Lamentations: the mystery of Providence

Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. (St. John 2:18-19)

In the Daily Office, we have been reading the first chapters of the Second Book of Moses, and for Holy Week we turn to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. In their different ways, both are examples of the Hand of God at work in the course of history. Indeed, much of the Old Testament can be read as an exploration of Divine Providence in the details of history.

I have heard clergy, including some whom I respect, scoff at the idea of God “micro-managing” the universe. They scoff at the simple folk who often attribute the small doings and events of their lives to God's direct intervention (as I do, though I have learned to keep such thoughts to myself in the place where I work). They apply this especially to circumstances where (for example) someone has suffered an accident or tragedy, or a natural disaster has struck. The clergy of whom I am thinking would say that the idea of God “willing” suffering or injustice or tragedy on someone is preposterous.

I am not so sure.

Jeremiah struggles with this in the Lamentations. He describes what has happened to the Daughter of Zion, and cries out to God: “Why????”, even though he knows very well why. He has delivered the word of the LORD to the people from his youth and they have steadfastly refused to listen, in the end throwing him into a pit to die. He concludes with these verses (5:19-22), leaving the question open:

Thou,O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.
Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned;
renew our days as of old.
But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.

I am inclined to side with Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, of blessed memory. Staunch Calvinist that he was, he attributed his successes on the battlefields of Virginia to the “gracious hand of Divine Providence.” But he also freely acknowledged the hand of Providence when it was seemingly against him – most of all in his friendly-fire injury at Chancellorsville, which resulted in his death. At the distance of almost one hundred fifty years, one can to a small extent guess at the workings of Providence: had Jackson been on the field at Gettysburg later that summer, his army corps would almost certainly have driven the Federals from Cemetery Hill behind the town on the first day of the battle before they could dig in, sealing a victory. At that moment, there sat on Lord Palmerston's desk at Ten Downing Street a bill that would formally recognize the Confederate States of America. Palmerston was sympathetic to the Southern cause and had expressed the opinion that an independent Confederacy “would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures.” He was awaiting news from Gettysburg. Should the Confederates win a victory, he would proceed, and Great Britain would enter the war on the Southern side.

But Jackson was not at Gettysburg. Was his injury and death a random chance of war, or was it in some manner Divine Providence, or “God's will?”

The most obvious and central example of Divine Providence stands before us in the next week, and is indeed at the center of the universe: the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. The liberal theologians teach that (a) the Passion accounts as recorded in the Four Gospels are pious fictions with no relationship to what actually happened, and (b) “Rabbi” Jesus died on the cross, crushed by the Romans, and that was that. They delight in pointing to the short ending of Mark's Gospel, wherein (as they emphasize) there are no encounters with a risen Lord. None. Just a handful of women, running in terror from an imagined vision of angels. Naturally, they view this as the most authentic account of the so-called “resurrection.”

This fits nicely with the notion that our Lord's betrayal and death were, in essence, unfortunate accidents. It does not, however, fit at all with his teachings:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly. (St. Mark 8:31-32)

Divine Providence immediately raises the related question of Free Will. This, too, has its clearest answer in the events of the Passion: “Not my will, but thine be done.” The workings of Providence are most fully evident when our wills are fully aligned with God's. Very often, our wills are not so aligned; we insist on having it our own way. But the hand of Providence cannot be thwarted. If we refuse to do our part in furthering the Lord's will, he will get it done in another way.

Jeremiah weeps and we weep with him, because—if we are thoughtful and perceptive—we can see all of Jewish history in the dirges of Eichah [Lamentations]. This is the challenge of Tishah B'Av: [the day on which both the First and Second Temples were destroyed, also the day when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492] Can we realize that it is not merely a day of tears, but of challenge and hope? [from the Artscroll Chumash, footnote on p. 1274]

Returning to the example of the War Between the States, it seems clear that it was no more God's will that a whole race of people be enslaved than it was that (for example) Jerusalem be levelled to the ground, with its children within it (St. Luke 19:41-44), or Jerusalem's children of a later generation be slaughtered in the camps of the Holocaust. Both are cases where a great many people persisted over long spans of time in insisting on their own way, leading to vast suffering. And yet... in the end, God's will cannot be thwarted. Chattel slavery in the U.S. came to an end as one of the results of that war; the demonic regime of Nazi Germany likewise came to an end, and Hitler's goal of a “final solution” failed. Another hand was at work in this, beyond the workings of Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt and their armies.

Unless we are to abandon the conception of Providence altogether.... all events are equally providential. If God directs the course of events at all then he directs the movement of every atom at every moment; “not one sparrow falls to the ground” without that direction... This may sound excessive, but in reality we are attributing to the Omniscient only an infinitely superior degree of the same kind of skill which a mere human novelist exercises daily in constructing his plot... (C. S. Lewis: “Miracles,” pp. 174-5, quoted in “The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind 'The Lord of the Rings'”, by Peter J. Kreeft, pp. 60-61)

Providence extends well beyond the “important” events of the wide sweep of history, as described by Lewis in the extract above, and as one sees fictionally in Tolkien's novel, the most beautiful depiction of the workings of Providence that I know. If we accept the concept of Providence at all, it must extend to all events, down to the tiniest. Does this overturn the laws of Nature? Of course not; it is by the very laws of Nature that Divine Providence normally works. Without Providence, there would be no laws of Nature.

One of the great Names of God is El Shaddai, generally translated as “Almighty God.” “All-sufficient God” would be another rendering. Or “the God who can and will do whatever it takes.” When He first revealed Himself by this Name “when Abram was ninety years old and nine,” he said:

I am the Almighty God [El Shaddai]; walk before me, and be thou perfect. (Genesis 17:1)

It is in this way, by walking before God (that is, in awareness of God's presence with us and in constant companionship with him in prayer, song, life, and work – and the bearing of one's cross) and thus being “perfect,” that we align ourselves with the Divine Providence. Jesus expressed it very simply: he said “Come, follow me.” And when we do so, we find with St. Paul that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). We find as well that what had seemed chance was not that at all, but was part of the Story from the beginning: “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” (8:29)

This is the God of Divine Providence, the Author whose Story is most decidedly going to come to the eucatastrophe, the “happy ending,” that he foresaw before the foundation of the world.