Reflections on a Disaster

Today the world awoke to the horrendous disaster that struck Japan. Everyone processes the plight of people suffering such loss in their own way. How does our understanding of God shape the way we process it?

First by way of response, the Christian is motivated out of compassion for the suffering. Jesus taught His followers to take care of the sick, the prisoner, the naked (Matthew 25) These are all corrolaries of people in any kind of trouble and Jesus tells us that when we serve them, we are serving Him. In some way we are taking care of Him when we serve the person in trouble.

While our society is not monolithically Christian by any means, the influence of Christianity is significant in the way our country and our citizens respond in compassion to those suffering in other parts of the world.

The second way our understanding of God shapes our reaction is in how we understand natural disasters. If you read the opening verses of Luke 13 you will find Jesus dealing with the question of suffering and causality. Is all suffering the result of the judgment of God? Jesus uses two stories; one dealing with human evil (a story of Pilate’s brutality), the other a natural disaster (a tower falling and killing 18 people) to make a simple point – “Do you think that the people who suffering these disasters were worse sinners than their contemporaries because they were the individuals who were caught up in these situations?” The answer to His rhetorical question was, no, they were not. But then He adds, “But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” What we can learn from Jesus here is that tragedy is not always tied to guilt (sometimes it is – Ananias and Saphira died becuase of dishonesty before God’s Spirit). So we should not look for a moral cause for all human suffering. The other thing Jesus wants us to take from our observation of such suffering in natural and human-caused pain is that apart from repentance, we will all perish. In other words, we should take such events as a wake up call that we cannot live an unrepentant lifestyle and expect to ‘get away with it.’

I was talking with someone this week about the, for lack of a better word, debauchery of modern people. This person’s comment was, “And everyone acts like it is acceptable.” The scene of distruction we are witnessing in Japan is, according to Jesus (by analogy) a wake up call to everyone who lives outside of a lifestyle of repentance. Their time is coming when, if they do not come to their senses (the core meaning of repentance), they will finally perish, in all that means.

Let’s join in praying that we will respond to suffering in a way that allows us to care for Jesus as He meets us in suffering people.
Let’s live lifestyles of repentance and avoid the perishing of which Jesus warns His listeners in Luke 13.

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