+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
A friend of mine recently shared an experience he’d had which renewed his faith in Providence. He’d been trying to help a Pakistani refugee family in his parish whom he said had run up against bad break after bad break, and he (my friend) felt he was at the end of his ability to assist them very effectively. He knew vaguely of a new priest in his diocese who was also Pakistani and thought that maybe his experience meant he’d know better how to help them navigate through all the nonsense they were running up against. So he gathered them all together, and after about five minutes the priest and the father of the household realized that they new each other from working together in Campus Crusade for Christ back in Pakistan. My friend reported that the family was immediately put at ease. And I for one have no doubt that if anybody can figure out how to handle a difficult situation, it would be two people working together who had been part of an evangelistic organization in a country where “blasphemy against Islam” carries the death penalty. My colleague’s response was “doesn’t God just do it” and I say “amen!”
I think something like this providential reacquaintance might be happening in today’s Gospel. We might be confused at first, as indeed I was, that John the Baptist seems to be asking whether Jesus was who he (John) already seemed to say he was several chapters and probably only months earlier at the Jordan River. But note (and this was a point that had not occurred to me until I read a blog post from another colleague—Andy McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale—a few days ago) that John doesn’t dispatch his two disciples to Jesus but to the one claiming to be Christ, the Messiah. Of course, that one was Jesus, but presumably John didn’t know that.
We don’t return to John’s prison cell in Matthew’s narrative, but we might imagine the scene. The two disciples return, and they tell him:
We saw and heard exactly what the Prophet Isaiah foretold. This should be familiar, master, since he was your favorite person to quote in your sermons. “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
That fits the bill, So who is it.
A man named Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, from Nazareth in Galilee.
That guy! I knew it!
Doesn’t God just do it!
This must have given John strength to face the martyrdom he was to receive at the hand of that wind-shaken reed Herod in his soft raiment in his palace– to know that the Messiah had come, that he had played the part God assigned to him in the great work of salvation, that his reward was to be not merely an ignoble death but a crown of victory.
I mentioned Providence a moment ago, which is basically a fancy theological term for the proposition that God controls things. All Christians believe in this to some extent, and this is what distinguishes us from Deists, who believe God wound up the universe like a clock and then stepped away. There is, however, a worrying trend among some to reject the possibility of certain kinds of divine Providential acts. At least the trend worries me, and I’m the one in the pulpit so you have to hear me worry out loud, I guess.
So, there are two sorts of Providence: General Providence and Special Providence. To affirm General Providence is to say that you believe God is sovereign over the cosmos, that natural and human endeavors are a part of his plan, and this includes the plan of salvation. Naturally, we have free will and we’re sinners, so we can try to frustrate these designs, but good luck with that. So this is God’s will for the universe seen, as it were, from ten thousand feet. As far as I know, no bona fide Christian is seriously disputing this sort of Providence.
Special Providence, on the other hand, is what God does for us on the micro-level. It’s how he breaks into our lives as individuals and communities- how he makes himself felt and known and heard among us. There are some who would dispute that God acts in this way. I clearly think they’re mistaken, but one can understand why. One might see a tragic situation in which God has not intervened (or at least has not done so apparently) and get upset at the ostensible unfairness of human affairs and conclude that “God just doesn’t work that way.”
Now, I think that conclusion is wrong, but it’s understandable. I always go back to the climax of the book of Job. Job wasn’t there when God laid the foundations of the earth and shut up the see with doors when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. So it was a bit arrogant for Job to get snippy and think he’d do a better job than the creator of the universe, but it was understandable, and God wasn’t going to cast Job into outer darkness just for being petulant.
That said, we shouldn’t welcome the questioning of Providence because it leads us where I assure you we don’t want to go. I’ve seen it happen. First you change your prayers of the people in church on Sunday and your own personal prayers. You say something arrogant that’s meant to sound humble: “we can’t presume to change God’s mind (as if that’s what we think we’re doing in intercessory prayer) so prayer is only about changing us.” Then whatever good works and social action and self-improving meditation we do neither makes the world nor ourselves perfect. We’re left each of us needing to be crucified, because we think Christ’s one sacrifice didn’t take. So when I say that this line of reasoning leads us to a bad place, I mean it.
The upshot here is I believe God can do a miracle if he wants to. There’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t pray for one, and if we pray for the eyes to see God’s hand at work in and among us, we will see it. I bet John the Baptist knew that (at least he did in my made up story about his two disciples’ return). I suppose he could have said, “oh that guy claiming to be the Messiah is the same one I saw at the river that day? Weird coincidence, but that must be all it is.” No. That seems as unlikely to me as eleven men cooking up a conspiracy theory about a dead friend and deciding they might as well die for it “just for the lols.” It’s not scientific proof (you’ve still got to have faith) but I contend that the preponderance of evidence is leaning more-and-more in our direction here.
So I believe that we can, along with my colleague and his Pakistani refugee parishioners, along with John the Baptist, along with so many of our own number who’ve experienced the blessings of our Lord’s providential appearing, say with confidence “doesn’t God just do it!.”
+Amen.