Reflections on the Tsunami
9 January 2005
Preached at St Mary Magdalene, Sandringham
The harrowing events of the last two weeks seem to have flung the world from Christmas to Easter in an instant. We have gone, without warning and without any journeying through the wilderness of Lent, straight to the bleak forsakenness of Good Friday. Thousands upon thousands seized by the sea leaving others to cry on their behalf "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me".
On that first Good Friday Heaven was also silent - no reassuring voice, no miraculous hand to save the one pleading "Let this cup pass from me".
How Jesus must have longed at that moment to hear those words heard in today's Gospel:"This is my son, my beloved with whom I am well pleased".
Yet this was the story of his life. There were moments when God seemed so very close; there were times when he seemed a wilderness away.
This too is the story of our life and lives. There are moments of ecstasy then times of agony. Periods of happiness which we wish we could elongate and last forever; and tunnels of despair which we wish we could shorten and eliminate altogether.
Jesus shared in all this, just as we do. He was one of us "from the womb to the tomb".
After his Baptism in the Gospel of Matthew the very first time that Jesus finds himself in danger is when he is sleeping in a boat on the Sea of Galilee . Suddenly there's a great earthquake and a huge wave swamps the boat. All the translations of the Bible call it a storm. But it was more than that - it was actually an earthquake, a seismos, beneath the sea, a Tsunami. It was the first assault on Jesus' life.
And although he then stilled the sea and survived, it was a sign that God in his Son lives with all the traumas of our life.
The next time the earth quakes in the Gospel of Matthew is when Jesus cried out from the cross with a loud voice and breathed his last. The earth shook, and the rocks split. The earth quaked as it prepared to take to its heart the body of the one forsaken by God on the cross. It's as if the quaking earth was an echo of Jesus' own cry of dereliction.
But then there's another earthquake. Three days later. At dawn. The Day of Resurrection. The earth that had threatened the life of Jesus with the quake at sea, that had echoed his last breath with the quake at Calvary , quaked and shook again as he burst from the tomb.
In that most beautiful Christmas carol "In the Bleak Mid Winter" we sing "Heaven cannot hold him". What the quaking earth of Easter Sunday tells the world is this: "The Earth cannot hold him". Death cannot hold him. He is risen.
The quaking earth together with the Angel and the two Mary's is the first witness to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead. Proof that death is not the end of our story.
There is a fourth and final reference to earthquakes in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus paints a picture of the future when God will perfect his creation with new heavens and a new earth.
He says "Nation will rise again nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: but all this" he says "is but the beginnings of birthpangs" of a new world that is coming.
Why it has to be so we do not nor can we ever know. Yet the Bible impresses on us a belief that through all the changing scenes of life, in sorrow and in joy, God is creatively redeeming this world. In our personal lives and in our common life we will know both joy and sorrow. Curiously it is the sorrow more than the joy that draws us deeper into faith, into trusting God that he is working out a purpose and a destiny that are ultimately loving and originally good.
Years ago when I was a child I remember the BBC used to play interludes between programmes. One was a speeded up train journey between London and Brighton in four minutes. Another was a potter at his wheel. That picture has stayed with me. The potter moulding the clay with his hands. Just when you thought he had brought the pot to perfection suddenly the great thumbs dug in and seemed to destroy all that was made and looked so good. Yet the potter proved he knew what he was doing as he continued his artistry.
In our personal lives and in our common life there are times when everything that seems so good is shattered, as if divine thumbs have flattened the shape of the clay. At such a time we simply hold God to ourselves trusting that he loves us, that he looks upon all the children of the earth and speaks to each of us as he spoke to Jesus: "You, you are my child, my children, my beloved."