Archbishop of Sydney

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Is 8:23-9:3; 1 Cor 1:10-13,17; Mt 4:12-23

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
23 January 2005

The media event surrounding the tsunami has run its course.  Not surprisingly there was a good deal of discussion about God’s role in the disaster, with some of God’s defenders running into trouble in their explanations.

We should always remember that death and suffering are regular occurrences in history and that we all have to die at some stage.  It is when some huge and unexpected tragedy occurs that a new light is thrown on an intractable problem, for good or for ill.

In today’s readings both Isaiah and Matthew speak of people living in a land of deep shadow and walking in darkness, who are blessed by the dawning of a great light.

Some, perhaps many of us here have little idea of the emptiness and muddle of many of those who have no faith in the Transcendent at all.  It is a great boon, an enormous advantage to know that the one true God loves us and sent his only Son to suffer with us and redeem us.

A number of basic approaches are possible as we try to make sense of life; of the beauty and goodness on the one hand and the evil and suffering on the other.

1.God does not exist and therefore we are the products of chance, a superior type of animal, of very limited worth and significance;

2.God does exist but is not interested in people and does not concern himself with human history.  These believers are called deists;

3.God does exist and enjoys unleashing terrible disasters at intervals and perhaps even the spectacle of regular human suffering.  In other words, God is not good, but cruel and capricious;

4.Some have believed that there are two gods, one good and one evil, locked in permanent conflict.  St. Augustine once belonged to such a group, the Manichees;

5.God does exist, is both loving and omnipotent, but allows evil and suffering for some mysterious reason.

Obviously this last approach is ours as followers of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

If God is good, interested in us and all powerful, where does He fit into this suffering and its aftermath?

Certainly Jews and Christians have not continued to believe in the one true God for more than 3000 years by pretending that disasters, human and natural, do not occur.  The Jews remembered Noah and the great flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The psalmist proclaimed that the God of Jacob remains our refuge and strength, our stronghold

“though the earth should rock,
though the mountains fall into the depths of the sea,
even though its waters rage and foam,
even though the mountains be shaken by its waves” (ps45)

Today’s psalm 26 speaks of God as our light, our help, our stronghold, presumably when the situation is grim.  We Christians adopted the image of the suffering servant from the Jewish prophet Isaiah and applied it to the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus.  Indeed Christians have been accused of focusing too much on suffering, on Christ’s death and the symbol of the cross.

God is omnipotent, but God’s Son was powerless in the crib at Bethlehem and at the end of the cross.  This example is profoundly important.

30 years ago I met an apologist for another Christian tradition who had a scroll listing the great disasters in history, which he saw as evidence for God.  I have never accepted this as such evils are problems for believers, a difficult part of the picture.

The universe is imperfect, flawed cosmically as it moves towards perfection.  God has given his creatures freedom, which can be used for evil purposes and nature evolves and changes according to fixed laws.  We have little power to control nature, which is relentless and unforgiving.

It is inaccurate to call the tsunami an act of God, because God did not intervene to provoke the disaster.  We might still ask why He did not create a more perfect world, why God permits so much suffering.  We do not know.  Evil remains a mystery, but we are called to battle against it, and it is only one part of our story.

Neither has the tsunami anything in common with God’s final judgement, as the tsunami killed and destroyed capriciously, without rhyme or reason.  God’s judgement will be the ultimate in justice and mercy, with only those unrepentantly evil being punished.

As well as pondering why bad things happen even to good people we should also pause to reflect on why good things happen at all.  I believe that the goodness, beauty, purpose and design of our world require an explanation.  This belief is an almost universal instinct, or at least a universal yearning.

No good mother or father believes that their new-born child is worthless.  The mystery of the new life they have created inspires awe and love.  Neither do I believe that Jesus or Mother Teresa, Einstein or Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Beethoven are products of chance, as meaningless as froth on a wave.

We might also reflect on our precarious grasp of these good things and on the small distance sometimes between survival and disaster.

A cousin of mine was holidaying with his wife and children on the coast of Sri Lanka.  His two beautiful young daughters did not want to go to the beach as it looked a bit rough, so they went up to the pool and watched the tsunami from the fourth floor as it trashed the first two floors of the hotel.

We are not gods, masters of all we survey, but travellers who should be grateful for our blessings and aware of our transience and the life to come.

Let us be grateful for the God-given gift of human intelligence, which has produced so many marvels which we use every day.  This intelligence can also take us to the Supreme Intelligence behind the order in the universe, behind the D.N.A. package which programmes so much of us physically and intellectually from the moment of conception.

More importantly than that, let us thank God for his revealing himself to the Jewish people and then sending his Son to live and suffer with us, to teach us and call us to follow Him just as he called Simon, Andrew, James and John.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.