Some three months have passed since the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean took hundreds of thousands of lives and left millions homeless and destitute. During the weeks following that horrendous event, mudslides, blizzards, floods and other natural disasters have taken their toll as well, in California and throughout the world. Material aid and heroic efforts on the part of rescue teams have made a difference, but the enormity of these catastrophes is, for most of us, beyond comprehension.
Particularly since 9/11, we have become at least somewhat inured to man-made crises and tragedies. We see images on TV and in the newspapers of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq, both of our troops and of innocent civilians. With barely a second glance, we pass over photos of wrecked trains, spewing deadly gas into small towns, or of children and the elderly dying of hunger in African war zones, or of handgun violence that takes the lives of our neighbors’ teen-agers. We have become so accustomed to “man’s inhumanity to man” that these events sadden and trouble us, but they rarely shock us anymore.
It’s quite another matter when outrageous damage and loss are produced by “nature.” In the wake of the post-Christmas earthquake, the media conveyed devastating images: the corpses of more than a hundred little children laid side by side in a makeshift morgue; a father, with unspeakable agony etched in his face, bearing the lifeless body of his young son; a teen-aged girl kneeling alone in the middle of a rubble strewn street, sobbing uncontrollably…. Of all these images, however, one of the most poignant was of a Christian pastor. He looked mournfully at the wreckage and carnage that lay all about him. Then he asked the interviewer, almost rhetorically: “How, in the face of all this, can we explain to people that God loves them, that God cares?”
This is a question many of us, victims and bystanders, have asked ourselves in these days. It’s the age-old problem of “theodicy.” How do we reconcile our image of a good, compassionate and all-powerful God with the reality of evil?
Muslim preachers were quick to lay blame for the disaster on the people’s immorality: failure to follow the Quran’s precepts, mingling with the infidels, imbibing alcohol, and premarital sex. To their mind, the tsunami, like other natural catastrophes, represents God’s wrath wreaked upon sinful humanity. The image of God that underlies that conclusion, though, is radically different from the image Jesus offers us of His Father: a God of infinite power and sure justice, but also a God of mercy, compassion and boundless love. A God who never inflicts indiscriminate slaughter, particularly on the innocent, as a matter of policy.
If there is any sense to be made of these tragedies from our poor, myopic perspective, it is one provided simply and eloquently by the Church’s liturgical worship. From Nativity, through Theophany, and on to Holy Pascha which we are now preparing, the common theme that we celebrate and proclaim to each other and to the world is summed up in the name given to Jesus at His birth, the name Emmanuel, “God is with us.” This means not only that God accompanies us, remains present with us, and provides hope and consolation in our times of grief and loss. It means above all that God shares our suffering. He takes part in our pain and anguish, fully and to the bitter end. To put it somewhat melodramatically, yet accurately: with every drowned infant, every starving refugee, every family buried beneath a mudslide, and every fisherman lost in a “perfect storm,” Christ the Son of God is present, and He suffers and weeps.
Since the high Middle Ages theologians have pondered the mystery of God’s “omniscience” and “omnipotence.” In the process they have often lost sight of another aspect of divinity, one that for us is far more important. It is what the apostle Paul refers to as God’s “kenotic” or self-emptying descent into the darkness and frailty of human life (Philippians 2:7). Paul uses the word to speak of the incarnation of the Son of God, His “taking flesh” and becoming a human person, without ceasing to be God in His very essence. But, he declares, that kenotic descent does not end with Jesus’ birth. For the Son of God further “humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”
This is the distinguishing mark of Christianity. The quality that sets Christian revelation and Christian faith off from every form of “religion” is the one celebrated in the Church’s worship. It is the truth that God’s love for His people—for us—is such that He humbles and sacrifices Himself on our behalf. God suffers and dies, so that we might live in Him.
What does this mean about tsunamis, hurricanes, droughts and forest fires? First of all, that the incarnation of our Lord did not bring an end to cataclysmic natural disasters, any more than His resurrection brought an end to the process that leads to our physical death. That was not their purpose. Orthodox theology has always proclaimed that a vital if tragic link exists between ourselves and the cosmos, the created universe. In some inexplicable way, the cosmic order shares in and suffers from human sin, our rebellion against the God of life and love. Creation itself is caught up in “bondage to decay,” “groaning in travail” until we ourselves attain the glorious fruits of redemption and adoption as children of God (Romans 8:20-23). In the meantime, as the apostle John tells us, “the whole world lies in [the power of] the Evil One” (1 John 5:19). If chaos is occasionally unleashed in the natural order, it is precisely because of this state of affairs: until God’s work of salvation is complete, until our “hope of redemption” is finally fulfilled, evil will continue to impact our lives on both a human and a cosmic scale.
Another and still more important point, however, is the truth expressed in the name Emmanuel. In the midst of a critically unstable, and at times violently chaotic world, we can hold fast to the one truth, the one reality that matters: God is with us.
In this regard, we can say that the author of 1 Kings rather misunderstood the tradition he received concerning Elijah’s experience on Mount Horeb (1 Ki 19). God was indeed present in the “still small voice.” But He was also present in the wind, in the earthquake and in the fire. He was present then, He was present on December 26th, and He will be present until the very end. Present, but also knowing and sharing to the full the pain and anguish of all those who cry out from under the rubble.