Earthquakes, Famines and Mass Murder - Where is God?
Bustling Kuala Lumpur was the venue for this year’s Baptist World Alliance Annual Gathering. Over 300 Baptists converged on this modern confident capital of Malaysia. There is nothing quite like it. At breakfast you may be deeply involved in a conversation about ministry in New Zealand, in worship the Bible is read in Chinese, over coffee you find yourself talking about mission work in central India, and then in a committee you find yourself negotiating with people from Germany, Argentina, the USA and Jamaica. It is a very, very rich experience and full of interest and challenge.
Amidst the many moving experiences of the week one stood out. Baptists from Japan led a session entitled,” The Crisis in Japan and the Pain of God.” Japan is familiar with earthquakes but the disastrous quake that occurred on March 11th this year has led the country into a time of deep and agonizing reflection. For me the most powerful testimony came from Hanae Igata, pastor of a Baptist church in Sendai City, one of the most devastated areas. She spoke with great sensitivity of ministering to a people who were thoroughly traumatized, and for whom life would never be the same again. In a stunning sentence she spoke about the way in which as a community they had discovered the comfort of meeting with Jesus and of knowing that he shared with them the experience of being forsaken by God.
It was a painful session. Dr Michio Hamano, chair of the Research and Training Institute for Mission of the Japan Baptist Convention, spoke of way in which the Fukushima Nuclear power plant explosion had released radiation that had redefined life for hundreds of thousands of people. He spoke of the way in which radiation tears everything apart – physically, emotionally and socially. Agonizingly he spoke of the fact that some because of the contamination some families were never going to be able to meet together again.
So much pain. Since I returned from Malaysia attention has been focused on the appalling situation in the Horn of Africa. It is terrifying to see how little the world learnt from the Ethiopian famine of the mid 1980s. The moving BBC reports by Michael Buerk, the anger of Bob Geldof and the Live Aid phenomenon genuinely affected the thinking of millions of people – but the world has not noticeably changed. The present crisis affects more than nine million people, and however speedy the response tens of thousands of lives will be lost. It defies belief that these things can happen in the same world in which so many of us live with abundance.
The murderous rampage of Anders Behring Breivik on the beautiful holiday island of Utoya in Norway adds yet another layer to the world’s grief. It is all the more poignant because Norway has become a byword for peace. The Nobel Peace Prize has placed the country on a pedestal and we have respected Norway as a quiet and gentle nation that stands well back from the violence and disorder that have characterized so much of the world’s life.
Where is God? It is the right question. And the answer is that God is in the midst of the brokenness and anguish. Jesus became a man in order to share the pain and disorder of this amazing, infuriating, perplexing world. He is not distant, but stands with those who have lost their homes in earthquake, or who have been contaminated by nuclear explosion, or whose stomachs ache for lack of food, or whose children have been brutally murdered. And for those of us who do not face these catastrophes personally, Jesus calls us to respond with his love and compassion.
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