FROM THE BOUNDARY: Act of...? – Part two
GOD and COVID Wimp: how will it turn out? God knows. We ascribe so much to God, don’t we? We make Him in our image. We make Him ‘Him’. We make Him ‘super-US’. And so as ‘super-US’ we ascribe to Him ‘US’ thought processes. Just now He has His critics. ‘How can a God of Love allow it?’, some say. ‘He must intervene.’ Today I telephoned my dear friend, Rosa, in Wales. She’s over 90 now. “God is very angry,” she said of Wimp. “He’s going to send a famine.” Sounds pretty Biblical, doesn’t it – the eternal anger against sin, maybe even the end times?
It’s been suggested that Wimp doesn’t qualify as a Biblical plague, I suppose because, coward that he is, he ‘takes’ mostly the elderly and otherwise infirm... Better try incense. It worked for Moses (Num. 16:46-48). Mind, the earth was flat then, and hand washing and social distancing unknown. God-plagues were ten-a-penny.
Well, certainly Wimp has made us confront it all. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 didn’t have quite the same effect on us. It was all thousands of miles away, like the persecuted Christians in the Middle East, like starving kids in Africa. But now Wimp lurks in and about all the people-places of the world. From China to Peru, he’s personal to us all NOW. Yet, maybe we need this wake-up call to wake up to faith. It’s going to be a slog, though. Prayer, praise and petition, don’t seem to be magic wands, do they? ‘Oh, but you can’t rush God. In God’s good time...,’ some respond. And then the great cop-out: ‘These are great mysteries.’
Someone told me about the arrests at a party in Lady Chancellor Heights in Port of Spain. Maybe it was a party of despair. Maybe it was young people cocking-a-snook at Wimp and the thought of death. Maybe they wanted to put God on the spot, like Abraham arguing with Him to get better terms before Sodom fell. Maybe they’d listened to Mrs Job and were content, in their way, to curse this God who doesn’t seem to hear the cries of His people, and then die. But then we’re back to the tower of Siloam: “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” OK – we worship an even-handed God?
Today I heard Little Billy, Franklin, Graham on the Easter experience and Wimp. On Good Friday, he said, God turned his back on His Son and let Him die – but then He changed His mind and raised Him. You what? No wonder he gets on with Trump. And then this evening on ‘The People’s Business’: one caller said that though she wasn’t saying God was punishing us, nevertheless we’d better repent and pray, for sin has infected the world. Well, didn’t He bring the AIDS virus as a punishment for gay sin? Well, did He? Are hurricanes punishments? But then the Anglican voice on the programme: we must heed the call to where God is leading us and place ourselves at His disposal. If that’s another way of asking what lessons are to be learned from all this, it surely can’t be faulted.
Oh dear – so many think they “know the mind of the Lord”, though no one actually does. Maybe we should understand, with Kabir, that “He is neither revealed nor unrevealed”, that “there are no words to tell that which He is”. Maybe all we need resolve is that our hearts “must cleave to our Lover”, that our “eyes must perform the ceremony of the lamps of love”. I guess that a trust deeper even than faith, underpins all our responses to Wimp-terror, asking nothing, just shouldering arms ready to march. Do we have that trust? Is it enough?
Go safely, then – until the next time.
YOU (again) from the boundary: “Let each man try, by great thoughts and good deeds, to show the most of Heaven he hath in him” (Philip James Bailey).