with the congregation of St Andrew's Dawson Street, Crook
Holocaust Memorial Day
takes place on 27 January each year. It’s a time to pause, to remember the
millions of people who were murdered or whose lives were changed beyond
recognition during the Nazi Persecution and in subsequent genocides in Cambodia,
Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. 27 January marks the liberation of
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. By chance I was in Ripon Cathedral a couple of years ago
and came across a moving and powerful art installation to commemorate the
Holocaust. 6 million +,
Every person counts, an artwork of 6 million buttons, each one
representing someone killed in the Holocaust.
The buttons were spread across the north aisle of the Cathedral both on
the floor and in symbolic glass funnels. The Exhibition was created by the
Leeds based artist Antonia Stowe. It was a powerful and moving experience.
The holocaust together
with natural disasters represents one of the
greatest practical problems for belief in God, the fact of suffering. An American
Rabbi, Irving Greenberg after reading the transcript of one of the Nuremberg
trials relating to Auschwitz subsequently reported “Evidently at one stage the
decision was taken by the Nazi authorities not to put young Jewish children
into the gas chambers, but to throw them alive into the crematoria, and the
screams were heard throughout the camp.” Greenberg was later to comment ‘No
statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that could not be made with
credibility in the presence of the burning children.’ Much suffering is truly
terrible, and in the face of such suffering any believer in God must pause.
In the case of the Holocaust there were other human
beings who could, and have been, held
responsible. We know, all too terribly, that we human beings have been given
free will, and some have abused that free will most dreadfully. It was Edmund
Burke who once said ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to do nothing.’ It is a salutary warning that we would all do well to
reflect upon.
But then there are other disasters that were not
the responsibility of human beings, and where freewill cannot be used as an
explanation, still less an excuse. The tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 resulted in a
quarter of a million people killed and well over a million people displaced;
and the final death toll of the recent typhoon Haiyan which devastated the Philippines in November last year is
yet to be finally calculated. These horrific disasters raise the question of
‘Where was God?’ That was a question that was similarly asked in 1755 after the
tragedy of the Lisbon earthquake that may have killed up to 100,000 people. The immediate response of most at the
time was to view it as a sign of God’s anger against sinful humanity and to
call for public acts of contrition and repentance. A more sober and reasonable answer was given by the
Oxford theologian Austin Farrer, who said that God was there allowing the
earth’s crust to behave according to its nature. Much the same answer on the
movement of tectonic plates could be given about the tsunami, typhoons and
earthquakes, and although very tough I suppose that answer is essentially true.
The universe is as it is, and I am not sure that we can wish God had made it
otherwise. Perhaps we need a world with the possibilities of challenge and
tragedy if strong character is ever to be formed. If everything was just easy
and there was no possibility of disaster maybe that would produce only easy and
complacent character.
Reflections
like that show that it is very difficult to sustain any notion of God being a
sort of master-puppeteer, pulling the strings of the world to make things
happen. Of course some Christians do believe that, and some have had the temerity
to suggest that natural disasters are somehow a punishment on people for some
wickedness. What any of the young children who died can have done to deserve
that is, I confess, completely beyond me, and I find such expressions by some
Christians frankly offensive. If God is a master puppeteer like that it seems
to me he is nothing other than a monster, and certainly does not deserve our
love or our respect.
But maybe
God is not like that. God is not all powerful in the way some would suggest,
because any act of creation carries with it an element of risk. As a
grandfather of who has lost a grandchild of late, I know only to clearly. Once
something is created, whether it be a universe or a grandchild, it then has a
life of its own and cannot be simply manipulated. In the case of our world,
both because of the nature of the physical world and the nature of human beings
there is always the possibility of terrible tragedy and even disaster, and the
question about God is what will God-fearing people do in response to it. The
answer seems to be, thank God, in many cases they strive to overcome the
consequences and to re-build, learning the lessons of whatever disaster it was.
I find a far more compelling notion of where God was in an event like a natural
disaster is to see him in the practical love and compassion of those
individuals and agencies who bring help and relief to those who are traumatised
by the disaster, and to see him in the resilience, courage and determination
shown by some of the victims who strive to live authentically even in the midst
of tragedy, and who, if they survive, then seek to put their lives and the
lives of their communities back together again afterwards. God may have been
there in creating the world as it is, but he is also there in the victims, who
are also part of his creation, creating the world as it will be.
But there
is also a Christian dimension and perspective. The Christian Church has always
believed that in some way the person of Jesus Christ shows us what God is like.
It is not that Jesus is God-like, but that God is Jesus-like. And in the
crucifixion we see Jesus fully participating in human suffering. Some
theologians say that we should not speak of God suffering because that makes
him subject to his creation, and it stops him being God. Well, maybe; but the
cross of Christ surely shows us that there is the knowledge of suffering
experienced in a deeply personal way in the Godhead. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer a
German Lutheran pastor, theologian,
dissident anti-Nazi, and founding member of the Confessing
Church stated “Only a suffering God will do.”
I do not
think it is fanciful in that sense to speak of God suffering. Many will know
the story told by Ellie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, who witnessed in a
Nazi concentration camp some men being hung, among whom was a young boy, who
took some time to die because his body was light and therefore he did not die
quickly. As the boy writhed on the rope Wiesel heard someone ask ‘Where is God
now?’ and he found himself answering ‘In that boy.’
God is there in the suffering
victims of this world’s disasters. He was there in the Holocaust, he was there
in the tsunami, in the Philippines and in Syria, as I understand it he was
there in the victims who suffered, just as he was not there in Pilate and in
Herod, but in the victim on the cross at Golgotha. That is where we can find
God, and that is where we can choose now to follow him, in seeking to ensure
that nothing like the Holocaust can ever happen again, and in ensuring that our
world is managed in such a way that there are realistic warning systems for
tsunamis and typhoons, and that buildings in earthquake areas can be built to
resist possible tremors. We cannot push all the blame on God, even though in
the Cross we can see him accepting some of it; the responsibility for managing
the world as it is lies with us.
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