Our readings from Genesis and Revelation took us on a journey to the furthest bounds of time and space, where truths about the creative and redeeming power of Almighty God shimmer tantalisingly through the veils of ancient myth and inspired prophetic vision. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, says the Lord, the Almighty (Rev 1.8). What are we to make of such tales and visions? As we struggle with the pressures and concerns of our daily lives, we may feel that the relevance of such stories is rather distant and philosophical. But then suddenly, with the Gospel story, we are with the disciples in a small boat caught in a fierce storm. Their fragile vessel is about to be overwhelmed, and we know how they feel. Like them, we have been sailing along calmly enough, and then suddenly we have run into a squall of troubles – the doctor has bad news for us, redundancies threaten at work, something terrible happens to our partner or one of our children. Everything seems to be falling apart and we cry out: Master, we are perishing! Do something! In this story, the god of heaven and earth whose power and compassion have been evident from the very dawn of history is with them in the boat; he wakes, calms the wind and the waves, and they are saved. Which is fine. But where was he, we ask, when the earth shook under Port-au-Prince, and tens of thousands of innocent people cried out in terror: Master, we are perishing, before they were buried beneath the rubble of their houses and churches and public buildings?
There used to be an easy answer, based on the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. They were all wicked sinners, and God had finally decided to punish them. If you read Giles Fraser’s column in the Church Times, you may have been as surprised as I was to see that even John Wesley could interpret the devastating earthquake that destroyed much of Lisbon on 1 November 1755 in this way. How long, he thunders, “how long has that bloody House of Mercy, the scandal not only of religion, but even of human nature, stood to insult both heaven and earth! And shall not I visit for these things? Shall not my soul be avenged on such a city as this?” Charles Wesley echoes his brother’s sentiments in a hymn which you won’t find in any modern collection: “Jesus descends in dread array to judge the scarlet whore.” The ‘scarlet whore’ was of course an abusive reference to the Roman Catholic church, and ‘that bloody House of Mercy’ I take to be a reference to the Inquisition – the art of spin is a lot older than Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair. What the Wesleys were saying, reflecting a view then widely shared, was that earthquakes were an instrument of God’s judgment, in this case his judgment on the Roman Catholic church in general, and the Inquisition in particular.
In an era when news travelled slowly, and there were no instant pictures to bring home to people the enormity of such calamities, it took longer than it would to-day for thoughtful public opinion to process the implications of the Lisbon earthquake, and the tsunami that followed it, but as the scale of the disaster sank in, and people thought more sensitively about its manifestly indiscriminate impact, it had a profound effect on both science and religion. It would take another 200 years before the movement of tectonic plates was properly understood, but seismologists trace the origins of their science back to the detailed reports which the Portuguese authorities collected after the earthquake from all the towns and villages that were affected.
The impact on philosophy and religion was no less profound. Voltaire’s picaresque novella Candide, a huge best seller when it was published in 1759, uses the Lisbon earthquake to demolish the absurd optimism of some Enlightenment thinking which had wanted to believe that nature was not only intelligible and therefore ultimately predictable, but also reliably benign, reflecting the mind of the God who had set in motion a beneficent creation, in which ‘all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. Standing in the ruins of a once rich and glorious city, where 85% of the buildings had been destroyed and up to half the population may have perished, or reading about it in Voltaire’s graphic fast-moving story, thoughtful people could no longer be comfortable with any explanation based either on the unshakeable optimism of a Leibniz, or on the indiscriminate vengeance attributed to an angry God. At the end of the story Candide and his companions find a modest degree of happiness in cultivating their garden. Slightly surprisingly, Voltaire cites without irony the passage we read this morning from the book of Genesis in support of the notion that even in the ideal world of the garden of Eden, man was put there to till it and keep it. Stuff happens, as we would say nowadays, but minding our own business, cultivating our own garden, looks suspiciously like a retreat from the problem that such events pose, rather than a solution. Is it the best we can do?
This is where it begins to get difficult. The first thing to say is that quietly getting on with our own affairs is better than some of the alternatives. Giles Fraser rightly tears to shreds not only the Wesley brothers but the American TV evangelist Pat Robertson, who has apparently opined that the reason for Haiti’s suffering is that, some 200 years ago, they made a pact with the Devil to drive out the French. Such views are untenable, but in less extreme form they are common enough. Well, they had it coming to them, people say, if not of earthquake victims, then perhaps of redundant bankers. Equally dangerous, if apparently less vindictive, is the view propagated in some Christian communities that good people can always be healed by fervent prayer. Sadly, hospital chaplains come across people whose physical illness is compounded by guilt, because they know they are being prayed for, but they are not getting any better; they may even be shunned as sinners when this happens. It may be too easy to knock the naïve extremes, but it helps us to see that any solution to the problem of evil which causes us to pass judgment on others, or indeed on ourselves, is deeply flawed. When something has gone terribly wrong, we may as a society need to discover who or what is responsible in order to put in place measures designed to prevent such things happening again. We rely on our legal system to reinforce responsibility by applying proportionate remedies. But blame, and moral guilt, and responsibility before God, is another matter entirely, in which we have no right to usurp the position of Christ who alone is our Judge.
Inexorably we find ourselves driven back onto our knees, as Job was, when he had exhausted himself in wrestling with the God who had apparently allowed so many disasters to overwhelm him. We are at last silent in the presence of Almighty God, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, Creator and Judge of all things and all people. But as Job perceived, he is more than our Judge, more even than our Advocate. He is our loving Redeemer, the one who has already paid the fearful price which our sinfulness would otherwise demand. As the little ship of our life runs into the storm, he is with us in the boat. What he will do to calm the wind and the waves which threaten to overwhelm us, we cannot tell. All we know is that even when our little ship goes down, as one day it must, he will bring us safe to shore. He said to them: “Where is your faith?” They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, “who is this, that he commands even the wind and the waves, and they obey him?”