By Rev. Matthew Watley, 2nd Episcopal District
All of us are reeling, our hearts aching, and our minds overwhelmed with grief and confusion about the unthinkable tragedy concerning the Kobe and Gigi Bryant and each of the families who lost loved ones. As a pastor of a younger congregation, I often lament the fact that I don’t get to do “Good funerals”–the ones where a great grandparent has lived a good life and is ready to transition to receive their heavenly reward, and the generations gather around the bedside to say their goodbyes. Unfortunately, I’ve had to eulogize the young adult and even infant children of parents who find themselves caught in a maze of grief and trauma who are holding on to their faith as the only thing that is holding them up. I’ve had to wrestle as a pastor and also as a person with the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” This is the central question of a theological construct known as theodicy.
A quick read of scripture shows the great leaders of the faith pointedly asked God ‘why,’ including Job, David, Gideon, and most prominently Jesus – who in his most tragic hour while being crucified screamed the question was taken from Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”
While Jesus permits us to ask the question “Why?” – we must be careful to manage our expectations of that question. “Why?” never is satisfied. I learned this lesson from my darling daughter, who one day innocently asked me this question, “Daddy, why is the sky blue”? I replied, “When the sunlight strikes the earth’s atmosphere, it is disbursed into the various colors of the spectrum, and because blue has the shortest wavelength, the sky appears to be blue. “Ok, daddy, but why”? Realizing that my response was much too complicated, I said, “Well, because blue is the color that God wanted it to be. “Ok, daddy, but why?” That’s when it hit me that ‘Why is a one-way road that never leads back to home. Why has an appetite for answers that can never been fulfilled, and a thirst for understanding that is never quenched. ‘Why’ is often the expression of the desire for closure, balance, and a formula that will make sense out of life. ‘Here are some things to consider when tragedy causes us to ask the questions ‘why do bad things happen to good people?
Life
Tragedies are a part of life. Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 says “I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them”. The point is clear; there is often no formula for life. Noble behavior does not prevent time and chance from arriving at the doorstep of good people. Some tragedies are simply a part of what it means to live life.
The Devil
I Peter 5:8 tells us, ‘Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour’. Jesus declared in John 10:10 ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’ The truth is that the devil desires the demise of humanity, physically, spiritually, and eternally. Therefore, when tragedy happens sometimes is the act of evil. Evil unleashed by the devil is a reality that we must recognize in its various forms, especially as it works through people.
Corruption
After each phase of God’s creation recorded in Genesis 1, God performed an after-event assessment and determined ‘it was good.’ Therefore, when we see tragedy in life, we should recognize that it is not necessarily a result of God’s creation but the mans’ corruption of God’s creation. When tragedies of racialized police shootings, famine, and war, and we must assign responsibility not to the hand of God, but the hand of man as we have the power to prevent each of these occurrences, but we lack the will to correct them.
Choice
Some tragedies are painful but not without explanation. When doctors warn us about our diets and lifestyles, but we continue to make unhealthy decisions, the tragedies that result are no less hurtful to those of us who remain but should not be ascribed to the will of God. Sometimes tragedy is the direct result of unwise choices, which is why the book of Proverbs admonishes us to to ‘get wisdom repeatedly’.
God
Sometimes God allows tragedy to happen. There is what is known as the permissive will of God and the perfect will of God. The perfect will is what God desires. The permissive will is what God does not want but allows either because of the free will choices of people, or the chance occurrences of a tragedy that are part of life. While we cannot know why God allows chance, we must recognize that chance is a pendulum that swings both ways. So just as random events may work out in our favor, that may also work out toward our misery. Yet, our lives are not simply given to chance, grace is actively at work in our lives daily, keeping us from most of that which life, humanity, and the devil would seek to do to us. Just as God’s grace saves us from the judgment of sin, it also keeps us from much of the tragedies of life Leviticus 3:22 says, “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.”
Rev. Matthew Watley is the pastor of Kingdom Fellowship AME Church in Spring Spring, Maryland.
