It's just as well that the congregation where I was going to fill in this morning canceled services. I was getting ready to offer a definitive answer to a question that I'm only prepared to think out loud about: why did God save only Jesus, and not all the innocents in Bethlehem?
In an article in Review and Expositor, Frank Tupper offers an interesting answer: Joseph was the only one to whom a warning would have made any sense. For example, if I had dreamed last night that my children were in mortal danger, I would not have packed them in the car that very instant and driven to Florida. I would have got up, fixed myself a glass of water, shaken the cobwebs of that nightmare out of my head, and returned to bed. And so would have the fathers of Bethlehem.
Joseph was in a different situation. Joseph knew the true identity of the boy in the crib under his roof. Joseph, like everyone, knew he was ruled by a ruthless monarch. Furthermore, Joseph surely knew that the identity of his son was known to the king, thanks to the visit of the magi. Finally, Joseph had experience trusting and acting on his dreams. So when the angel visited him one night prophesying doom unless he and his family got out of Dodge, Joseph alone was prepared to act on that information.
Thus, says Tupper, the Slaughter of the Innocents suggests that God's special providence (miracles) usually defers to God's general providence (God's creation of a world whose orderliness we call "laws of nature," conditioned by time and space, filled with human beings whose exercise of free will--embedded in the mysterious nexus of finitude sin and redemption--is the story of history). God may well intervene in a given situation to give it a nudge toward the best possible outcome, but what is possible is to a great extent already determined by what has unfolded up to that point. This is not to say that there are things God cannot do, but it is to say that when God intervenes, God does so respecting the integrity of what God has created and permitted--which is another way of saying that God is always true to himself.
Clearly this won't satisfy everyone, and if we have experienced the murder of one of our own children we might well want a bit more intervention from the Almighty. But I can't imagine that a more active intervention would make the situation any better. Chaos and evil make life unpredictable and at times unbearable, but so would a Deity who kept stepping onto the stage of human history coaching the actors on blocking and intonation according to plot changes he's composing at that very moment.
I imagine it would be like living in the world of David Tennant's Doctor Who. As a Time Lord, the Doctor frequently intervenes in history both for its own sake and to make subsequent events turn out OK. Usually such interventions are known only to the viewer and the Doctor's lovely human sidekick, but during Tennant's run as the Doctor, he saves planet Earth from full-scale, extraterrestrial and very public invasions of Daleks and Cybermen, not to mention nudging a crashing spaceship away from Buckingham Palace. As I watched the human race experience redemption on an annual basis by a mysterious, benevolent visitor in a flying phone booth, armed only with a magic screwdriver, I couldn't help but wonder, "If this were really happening, how would the markets react?"
If the angels were to act any more overtly in their war against the demons than they do, I'm not sure we could tolerate it any better than the present miseries that make us question God's power and goodness. I do wonder, however, if a series of gentle nudges can get the universe to the place where the scriptures promise that it will wind up: where death is destroyed, and the home of God is among mortals. That would seem to require a kind of special revelation at odds with the general revelation we see on a daily basis.
On the other hand, Paul compares our present state to our resurrected state by appealing to the continuity and discontinuity between a seed and a fully grown plant. If we didn't know anything about botany, it would seem incredible that a series of small steps could lead from one to the other. Yet it does. So maybe this incredibly violent, evolving universe can be nudged toward utopia.
But if so, that would seem to require patience. If it took 13 billion years for the first resurrection to occur, it might take another 13 billion years for all the rest of them to occur.
I like the way you are thinking here, Marvin.:)
Posted by: Scarlett Sams | 26 December 2010 at 08:05 PM