Why Doesn’t God Intervene to Make Things Better?
A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, North Shields, August 4th 2024
Psalm 13; Romans 8:18-25; Mark 15:33-39
Watch the whole service on YouTube
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul? (13:1, 2)
Back in the mid to late 1990s, on Fridays, which is my day off, Sue and I would often head out to a nearby town for the day. It was a pleasant place. It had several cafes and restaurants, a couple of very good second-hand bookshops, plus an indoor market with stalls selling all sorts of good things, many of them edible. You could stroll in the pleasing town gardens. You could admire the views out to sea. You might spend a day on the beach if you wished. It was a lovely place.
During this last week though, Southport has not been such a lovely place. In a ferocious knife attack three girls, Bebe, Elsie and Alice, aged six, seven and nine years old respectively, were killed by Axel Rudakubana, aged almost eighteen years old. Several other children and some adults were also injured in this attack.
And just as you might have thought things could not be worse, far-right groups have cynically exploited this heart-breaking situation, spreading rumours and lies in order to stir up hatred against those they deem to be “other.” These have led to riots and violence, targeting people because of the colour of their skin, and/or because of the religion that they follow. It’s appalling.
Last week, in our service and in my sermon we asked why there is trouble and suffering in the world. I said that some of it was down to human failings. I also said that it might be that for this world to be lively and dynamic, and for us to grow as human beings, an amount of struggle and suffering might be essential. In conversation after the service we began to ask why God does not act to prevent wrongdoing in the world. There were several mentions of God gifting us human beings “free will”; the ability to flourish by doing what is right, but, in order for this choice to be possible, having to have the opportunity to do wrong instead.
And we left things there in the knowledge that this week’s sermon would address the issue of God intervention or non-intervention in the world, and so all would be made clear! If only …
On Monday, though, that attack took place in Southport. In the light of it you have to ask, can the death of those young children, can the injury to others, can the pain to their families and others, and the events which have followed – in all of which God appears to have chosen not to intervene – really be explained or justified by God’s need for Axel Rudakubana to be able to enjoy and exercise his “free will”? I think it would be a bold person, or very bold preacher, who simply said “yes” to that.
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul?
Why doesn’t God intervene to make things better?
Were someone who has been directly affected by this tragedy in Southport a believer in God you can almost imagine them speaking in the same terms as the writer of Psalm 13. There is the heartfelt plea: ‘how long, O God?’ (13:1) There is the pain and sadness: ‘how long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long?’ (13:2) And there is the fear that, whether through carelessness or intention, God will not intervene: ‘Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me?’ (13:1) Then, not unreasonably, there is also the demand for an answer: ‘Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death.’ (13:3)
Why did God not intervene to prevent or stop the events which took place in Southport last Monday? Is it that God is incapable of doing so? Such a God might elicit our sympathy, but he’s unlikely to instil the awe in us that calls for worship. Alternatively, if God is truly sovereign over the universe, and does have the power to intervene, but chooses not to do so, then whilst we might fear such a god we are very unlikely to love him. This is so challenging.
It might be that, without forgetting the reality of the personal, we also need to look at the bigger picture. Writing centuries later than the psalmist, the Apostle Paul looks at suffering in a wider context. For Paul ‘the whole of creation has been groaning as though in labour pains’ (8:22). It is awaiting redemption, just as we human beings ‘wait for adoption [as God’s children, and] the redemption of our bodies.’ (8:23) The questions that the psalmist poses are relevant to events in Southport, but they are equally so to a wider world situation which throws up many, many “Southports.”
The question then becomes not simply one about the intervention of God in individual circumstances, or about the “right” of individuals like me, you and Axel Rudakubana to exercise “free will.” It’s also – perhaps firstly – about God’s intentions towards, and intervention in, the destiny of the world at large. Saint Paul even makes a bold claim about that, suggesting that the sufferings of the world are an essential early stage to bringing about the most-happy of conclusions: ‘for creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one [God] who subjected, in hope that creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay.’ (8:20, 21)
From a faith perspective, then, it seems that God does not (at least in general) intervene in individual events and circumstances. Rather, though, God has an overall, good purpose for the whole world which will not be denied. And, paradoxically, in the light of what I just been saying, God is bringing that redemption of everything about through the most personal of interventions in the world; through the unique birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of one person: God’s own beloved Son, Jesus Christ.
And today, in our reading from Mark’s Gospel, we see God’s great plan pivoting around the cross, and the suffering and death of Jesus. This is so personal, so individual. It’s about one person, yet it’s also about the world. Mark tells us that as Jesus was suffering upon the cross, ‘when it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.’ (15:33) It was than that Jesus ‘cried out’ (one translation suggests ‘screamed out’) ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’ (15:34) It’s as though we are listening to the psalmist again: ‘how long will you hide your face from me.’ (13:1)
In fact, consciously or unconsciously, in his pain (in which God is not intervening), Jesus is quoting words from another one of the psalms: Psalm 22. And it is at just this point, Mark tells us, in the darkness that is over the land, that Jesus died; he ex-pired; he ‘gave a loud cry and breathed his last.’ (15:37) And it is this that moves the (almost certainly gentile) Roman centurion who was most likely overseeing Jesus’s execution to comment and proclaim, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
So Jesus – God’s Son / God’s self – suffers in solidarity with and on behalf of each individual person who feels abandoned by God – at different times, you, me, little children their families, and even the killer of those children. Though most people are not aware of it, or do not recognise or accept it, this is God’s intervention on their behalf and ours. Just like in my sermon of a couple of weeks ago, when I pointed out the play on words between ‘Adam’ – the human – and ‘Adamah’ – the earth in the Hebrew in Genesis 1 which makes us all ‘earthlings, so this week I just want to point you to one word in Mark’s Gospel. Or is it two?
Speaking of the crucifixion and death of Jesus, Mark says, ‘darkness came over the whole land.’ If you have been following along in a Bible (and that’s a good thing to do!) you might see there’s a footnote concerning the word ‘land.’ In the Greek of the New Testament the word for ‘land’ is the same as the word for ‘earth.’ It could be that Mark meant to say that when Jesus died the whole earth was being affected: ‘darkness came over the whole earth.’ (15:33)
In the light of what Saint Paul proclaimed about God’s actions which lead to the redemption of the whole of creation (8:21) it seems to me that connecting the cross not just with ‘the land’ but with its effect on ‘the earth’ is most appropriate.
So then, to conclude, it seems that God does not normally intervene in individual events in the world, and that comes at a cost. It’s distressing. It’s also ok to tell God that this is how we feel about that. After all, the psalmist didn’t hold back, not did Jesus in his cry – in his scream – from the cross.
But there is hope that all of this individual suffering will be taken up into God’s ultimate plan for the world, for the earth, for the universe – for creation. It was of that the Apostle Paul wrote, even as he responded to his encounter with Jesus Christ, the one who died upon the cross in God’s great intervention in and for the world.
In the light of that, even in the face of suffering in the world we might dare to echo the final lines of Psalm 13; the words with which the psalmist himself concludes:
‘But I trusted in your steadfast love;
My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
Because he has dealt bountifully with me.’