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Earthquakes, Tsunamis & God

EARTHQUAKES, TSUNAMIS AND GOD

Mike Cunningham

January 4, 2015

I felt awful for the grieving loved ones of the people who suddenly had their lives snuffed out in last Sunday’s (December 28, 2014) Air Asia Flight 8501 plane crash.The World Post reported on New Years Day,that,“nearly all the passengers were Indonesian, and many were Christians of Chinese descent. The country is predominantly Muslim, but sizable pockets of people of other faiths are found throughout the sprawling archipelago.”

If I was one of the spiritual counselors chosen to console those poor suffering Christians, all I think I would do is put my arm around the persons shoulder and say, “I’m sorry for you loss” and, unless they wanted to know why our all loving and almighty God allowed it to happen, I would gently say, “I don’t know” and leave it at that. The same question and answer arises for the survivors or the loved ones of the folks who were killed by terrible natural disasters such as earthquakes, and tsunami’s.

Concerning natural disasters, Dinish D’Souza says that, on November 1, 1755, a massive earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal-at the time, one of the richest cities in Europe, with one of the most active ports in the world. The quake occurred midday on All Saints’ Day, when many people were in church. Many churches and homes were razzed; museums and libraries were leveled; priceless paintings and manuscripts were destroyed; and thirty thousand people died instantly. Later accounts would put the number of deaths around fifty thousand, one-fourth the population of the city. Contemporary chroniclers noting the ruins also observed that the sky turned black with dust. The quake was followed by fires that raged across the city, and caused more death and destruction; then a series of tidal waves smashed the port, drowning hundreds of people in coastal areas.(1)

David Bentley Hart, reminds his readers that, on the second day of Christmas 2004, an earthquake-measured on the Richter scale at a magnitude of 9.0-struck offshore of Banda Aceh, at the northern end of Sumatra, early in the morning. Near the epicenter, the tremors were horribly lethal; but the far greater devastation released by the quake came (as is almost always the case) from the tsunamis it drove towards all the surrounding coasts. An enormous surge, scarcely visible at first, spread in all directions with extraordinary speed, then it slowed and mounted as it approached land. No one was prepared. Warnings may have been given to some of the regional governments, but they were not made public. At the shorelines, the lovely glistering hyaline waters were all at once polluted with the silt and debris and murk of the ocean’s bed, and rose with such terrifying suddenness that very few-even as far away as Sri-Lanka had sufficient time to flee.

In the days immediately following, a proper picture of the real dimensions of the disaster was strangely slow in reaching the world beyond. At first, those of us who lived far from the region heard that thousands had perished, which seemed tragic enough; then, in subsequent days, the number of the dead began to be reckoned in tens of thousands; and finally, in the hundreds of thousands and the true horror of what had occurred became in some small measure appreciable for us. As I write, the most recent estimate is very near a quarter million. And when images of the aftermath began to appear, they seemed too dreadful to believe: films of those caught amid the flood clinging desperately to poles and railings, and occasionally loosing their grip to be torn away by the fierce rush of water; satellite pictures showing where whole islands had been laid waste, villages swept away, the earth stripped of vegetation; and photographs of long stretches of coastline strewn not only with wreckage but with countless corpses, a great many of the corpses small children.(2)

Silence might have been the wisest response in the days following the Indian Ocean catastrophe. And here, after(at this writing) two months and many thousand words, I remain uncertain whether what I have said is proper or even remotely adequate. (3)

To phrase all of this somewhat differently, words we would not utter to ease another’s grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety. In the New York Times this morning, on this last day I have set aside for the writing of this book, there appeared a report from Sri Lanka recounting, in part, the story of a large man of enormous physical strength who was unable to prevent four of his five children from perishing in the tsunami, and who-as he recited the names of his lost children to the reporter, in descending order of age, ending with the name of his four-year-old son was utterly overwhelmed by his own weeping.

For if we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment of another’s sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them; because what would still our tongues would be the knowledge (which we would possess at the time, though we might forget it later) that such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God. In the process, moreover, we would be attempting to deny that man a knowledge central to the gospel: the knowledge of the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity-or outrage-of the empty tomb.

However-fortunately, I think-we Christians are not obliged (and perhaps are not even allowed) to look upon the devastation of that day-to look-that is, upon the entire littoral rim of the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal and upper Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children-and to attempt to console ourselves or others with vacuous cant about the meaning or purpose residing in all that 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, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces-whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance-that we shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. And we are not only permitted but required to believe that cosmic time as we know it, through all the immensity of its geological ages and historical epochs, is only a shadow of true time, and this world only a shadow of the fuller, richer, more substantial, more glorious creation that God intends; and to believe also that all of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness. That ours is a fallen world, is not, of course, a truth demonstrable to those who do not believe; it is not a first principle of faith, but rather something revealed to us only by what we know of Christ, in the light cast back from his saving action in history upon the whole of time. The fall of rational creation and the subjection of the cosmos to death is something that appears to us nowhere within the broken law of nature or history; we cannot search it out within the closed continuum of the wounded world; it belongs to another frame of time, another “kind” of time, one more real than the time of death.

When however, we learn in Christ the nature of our first estate, and the divine destiny to which we are called we begin to see more clearly the more we are able to look upon the world with an eye of charity-that there is in all the things of earth a hidden glory waiting to be revealed, more radiant than a million suns, more beautiful than the most generous imagination or most ardent desire can now conceive. Or, rather, it is a glory not entirely hidden: veiled, rather, but shining in and through and upon all things.The imperishable goodness of all being does in fact show itself in all that is. It shows itself in vast waters of the Indian Ocean, and it is not hard to see when those waters are silver and azure under the midday sky, or gold and indigo in the light of the setting sun, or jet and pearl in the light of the moon, and when their smoothly surging tides break upon the shore and harmlessly recede. But it is still there even when-the doors of the sea have broken their seals-those waters become suddenly dull and opaque with gray or sallow silt and rise up to destroy and kill without will or thought or purpose or mercy. At such times, to see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory to be revealed both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty.

Until the final glory, however, the world remains divided between two kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days. 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. Such faith might never seem credible to someone like Ivan Karamazov, or still the disquiet of his conscience, or give him peace in place of rebellion, but neither is it a faith that his arguments can defeat; for it is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead. Now we are able to 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 rise 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.” (5)

In 1 Peter 1:17 we read that, “the heavenly Father to whom you pray has no favorites.” Romans 5:18 speaks of salvation offered “for everyone.” 1 Timothy 2:3-4 says that “God …wants everyone to be saved and to understand the truth.” And the most famous passage in the Bible John 3:16, says that “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that “everyone” who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

Theologians wrangle over how to interpret these texts, but my contention is that the plain, commonsense meaning of Scripture appears to indicate that God is inviting everyone to believe in him. Whether we choose to believe or not is another matter, but there is no indication here that God has denied some the opportunity to accept the free gift. On the contrary, the point seems to be that God has given to every person the grace, which is the ability to decide either way.

Paul writes in Romans 2:15 that even the pagans-those who have not heard of the Christian God-have no excuse to turn away from God, because God’s law is implanted in every human heart. From Paul we get the idea that even pagans have, through the moral law, the imprint of the divine. So do individual Hindus in India and Confucians in China, who haven’t heard of Christ, automatically go to hell because they don’t become Christians?The honest answer to that question is that only God knows-but we should be content to leave the matter to God’s justice and mercy. Let him sort out whether people who have been offered a gift but don’t know about it should be given or denied the benefits of it.

I agree with C. S. Lewis on this point in his Mere Christianity. “We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that no man can be saved except through Him.” Dante expresses a similar view in the Divine Comedy.Dante describes how when we reach the upper rings of heaven we get an entirely different perspective on salvation from the one we have on earth. God doesn’t use the same scales that we do; his perfect and transcendent justice cannot be reduced to human formulas, Dante isn’t saying that pagans can or cannot go to heaven; he is saying that our knowledge of such high things is very imperfect. For Christians, as for everyone else, it’s better to confess ignorance and to attend to one’s own spiritual condition, responding to what is clear in Scripture, than to feign omniscience about such mysteries that God has hidden from us.

Heaven is a great expression of God’s generosity toward us, and he made it an easy place to get to; we must only place our faith in him. Hell, too, is a tribute to God’s generosity. How? By being a testament to human freedom. We have the opportunity to go there if we so choose. Right up to the end, God permits us to go our way instead of his way. Of course, we have to go there without him, since if God accompanied us to hell it would no longer be hell. Moreover, since happiness and virtue are attributes of God, and there is neither happiness nor virtue entirely apart from God, there is great evil and misery in hell. Through a free act of the will to place our faith in God, however, we can avoid this misery and enjoy all of God’s blessings in heaven. Through the sacrifice of Jesus, God has cleared the path; the decision whether we will receive this priceless gift that has been offered to us is now ours. 4

I’ve been asking God to add his blessing to this sermon and that each of you folks will find it to be helpful in sharing your faith throughout this New Year. I appreciate it, if, in one-way or another, you will let me know!

Lord willing, next week….

 

  1. What’s So Great About God? © 2013 by Dinesh D’Souza, page 117.
  2. The Doors of the Sea, by David Bentley Hart, © 2005 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Pages 5-6.
  3. Page 92.
  4. D’Souza, Pages 239-241
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January 4, 2015 Posted by Categories: Uncategorized 1 comment

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