Theological Journal - April 2: Where is God in thos pandemic?
Oh, yes, it’s his presence we want right now. A glimpse
of him in the chaotic darkness swirling around us. Please, Lord, just a
glimpse.
But where are we to look? What is the sign of his
presence?
There’s only one really. Just one sure place to look for
him. It’s all we’re given. It’s all he has to give. Yet it is enough. More than
enough. Far more than enough.
Yet some hopes for where we might find him we have to give
up on. There are false leads to his presence that are really dead ends. Claudel
names two of the most common: hoping
-Jesus will remove us from what distresses us, or
-he will explain things so they make sense to us.
Well, the first is not Jesus’ way and the second can’t be
done, not even by God.
If we learn anything from Jesus, it’s that suffering,
evil, and chaos cannot be avoided or evaded. It must be faced and struggled
through to get to the other side. And evil is irrational. It doesn’t make sense
even to God because it doesn’t make sense. It can’t be explained or reasoned away.
No explanations can be given for it.
But there is one place, one sign that is a sure bet to
find Jesus. It is Jesus’ cross and resurrection. Here is the place evil is
confronted and borne in its full “evilness.” In Jesus’ cross evil gathered its
full force and unleashed it on him. And broke him and killed him. But in his resurrection
the power of God defeated and undid death and evil’s work bringing Jesus through
to new life.
Cross and resurrection are powerful symbols of a way of
life God taught the Jews in their long journey with him. A paradoxical way that
involves holding together at one and same time both utter reality (in all its
darkness and horrors) and extravagant hope. A place that faces evil full in the
face and struggles with its fury and endures its wrath knowing it is but the
death throes of a beaten foe. Still potent for a while, even lethal, but devoid
of any ultimate threat to human or creational well-being.
And that’s because the cross is empty. Jesus has the
annoyingly good habit of removing evil’s victims from the cross of the worst it
can do to us. And opening up vistas of thought of goodness and beauty and
wonder to us. Even now in the midst our brokenness and pain as evil still
assaults us he graciously gives us tastes and glimpses of that new life to be
ours in full one day.
This doesn’t give us any answers to our whys and
wherefores – they remain as opaque and unexplainable as ever. Nor does it dull
the ache of pain and loss – they are as real for us as ever. But they do give
us hope, real hope. A sure and certain hope that the love we have found in
Jesus’ cross and resurrection is the real thing, the one thing that matters now
and forever. The one thing that gives meaning to and fulfills the creatures we
are made to be. The one thing that promises the healing we desperately long
for. Victor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, discovered this reality
in the hell he found himself in:
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw
the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final
wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the
highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the
greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:
The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who
has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief
moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation,
when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement
may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way - in
such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries
of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able
to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual
contemplation of an infinite glory.’” (Man's Search for Meaning)
And if we ask about the name and face of this beloved, a
glimpse of whom brings such goodness to us even amid life’s terrors, a
Christian can only answer, “Jesus, the crucified and risen One”!
And that’s the witness we have to give in this time of
shared hurt and seeming hopelessness. Other answers will be given as people attempt
to cope with the destructive chaos engulfing us. And we must hear them and
respect them for what they are trying to do. At the same time, we must also
bear our witness to what/who we have seen and heard and cast our lot with as we
work together to cope with a disaster the magnitude of which very few of us
have ever known.
So, where is God in this pandemic? Only one place I know
of: the cross and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
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