Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good Morning. The devastating news that the bodies of 39 people were found in the back of a container in Essex yesterday, shocks and breaks hearts, demands and confounds explanation. For those poor people, it seems our sadness and outrage has come too late. Only awful questions remain. How could this happen? Did anyone hear their cries? Why did no one intervene? My God, why have you forsaken them? The musician Nick Cave, has a song that opens with the lament ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God.’ And I confess that events like these make faith in a God who intervenes hard to hold on to. Cave himself went on to experience great loss when his teenage son died. He has released two deeply moving albums since that tragedy, both lyrically haunted by his grief and raising questions about where his faith is in the face of suffering. ‘Sometimes,’ he sings, ‘it’s better not to say anything – at all.’ Terrible events leave us mute. The words run out. But still, prayers and thoughts and feelings go out (some to an interventionist God, some not). Even though they sometimes seem to come back void, unanswered or unheard – we send them out. Sometimes in the face of impossible odds. Like the prayers for my friend who, following heart surgery, lies vulnerable in his hospital bed, his life in the balance. I know he wants me to pray, because he has asked me to, so I do. As an act of solidarity and love. If not faith. Even though with every prayer the questions flash back - why bother? Is anybody out there? What difference will it make? - I do it anyway. What if you do believe in an interventionist God? The whole crux of faith in Christ hangs on this. The hope in a God who has, does and will intervene. Not an indifferent, Deist God spectating from afar - but one who is involved, who is present. Even then, suffering awakes doubts about the nearness – the existence – of such a God. Jesus who, some believe, embodies the promise of God’s intervention in our world, put no theory forward about suffering. He made no conjectures. He did not enter into the tricky arguments about cause and effect and blame in which people tried to draw him. Faced with suffering he was just deeply moved by it. His compassion was the answer given to the question. If, with the news of the deaths of the 39 people, we are left with only sadness and outrage, that is something. For if we are angry, we are not indifferent. If we are moved, we are involved. We are giving our voice to the 39 whose lives have been so cruelly silenced. These responses may well be part of what prayer is. And they contain the possibility that we are part of the answer.