My Word for the Year is "Calamity"

The Problem of Pain and the Work of Theodicy

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Our church has just finished our series on the book of Jonah, and I can’t stop thinking about it. A story that at first glance seems like a cautionary tale on what happens when you refuse to go to the mission field like God told you to (yup, you become fish food) is actually a summary of the excruciating reality of being human in a broken world.

I’m no Hebrew scholar but my friend Ethan (along with some studies from The Bible Project and David Platt) pointed out that there is a word that occurs again and again in the book of Jonah. The word (or some form of it) is r'a-ah, and it can be translated as “evil/wickedness” but also as “disaster/calamity.” In the words of my friend Ethan, “Context determines which semantic is intended…The author seems to be exploring this semantic range with some deliberate ambiguity.” The brilliant author of Jonah places the word strategically and provocatively throughout, forcing us to confront the varied meanings and implications of the word.

For starters, God states that his whole purpose in sending Jonah to Ninevah is that the Ninevite’s “wickedness (r'a-ah) has come up before me” (1:2). When Jonah hops on a boat instead of obeying the prophetic call, the punishing storm that sweeps across the sea is twice referred to by the pagan sailors as a “calamity” (r'a-ah) or “trouble” (r'a-ah).

Later, after Jonah finally goes and preaches repentance to the Ninevites, the king tells the people that they should “give up their evil (r'a-ah) ways and their violence” (3:8). And perhaps most dramatically, in 3:10 we see the different uses of the word side by side: “When God saw what they (the Ninevites) did and how they turned from their evil (r'a-ah) ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction (r'a-ah) he had threatened.”

But it’s the use of the word in chapter 4 that intrigues me the most. Here, we find out what it is that’s been bothering Jonah all along. “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity (r'a-ah)” (4:2).

And then…(this is the part I can’t stop thinking about)…after Jonah goes outside the city to sulk, wait, and watch what happens, God sends him a leafy plant “give shade for his head to ease his discomfort” (4:6). That word for discomfort? You guessed it…r'a-ah.

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Jonah’s own stewing hatred for the Ninevites was ra’ah, an internal calamity. And while we are inclined to revile him for it - to claim we’d never harbor that level of hatred towards anyone - I’m beginning to feel some compassion for Jonah.

The Ninevites (whose Assyrian empire was the most militaristically sophisticated kingdom of its time) were known for their cruelty - for torturing their enemies, assaulting women, and murdering children or taking them into slavery. Imagine if you were Jonah and it had been your people, your neighbors, your family that had been brutalized. One could argue that Jonah was simply having a trauma response. He has witnessed calamity, and his pain and fear had become, in turn, a mental and emotional calamity of its own.

In her book Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson writes, “The Bible is theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are… That is to say that the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.”

Jonah is doing the work of theodicy. Just like we all do every day. The reason I can’t stop thinking about the word r'a-ah is because just as I see it all over the pages of Jonah, I see it all over the world, written across our days and weeks and years in the indelible ink of human pain. I see it every time I turn on the news. I see it in the oppression of the poor, the sick, and the stranger. I see it in the groaning of creation as earthquakes rattle cities and epidemics bring nations to their knees. I see it in my own heart and mind as I wrestle with my wants, my wounds, and my waywardness.

And perhaps most acutely, I see it in the festering, internal resentments I hold against the people I’ve decided are my enemies. It is an indignation that eats me up from the inside.

I’ve always been one who wants to know the source of suffering. I like to know who to blame. Is this an act of man? Is this pain I’m experiencing my own fault, the result of my own poor decision making or selfishness? Or did God bring this trouble upon us as punishment for our misdeeds? Is this suffering simply sin’s wages: death upon death upon death?

According to Jonah, YES.

When we commit sins great and small, hidden and overt, it is calamity. When God allows us to experience the consequences of those sins, it is calamity. War, violence, death…it is calamity. Hatred is calamity. When those in power rule with an iron fist, it is calamity. When we trust in political might over mercy and justice, it is moral calamity. When families break apart and relationships are broken, it is calamity. When rising waters wash away our homes, our towns, our loved ones, it is calamity.

And that silent, simmering resentment...the enmity that coils quietly within us as we sit (like Jonah) waiting and watching and hoping (perhaps without even knowing it) for shame to reign down upon our enemies? It is calamity. When the labor of theodicy is ignored, it can become a calamity.

The wounds that go untended? Calamity. The trauma that gnaws, unhealed? Calamity. The doubts that are never voiced, the questions that are never named?

Calamity.

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So, what are we to do in the face of this unending calamity?

One thing I’ve always appreciated about Christianity is that it never shies away from the depth of pain in the world…and that it has a name for it: sin. Our troubles are not simply some failure of liberalism or chink in the armor of Democracy. They are not the result of some inadequacy of science, or a lapse in a system that can be somehow hacked or patched. It is sin and sin is calamity.

But hope comes, I think, when we look to God, to see his response to the calamity (the calamity of political violence, the calamity of consequential storms, the calamity of Jonah’s pain). We see not a God who positions himself above and beyond the calamity of humankind, but who is instead brimming with compassion. He doesn’t write off the world, nor does he smite Jonah, but rather he enters into conversation.

“And should I not have concern,” God says to Jonah, “for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?” (4:11). These words remind me of some of Jesus’ last words, even as he hung on the cross, bearing on his body the calamities of all the ages. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The cross, on which sin and death were crucified is God’s ultimate answer to calamity. Then and always, God meets calamity with tender mercy and miraculous compassion again and again and again.

Compassion is easy to talk about, but harder to embody. Compassion does not mean that we do not hold offenders to account, or that we allow injustice to go unchecked. Jonah’s pain was real and arguably justified. But we must acknowledge that if our reaction to sin is simply rage, walls, and resentment, then calamity becomes a cycle that can’t be stopped.

But if, somehow, we muster the courage to meet calamity with compassion, with curiosity, and with tenderness towards ourselves and towards others…then peace becomes a possibility. “Should I not have concern?” Should we not have concern? Is it wrong or weak to hope for the best, to be reckless with our empathy, to yearn for restoration enough to risk being kind? I believe the answer God give us is “no,” for even God was willing to hazard loving us, knowing full well that we would reject and wound him.

What do we do in a world rife with calamity? Give compassion oxygen. Make room for mercy. Where you feel a mustard seed of graciousness, give it space to grow. Nurture it, water it, give it air and sunlight. Make room in your heart for compassion for yourself and for others. And in so doing, calamity will not have the final word.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS…

I’m nearly halfway through Stephanie Duncan Smith’s book Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway. Following the liturgical year, Smith learns to steady herself in the sacred rhythms of birth, death, and resurrection even as she processes a miscarriage, a new and uncertain pregnancy, and the upheaval of the pandemic. The only reason I haven’t finished it yet it because it is SO GOOD that I’m taking it slow and savoring every word. I’m thinking of this book (in light of Jonah) because she has a chapter entitled “Daring to Expand” about Mary’s willingness to open her heart to more love though she knew the cost would be enormous. Smith writes:

“To love someone is firstly to confess: I am prepared to be devastated by you... God made himself vulnerable to devastation. Rather than confining communion to within the Trinity - a closed circle forever - God loosed the world open to love and all its contingencies. God said yes anyway, and breathed this divine yes into our lungs, giving us being and setting the whole story in motion. We are here because God - for all love, and against all risks - decided for life, in defiance of death.”

I’ve shared the song Donoughmore by Rose Cousin’s before…but these words keep ringing in my head as I think of love and compassion as the way to withstand calamity.

“O the sky, it fills with rain and empties o'er the fields
My heart can do the same and in each drop reveal
Everything I feel, everything I feel
The sky is filled with rain and empty o'er the fields
Well surely comes the day that I will rest my head
Let everything I say be everything I've said
And on days that fill with doubt, let wisdom hold me up
Heart, be with me now, as I make way for love
May I make room for love, may I make room for love
Heart, be with me now as I make way for love.”