. We cannot easily accept or easily reject the experiences of this life. We must bring them to God with urgency. Rather than being impertinent, these questions lead us into a more intense relationship with God. Let us not pretend that the scenes of devastation in Japan fill us merely with theological offense. We grieve. We are angry. We are hurt. God accepts and s that. This may not be acceptable to some, but what is the alternative? To be offended? At what? If God is not good, if there is no good and only matter, on what basis are we offended? Yes, the paradox of faith is that our very capacity to hold God to justice means that we must have gotten the idea of justice from somewhere. God may or may not respond to us. He is God and we are not. But there is the invitation to beat upon His breast. It is better to be angry at God, than to dismiss Him.
- A disaster like this should wake us up to the fragility of human life, to the true nature of our existence. It should make us humble. It may seem harsh to say, but whether it be in a bed or in a storm, all humans will die. If our life doesn’t make sense in light of death, then it never makes sense. A disaster like this, especially in a society that is as technologically advanced and organized as our own, should expose our weakness. We do not ultimately control our destinies. When we try to control things like the atom, then we find that nuclear power is not as in control as we had hoped.
- Disasters like this are chaotic and cannot be applied as particular judgment. However, any instance of death and global brokenness is a clue – that things are not as they should be. We think this situation is horrific, but on what basis? Surely this is nature. But if nature is all there is, why then are we sad? Why then do we question the meaning of life? The groaning of the world is a clue to the deeper yearning we have for meaning. Surely humans are made for more than this random destruction? Surely I can expect more from existence than meaningless death. The Bible tells us that the world is a battleground of good and evil, chaos and order. God is steadfastly against the great enemy of death. Evil and destruction must be opposed, and are opposed by God.
- We live in a serious universe. Pain is real. Men and women are destroyed in an instant. Children die. Cities are washed away in the dark. Our view of life, then, must be serious as well. We must not treat evil as an illusion, God as a simpleton puppet-master or people as rungs on the ladder of some mythical human progress. As humans, we must face up to the seriousness of our existence.
In such a serious universe, I see only one hope. That God will save us, in a way that I don’t fully understand. And that this God teaches us to be kind, compassionate and helpful in the face of the battle which is our lives.
This is what the cross teaches me. That God will save us, even at death. And it teaches me that I can also make sacrifices for the sake of others, and that will mean something. The cross of Jesus may seem small in the face of the tsunami. For me, it is my only hope. I don’t know why God has allowed such great waves in our world. But His response is not to make the waves smaller. He promises to be a big God so that no wave, not even death will ultimately overwhelm us. The cross is how I make sense of it.
So, it comes down to faith. In a chaotic world in which humans are very small, very fragile and overwhelmed (in spite of our real bravery, cleverness and resilience), we must ask the hard questions about who or what we trust. Will we trust ourselves? Will we trust our technology? Will we trust nature? Or will we trust a God who has revealed himself in suffering, in death – and ultimately in resurrection.
I will admit, that there is no simple choice here. But when Jesus looks at a man whose daughter has just died and says ‘Do not fear, only believe’ I trust him. The cross and the resurrection of good Jesus honors the real suffering that this world lives amongst. The cross and the resurrection is the only trustworthy hope in a world that resists my control or understanding.
Finally, I highly recommend an author called David B. Hart. He wrote extensively in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, including a book called The Doors of the Sea. In a recent article he wrote the following, which I find to be exquisitely powerful in its beauty and truth:
"I do not believe we Christians are obliged -- or even allowed -- to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean [in the 2004 tsunami] and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.
“As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy…. [We are set] free from optimism, and taught hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”
