It’s been fascinating, and yes disturbing, to be in conversations around the significance of the December 26 2004 tsunami.
I was at a meeting of teachers recently when a local Pentecostal minister gave us his version of the catastrophe. “It’s all about sin”, he told us. “The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. The people who died in the tsunami deserved to die. And before you shoot me down, I’ll qualify that by saying that we all deserve to die. Jesus came so that we wouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of our sinful nature.”
I nearly fell out of my chair. There is something desperately flawed in a gospel that tells us that Jesus died to save us from dying. The reality is that all of us are mortal – if we don’t end our lives through accident or illness, we end up wearing out. Is that because of sin? Honestly, I believe that there never was a time when humans were immortal. We don’t have a ‘pre-fall’ idyllic death-free existence to get back to. Sure, we have the story of Adam and Eve in which they are told that they would certainly ‘die’ the day they taste the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. But even from the story itself it is clear they do not literally die immediately. Something else dies – purity and innocence. The way we are created includes inbuilt fragility.
And then at a more mainstream denominational meeting when another minister suggested that the disastrous effects of the tsunami were linked with sin. “The consequences of spending so much money on armaments etc. when money could have been spent on predicting the impact of the earthquake and making sure people didn’t live so close to the sea.”
I responded by asking the question: “Who was to blame when Uluru burst out of the Australian rock? If there were people living in that area, did they think they had caused it to happen? And who was to blame when Australia’s continental plate tore away from the rest of Gondwanaland? Was it human sin that caused the many terrifying ruptures involved in that split?”
The reality is that we are fragile beings living in an exciting but dangerous world.
Why are we in such a hurry to assign blame and shame when things go wrong?
That must have been going through Jesus’ mind as he found a man who had been born blind. It’s all in John 9. Jesus’ followers ask him, “Teacher, whose sin caused this man to be born blind – his own sin or his parents’ sin.”
And Jesus gives an answer that makes it clear that they’ve been asking the wrong question. “It’s not this man’s sin nor his parents’ sin”. Trying to find out ‘why’ things have happened usually gets us nowhere unless there’s a way of preventing it happening again.
What’s more helpful is the purpose question. What purpose can we now find in the present situation? What is God going to make out of this?
And Jesus goes on to find God’s purpose in the man’s blindness. “God’s power can be shown in this man”. Jesus proceeds to find a way to bring the man his sight – an earthy approach that involves dust and spit and washing.
So what’s the most helpful question to be exploring in this time? “Who’s to blame for the tsunami?” Or “How can we be involved in God’s purposes in the wake of the disaster? How can we live in a way that makes it possible for those affected to have an ongoing living?”