Homily for the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord
Today is the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. In baptism, water is the great symbol of cleansing and salvation. However, in the minds of most people this morning, water will be perceived as a symbol of devastation and death. 'How can we believe in a good God anymore?' many people have asked in the course of the last two weeks. How could we possibly read the words of that psalm from today's liturgy and not advert to the awful things that happened in recent days:
The Lord's voice resounding on the waters,
the Lord on the immensity of waters;
the voice of the Lord, full of power,
the voice of the Lord, full of splendour.
The God of glory thunders.
In his temple they all cry "Glory!"
The Lord sat enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits as king forever.
The English philosopher Richard Dawkins, in a letter to The Guardian, suggested that we should "get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering". Through history, this reaction has been familiar enough in the face of great catastrophes. It is now almost knee-jerk in its predictability.
Equally predictable have been some of the traditional explanations for disasters, among them, original sin, punishment for some human misdemeanour, or the idea that suffering ultimately evokes compassion, which is positive. That is akin to saying that war is good because it has been established that people pray more regularly and with greater sincerity in times of war! No such explanation is adequate in the face of innocent suffering.
St. Augustine was a realist in matters such as this. While preaching on the death of a friend, he had this to say: "Of course we are greatly saddened by the death of our brother. However, we should also acknowledge the sense of relief that the person who has passed away is not myself!" If we too are truthful, we will recognise in Augustine's words an authentic human reaction to tragedy: "Thank God It's not me. Thank God I wasn't there!"
However, to be human is to seek meaning, and science alone cannot provide that meaning. Natural disasters do have a scientific explanation, but that does not satisfy the human thirst for meaning. The great religious traditions have attempted to locate such disasters in a broader context, based on the wisdom of thousands of years of human experience and reflection. Christianity has its own unique perspective on our shared human story and God's place in it.
Christians believe that creation is an ongoing project in which a loving God is intimately involved. Those who are now beginning to rebuild lives from the rubble in Asia show us the relationship between creativity and hope; only hope can make a future possible. That is what creation is: not a once-off Big Bang, but the continual renewing of the conditions for life in defiance of death's annihilating power. Paul spoke of 'creation groaning in one great act of giving birth'. What we experience now as senseless destruction may be part of the mystery of creation in ways that we cannot understand. The willingness of those who have suffered to begin living anew is the first assault on death and destructiveness.
To trust in the ultimate power of God's love does not diminish the horror of violent death. The Christian God is not some abstract, all-powerful, indifferent God, deaf to the cry of his suffering people. The Christian God, far from being indifferent, entered into the struggle with suffering and death. That is the meaning of the feast we celebrate today, the Baptism of the Lord. Through his baptism, he signalled his intention to plunge fully into human experience, to take on the negative as well as the positive. Our God is no bystander. Thus we must look for God, not in the power that moves the waves but in the suffering of the victims and in the love of those who comfort them. That is the God of the Christian story, and Christianity should have little to say about versions of God that exclude this human dimension.
Suffering and love are inseparable. In fact human experience tells us that love intensifies suffering. That is why, in order to speak of a God who loves and suffers, we have to speak of a particular person - Jesus of Nazareth - in whom God is revealed. It makes no sense to speak of suffering in abstract terms. Nor is suffering cumulative, as if the random deaths of 150,000 posed a greater theological problem than the random death of a single person.
Whatever the scale of any disaster - from a road accident to an earthquake - we instinctively seek a God who will intervene on our behalf, so that whoever else suffers we will be kept safe. But a mature faith recognises that God's ways are more mysterious than that. Indeed would it be easier to trust a God who was so easily influenced by others? The Book of Job cautions against trite appeals to divine favouritism based on moral worthiness or religious observance. John Donne's famous poem resonates with us this morning:
Any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
Christians must insist that every human life is of equal value to God, whether it is an American or an Iraqi, an Indonesian fisherman or a western industrialist, a believer or an atheist. In God, all the dead are counted and named: there are no anonymous, insignificant deaths.
Perhaps, then, prayer is not about changing God but about changing ourselves - about learning to be attentive, not only to the mystery of God but to the mystery of our humanity, and to acknowledge the claim which that makes upon us in the ways we respond to suffering. If humanity could do nothing to prevent the natural disasters, we can do much to prevent more prolonged suffering in their aftermath. In our first reading today Isaiah tells us that we are called "to open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison, and those who live in darkness from the dungeon." We have an opportunity today to respond compassionately to those people who have been cast into a deep, dark dungeon by recent events. Moral failure lies in ignoring their cry for help. We would be better occupied with responding positively to their terrible plight than with challenging a God that we have created in our own image.
The Asian catastrophe reminds us that there is an ultimate mystery to suffering which we cannot explain. But much suffering can be averted if the devastated communities are given the help they have been promised. Science will never enable us to avoid every natural disaster and every tragic death, but there are more effective targets for moral outrage than an all-powerful, all-knowing God who may only exist in the minds of the philosophers who invented him and the scientists who seek to replace him.
(I am indebted to Dr Tina Beattie of Roehampton University and The Tablet journal for some of the ideas contained above.)