God and the Pandemic
The first name that comes to my mind is Anglican bishop N.T. (Tom) Wright, research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St Andrews and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
How well I recall a gathering a few years ago in one of the lower conference rooms in Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, at which Wright was the guest speaker. He had flown in from Scotland to help promote one of his more than eighty books, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (HarperOne, 2013).
Before he had even opened the book and shuffled his index cards, all the lights went out, and the ushers’ desperate flicking of every switch in sight brought no relief.
Instead, a booming bishop’s voice took over: “Don’t worry, I can cope.” Then, waving his book in the gloom, “We’ve got all the light we need right here.”
Instead, a booming bishop’s voice took over: “Don’t worry, I can cope.” Then, waving his book in the gloom, “We’ve got all the light we need right here.”
And he was right. For forty-five minutes he told us how his book had come into being. He was able to recite several key passages without a moment’s lapse of memory.
When Wright’s time was up, I suspect he embraced all of us in a huge grin (his face was still in semi-darkness) and led us up the stairs and out under a starlit Copley Square sky.
The pandemic presents a much larger challenge than that power outage, but Wright seems to have faced it fearlessly and with vibrant rays of inner light.
He outlined his approach early on in the pandemic, in an essay in TIME magazine, and now, in another extraordinarily timely exercise, in a book titled God and the Pandemic: A Christian reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (Zondervan, 2020).
He explains that his book is a further attempt to tease out what may wisely and biblically be said at such a time as this. The aim of his book is not to offer “solutions” to the questions raised by the pandemic; to give a complete analysis of what we might learn from it; nor to suggest what we ought to do now.
His main concern, he says, is to resist the knee-jerk reactions that come so readily to mind. “Before we can answer those questions in anything other than the broadest outline, we need a time of lament, of restraint, of precisely not jumping to solutions.
These may come, he adds; but unless we retreat from our instant reactions, we may not be able to hear them.
So what does Wright suggest? Scramble for comfort, settle down, self-isolate, binge-watch Netflix?
Not exactly. He makes the point that many Christians see these events as moments of opportunity. Now that virtually everyone is thinking about death rather than wondering which cupcake to buy, perhaps there will be a massive turning to God, starting with the wisdom of the Old Testament.
Or we can use this moment to tell our friends about Jesus. Perhaps this time they’ll listen.
After all, says Wright, sometimes Jesus spoke and acted like an Old Testament prophet. People said he reminded them of Jeremiah or Elijah, which gives you rather a different picture from the standard image of Jesus “meek and mild.”
On one occasion, after healing a man, he warned the fellow, “Don’t sin anymore, in case something worse happens’’ (John 5.14). Yet at other times he seems to have been looking, not backward to sins that might bring about judgment, but forward to the new thing that was happening: the kingdom of God.
But as we explore that kingdom, says Wright, it’s not for us to tell Church leaders—let alone leaders of other faith communities—how they ought to be planning for the coming months, or what they ought to be pressing upon our governments.
Wright suggests that those of us who watch and wait alongside our leaders in church and state might view these confusing times as a rich opportunity for prayer and hope.
He says that what we hope for includes the wise human leadership and initiative that will, like that of Joseph in Egypt, bring about fresh and healing policies and action across God’s wide and wounded world.
And I would agree with him—as, I guess, would one of his fellow columnists, Richard Rohr, to whom I give the last (perhaps mischievous) word:
“Thankfully, we’re now seeing many people, religious and secular, from all around the world, coming together to form alternative systems for sharing resources, living simply, and imagining a sustainable future. [This] has been one of the spiritual gifts of the pandemic. God never misses a chance to help us grow up.”
His main concern, he says, is to resist the knee-jerk reactions that come so readily to mind. “Before we can answer those questions in anything other than the broadest outline, we need a time of lament, of restraint, of precisely not jumping to solutions.
These may come, he adds; but unless we retreat from our instant reactions, we may not be able to hear them.
So what does Wright suggest? Scramble for comfort, settle down, self-isolate, binge-watch Netflix?
Not exactly. He makes the point that many Christians see these events as moments of opportunity. Now that virtually everyone is thinking about death rather than wondering which cupcake to buy, perhaps there will be a massive turning to God, starting with the wisdom of the Old Testament.
Or we can use this moment to tell our friends about Jesus. Perhaps this time they’ll listen.
After all, says Wright, sometimes Jesus spoke and acted like an Old Testament prophet. People said he reminded them of Jeremiah or Elijah, which gives you rather a different picture from the standard image of Jesus “meek and mild.”
On one occasion, after healing a man, he warned the fellow, “Don’t sin anymore, in case something worse happens’’ (John 5.14). Yet at other times he seems to have been looking, not backward to sins that might bring about judgment, but forward to the new thing that was happening: the kingdom of God.
But as we explore that kingdom, says Wright, it’s not for us to tell Church leaders—let alone leaders of other faith communities—how they ought to be planning for the coming months, or what they ought to be pressing upon our governments.
Wright suggests that those of us who watch and wait alongside our leaders in church and state might view these confusing times as a rich opportunity for prayer and hope.
He says that what we hope for includes the wise human leadership and initiative that will, like that of Joseph in Egypt, bring about fresh and healing policies and action across God’s wide and wounded world.
And I would agree with him—as, I guess, would one of his fellow columnists, Richard Rohr, to whom I give the last (perhaps mischievous) word:
“Thankfully, we’re now seeing many people, religious and secular, from all around the world, coming together to form alternative systems for sharing resources, living simply, and imagining a sustainable future. [This] has been one of the spiritual gifts of the pandemic. God never misses a chance to help us grow up.”
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