Texts: Jeremiah 15:15-21; Romans 12:9-21; Matthew 16:21-28
Earlier this week I was doing some bird watching around at Back Beach. I happened to have the glasses on a couple of black-backed gulls who were paddling in the shallows at low tide, when one of them suddenly stabbed its beak into the water and lifted out quite a fair sized crab. The whole action was swift and clinical. The crab was taken completely by surprise, I would guess.
I went on watching as the gull put the crab down on a shingle bank, and started prodding at it with its beak. At this point the crab’s legs were flailing around quite quickly and the gull was having difficulty getting to the edible bits. So the gull picked the crab up, flew up to about thirty feet above the ground and dropped it. Then it flew down, had another prod and started the process all over again. The crab still had some life left in it. Twice more the gull repeated the actions – grabbing the crab, flying upwards, dropping it, and investigating with its beak.
Only after the third drop was the crab still – by this time it was dead, or deeply unconscious (if crabs are capable of losing consciousness). Then the gull was able to begin its meal. Throughout this whole scene I had remained watching, fascinated; it was like watching a natural history documentary on TV, only better. I was there, just a few metres away, with a close-up view courtesy of my binoculars.
Afterwards, I started to reflect on this little episode, and to ask myself some strange questions. What sort of world is this that we live in? And the answer depends very much on our own position in it. From the gull’s point of view, this is a bountiful world in which wonderfully tasting food is there for the taking. From the crab’s point of view, this world must seem very different indeed. It is a world of danger, where random death is never very far away. One minute it was going about its lawful everyday business, the next it was violently and cruelly murdered.
And what about from my point of view, the impartial observer? It occurred to me that I had been quite emotionally uninvolved in the whole drama. I had felt no desire to rescue the crab – to try to drive off the gulls. I had felt no sympathy or compassion for the crab, even though it was suffering a violent death before my eyes. After all, this was nature as it is, and we are all in favour of nature, aren’t we? Especially we Christians, who, when we remember, call nature God’s creation, and we know that creation is good because the Bible says so. God loves it and sustains it and is deeply involved in it.
So the next strange question to occur to me was this: where was God in the death of this crab? (You see what happens to people when they study theology – everything becomes so much more complicated than it was before!) Did God suffer with the crab, or exult with the gull? Or was God, like
me, watching the whole thing but largely unmoved? So the question has now become, not just what sort of world we live in, but what sort of God created it, sustains it, and loves it?
We might be tempted to dismiss all these thoughts as the ramblings of a befuddled priest, were it not for another death that occurred in the last few days – which, in some sense, bears a striking resemblance to the death of this crab. This victim, too, was going about his lawful business, when death came upon him from above. There was nothing he could do about it. The only good thing about it is that it seems he died instantly, or at least lost consciousness when the lump of concrete hit him. Of course, I’m not trivialising the horror of what happened to that young man as he drove along the motorway by comparing it to the death of a crab.
What I’m trying to do is to wonder aloud – and to invite you to ponder – what that young man’s death tells us about the world we actually live in, and about the God who created it and sustains it, and, in some sense, governs it. Where was God in the death of that young man? Fooling around with the culprit on the bridge, suffering with the young man in the car, or simply watching, the impartial observer, fascinated but unmoved?
One of the reasons why we are particularly outraged by a crime of this sort is that we are all victims in a sense. Because it is such an irrational, random act of violence there is no way of guarding against it. That’s the essence of terrorism. It not only kills or maims those who are directly hit; it shatters our general sense of security. For a time, at least, Londoners will be nervous about travelling on the underground. Aucklanders will be worrying every time they have to pass under an overbridge. We no longer feel safe in the ordinary, every-day world.
We discover – or we are forced to face up to the fact – that the world is a dangerous place. Life is precarious. It can end at any moment. It is far from just. Innocent people are just as likely to be killed or injured as the worst of thugs. It is far removed from Disneyland. And the challenge for the human species is this; knowing what the world is like, how should we live in it?
It seems to me that there are three broad approaches to this problem, which we might call the denial approach, the rational approach, and the religious approach. Most people, in our country anyway, seem to me to favour the denial approach most of the time. We simply do not want to think about it. Much of what we do amounts to passing the time so that we do not have to think about life in all its seriousness. The idea of keeping ourselves busy has something to do with all this, I suspect. When disaster strikes – the death of a loved one, for instance, - we tell ourselves how important it is to keep ourselves busy. At its root it s the fatalistic approach – with a dash of stoicism mixed in. The world is as it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so we just have to get on with it. If crabs could think they would choose this option.
The rational approach is to react to every new danger by trying to think up some new defensive mechanism. It’s the intellectual equivalent of evolution.
The crab’s best hope is to evolve in some useful direction – camouflage, perhaps, or more body armour, or a body fluid that makes its flesh unpalatable to black-backed gulls and other predators. We can’t wait for evolution – we use our brains to seek immediate solutions. So already there are suggestions for erecting wire mesh along motorway over-bridges, and installing more security cameras. Train drivers are considering wearing protective headgear. Faced with a new problem, we are attempting to evolve new solutions. That’s the rational approach. It, too, has a strand of fatalism in it. The world is like this – we need more protection.
Against these two approaches stands the religious approach. As our readings make very clear today, the religious approach is under no illusion about the world as it is. Yes, God made it, God loves it, God sustains it, and so on. But it is in a mess. It is a dangerous place in which to live. All three of today’s readings only make sense if we take for granted the fact that we live in a world where terrible things happen to good people, and crucifixion happens to the Son of God. So we can be clear-eyed and religious at the same time.
Where the religious approach differs is in its absolute rejection of fatalism. The religious approach is based firmly on the belief that this is not the way the world was created to be, and it is not the way it ought to be, and it is not the way it will be forever more. In other words, the religious approach is based on a belief in redemption. The world – creation – is redeemable. And as Christians we are called to be participants in God’s redemption of the world.
Now that’s all good churchy jargon, but what does it mean in practice? It means, a world in which young boys do not want to throw lumps of concrete off overbridges. The temptation in a case like this is to hit back at the offender. That’s natural enough. We can understand the grief of the victim’s father who insists that he will never forgive the offender. But to believe that we make the world a better place by locking the kid up and throwing away the key would be about as sensible as the crabs believing that if someone would shoot that particular black-backed gull the world would become safer for the other crabs. Only a change in the nature of gulls would make the world safer for crabs.
And only a change in human nature will make the world safe for Auckland motorists, so to speak. The good news of the gospel is that that change is possible. It is possible for us, and it is possible for the boy on the overbridge. It may begin today with how we respond to that boy. Do we follow the teaching of Scripture – refuse to repay evil with evil – show him the love he failed to show to the young man in the car – or do we go on building fences between us and pretend we are safe?
Where is God in all this? Awaiting our response.
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