January 9, 2005

The Baptism of Our Lord is the second manifestation or "epiphany" of Christ. The intertwining of joy and death in these epiphanies reveals the truth about human suffering and the goodness of God: God does not invent sorrow and death, but He brings good out them. God created the material world free of evil. The introduction of evil into the universe by the fall of Satan affected both the moral and material orders. Humans are free to choose moral evil (like the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center) and nature is also free to disrupt order (as in earthquakes). Romantic naturalists refuse to admit this in their deification of nature. The theologian Austin Farrer said, "God's will is that elements of earth's crust should behave in accordance with their nature." The recent shifting of tectonic plates in South Asia is no indictment of the goodness of nature, nor is the violence of wild animals. To be drowned in a tidal wave or to be eaten by a lion is a consequence of a world created good but fallen off the mark as a consequence of a primeval rebellion against God.

Natural disasters, as in the Bible, tell a modern story too: earthquakes killing 830,000 in Shansi, China in 1556; 300,000 in Anhwei, China in 1662; 153,000 in Catania, Sicily in 1693; 200,000 in Jedda, Japan in 1703; 300,000 in Calcutta, India in 1737; 300,000 in Sichuan, China in 1850; possibly upwards of 800,000 in China in 1976; and the cyclone that killed 500,000 in the Bay of Bengal in 1970. Not to mention 40 million killed in floods over a fifteen year period in the nineteenth century, or 18 million who died from influenza at the end of World War I. These are distinct from the moral disasters of over 44 million infants killed in our country by abortion since Roe v. Wade and the more than 100 million killed in Nazi and Communist genocides in the 20th century as the result of willful cooperation with evil. The indifference of tourists sunbathing in Thailand after the recent tsunami, while corpses rotted down the road, is a moral offence more fatal than material destruction.

The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 provoked some to say God was punishing sinful man. Others said it proved there is no God, and these so-called rationalists went on to give the world a Reign of Terror. But Christ said that there will be wars and rumors of wars, famine, disease, and earthquakes (Matt. 24: 6-7). In the midst of it all He suffered on the Cross, neither the cause of evil nor a detached observer, but the Saviour of all who turn to Him in their suffering. The wisest act in a calamity is to worship and adore Him as did the Wise Men.

Fr. George W. Rutler