God and the Pandemic

“The world is weeping right now. The initial calling of the Church, first and foremost, is to take our place humbly among the mourners. Grief, after all, is part of love.”

Tom Wright’s “God and the Pandemic” takes a realistic and helpful look both at what we might make of the pandemic, and at what we might say into the situation in which we find ourselves.

Rightly, in my view, he avoids both easy answers, but also blaming God. The most important thing for the moment is indeed to weep with the world. Pandemics and other major traumas are not there to be explained. In many ways what matters is to look through what is happening to what might be, whether that be reverting to life as we used to know it, or, as seems far more likely in the current circumstances, some kind of ‘new normal’ (though not one that we can yet define). Wright uses the Israelites facing famine as a model – “when the famine strikes the Middle East, they don’t say ‘Ah, this is because we’ve sinned’. They say, ‘We’ve heard there is corn in Egypt.’ They are not looking backwards at what might have caused the problem. They are looking forward to see what needs to be done.”

There is a lot to be said for such an approach. There is no doubt that we have messed up the creation. That is not a lead-in to saying that we have caused the pandemic. That doesn’t fit my theology at all. But what does work for my understanding is to look and see how we can grow the Kingdom, how can we more nearly make things be as they should. As Wright puts it – “one of the great principles of the kingdom of God – the principle that God’s kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings. That is part of the point of being made ‘in God’s image’.”

The essential thing is to stand with the world. That is what Jesus did. As Tom Wright would encourage us to recognize – “Jesus does not need church buildings for his work to go forward. Part of the answer to the question, ‘Where is God in the pandemic?’ must be, ‘Out there on the front line, suffering and dying to bring healing and hope.’”