York Minster

Where was God in all this?

Date: 31st January 2010
Preacher: The Very Reverend Keith Jones, Dean of York

A natural disaster such as the Haiti earthquake makes us ask whether there can be a good God; because a good God, people say, would not allow such a thing to happen.  Here I would like to set before you, if so brief a time can allow such a thing, why I believe the earthquake need not take away your faith; and I would also like to add that faith in God is a great help in a world where disasters have and will take place.

Not everything that happens in the natural world is because God has willed it and is part of his Providence.   The sovereign power of God, if is unlimited and irresistible, would leave no room for the freedom of anything, either good or bad.   There would be only one effective agent existing – namely God himself ;  even our thoughts about God and our doubts about him would have to be ascribed to him.  And that is so far from our usual understanding of things and so alien to anything like faith as we conceive it – let alone as Jesus taught it, that I hope we can leave it aside.

God leaves the natural world to exist by its natural laws and through its proper processes of change.  It is a world where fire burns and meteors invade, where cancers grow and lightning strikes, where the earth shakes and glaciers melt. It does so largely irrespective of human behaviour.  Largely, I say, though there is something to be said about intercessory prayer that I would like to mention at another time.  Today we need only point out that we find ourselves living in a world so full of risk, and in such constant danger of death, and this is no detraction from God by whose will the world exists at all.  The wonder is not that natural disaster occurs but that we manage to live with the degree of safety we do enjoy.  When you go home you will perhaps go on wondering whether we can conceive of a world in which God intervened more, and decreed that certain viruses or insects should be exterminated or certain tectonic plates be deprived of their power to harm humanity.  It seems that God does not exercise power in that way.  We might choose to add that he gives protection to us by having endowed us with the skill to find out how we can develop skills to eradicate diseases, build safer homes and create just societies where the poor and vulnerable can be protected better than they are.  But the world, as it is, is the world with which God deals and in which he offers to us his salvation.

When the question we started with is put in the form “Where was God 16:53 at local time on Tuesday, 12 January?” we need have no hesitation in saying that he was in the collapsing rooms of Port au Prince, no less than at your own address.  He was there in the same way that he was at that time with people suffering at that moment in the world from cancer, with children dying of cruelty or disease around the world, and as he might have been at that moment with a man imprisoned for dreadful crimes, or a saintly woman somewhere at that moment being raped by a thug.  There is no moment when there are not innumerable reasons for our tears at human anguish, and from which God is absent. God as we understand him is always present to his world, and does not stop the world so that such things do not happen.

The question is not whether God was there, but how was God there.  For with much of the world’s processes, natural or personal, God is present as it were as a witness of what occurs of itself.  He sees the fall of a sparrow, the collapse of a cliff, or a motor accident.   But to these things he is to a great extent an outsider. And why should God be more than that?  Our outrage and sorrow is not that natural laws operate over the things of the world, but that human life should be classed with all these other things, and people like us suffer among their changes and catastrophes.  And here we who try to learn the world from Christ have something more to claim.

That is: that with the human heart God has a closer relationship than with anything else in all the world.  He knows the secrets of all hearts, with a wisdom and understanding that is greater than our own.  To him all hearts are open, all desires known and no secrets are hidden.  We do not say: of these agreeable people like us who go to church and have enlightened views about Fair Trade, and are also in other ways good eggs.  God knows the hearts of the criminal and the sinner: and in every case he longs for them to turn and be changed and joined with him, because, as the Orthodox liturgy says, he loves the human race.  Loves it, and longs to come nearer to it than he usually can. God wants to be, not a witness and recorder of our pain and sorrow, but a rescuer and a saviour.

It is one thing to be known by God; but a greater thing to have opened the door of our soul to him, so that a bond of love and faith is made with him.  It is a far better thing, a far happier thing, for us to go through life hand in hand, heart to heart, joined with him, delighting in him and making our lives like his, than to remain an acquaintance, with him as an idea only, a theory, a vague presence or possibility.  Christ has come to show us a much better way.

And those who encourage us in this way (and they are very many) know that the disasters of the world may take from us our life, but do not take us from the life we share with God.  Our dying may be horribly painful and trying, but it is a short thing, a passing thing, compared with the union he makes with our hearts.  How can we convey to others that looking at life in this way changes the way we regard death?  It makes it no less real, but it is not simply the end.  It is a reality for which we can prepare, and a fear we can turn to hope.

Now this is only an address, not a wide-ranging treatment of such a matter.  I go no further here than to confirm that God is more present than people suspect, even to the worst things in the world.  And that even the worst things in the world lose some of their terror from our beginning, here and now, to live as those whose lives are being filled with his glory, his life without end.  And do not forget: many lives in Haiti were lost by people for whom faith was just such a bond with God as I have described.  They were not saved from death, but the covenant of eternal life is unbroken.