Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11
I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song!
He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says.
Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God.
So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his head.
I suspect the vicar was talking about whether or not we can believe in an interventionist God and I must confess that my sympathies are with Nick Cave. Like him, I believe in God but sometimes I struggle to believe in an interventionist God.
Cave’s father died in a car accident when he was only 19. I guess he asks himself, ‘If there really is an interventionist God, why didn’t he intervene to prevent the car accident from happening?’
But some people have no trouble at all believing in an interventionist God, like my colleague at work in Darnall. We set off for home from a conference in Newcastle at 4pm one Friday afternoon and I had to drive her down the A1 and put her on the 6.15pm train from the railway station close to where I live.
We knew when we set out that it was going to be a close run thing. Getting behind a slow moving lorry, which spent about 10 miles overtaking a convoy of even slower moving lorries, didn’t help. When we got to the centre of Pontefract we were still ten minutes’ drive from my local station and we knew, by checking on the internet, that the train was running only one minute late. That minute was going to be crucial.
‘There are two sets of traffic lights between here and the station,’ I said when we got to Purston Jaglin. ‘If they’re green we might make it!’ Sure enough, the first set of lights turned green as we approached them. So far, so good. But when we reached the second set there were eight cars in front of us.
‘I have to warn you,’ I said to my colleague, ‘That I’ve never seen this many cars go through those lights in one phase.’
‘You’ll have to jump them!’ she said. ‘That’s not going to happen,’ I thought. But anyway, we did get through the lights. When we pulled up outside the station she opened her car door and said, ‘I can hear the training coming!’ We jumped out, collected her bags and ran down the steps to the station. As we got onto the platform the train came to a halt, she got on and away it went.
Afterwards, she sent me a text: ‘I think God had his hand in the timing on that journey!’ she wrote/ Now how does that work? Did God stop the traffic lights from changing? And if so, why didn’t He prevent the lorry driver from pulling out in front of us on the A1 and slowing us down for 10 long miles?
I struggle to believe in an interventionist God, a God who just waves a magic wand and puts things right for us. My colleague was asking me to believe that God influenced the timings on our journey from Newcastle, like the time God intervened in the Battle of Gibeon, when first He threw down huge hailstones from heaven and then made the sun stand still, and the moon stop, until the nation of Israel had taken vengeance on their enemies. Even the writer of the story in Joshua acknowledges how exceptional it was that God apparently fought for Israel. ‘There has been no day like it, before or since,’ he says.
Nevertheless, I think Nick Cave’s song is rather sweet. He asks, if God does intervene in people’s lives, please would He not intervene in Susy’s life. ‘I would kneel down and ask Him not to intervene when it came to you, not to touch a hair on your head; to leave you as you are.’
Well, like Nick Cave, I struggle to believe in an interventionist God, a God who answers some prayers and not others, a God who rescues some people and allows others to perish. But, of course, in the end I can’t agree with the Nick Cave. I’m on Susy’s side. Although it maybe a struggle, I do believe in an interventionist God. And that’s because Easter is about God intervening. If we believe in the risen Jesus, we do believe that God intervenes.
Of course, that still leaves the question, ‘How much does God intervene?’ Paul, for example, is absolutely convinced that God intervened to raise Jesus from death. He says that he has met the risen Jesus himself, and that the risen Jesus turned his life upside down. He also says that the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time, so this wasn’t a dream or simply a personal experience, it was a real, tangible, shared experience. And yet he never mentions the empty tomb. Nor, for that matter, does he mention Jesus’ virgin birth. Instead, he says that Jesus was ‘descended from David according to the flesh’.
Paul was the first Christian theologian, yet it’s not entirely clear what sort of an interventionist God Paul believes in. But he does believe in an interventionist God, a God who gives us the promise of new life in Jesus.
Some early Christians believed, and modern Muslims also believe, that God intervened on the cross, to save Jesus from dying and take him straight to heaven’ leaving someone else - or the mere shell of Jesus’ human body - to die on the cross for him. But Paul doesn’t believe that.
Do you remember the passers-by who taunted Jesus on the cross, saying things like, ‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, “I am God’s Son.” ’ It’s axiomatic for Paul that God could not intervene to save Jesus from dying, he could only intervene to raise Jesus from death.
So like Paul, I do believe in an interventionist God, but I don’t believe in a God who can always intervene. I believe in a God who cannot necessarily prevent suffering and injustice but who can work in spite of them.
Nick Cave goes on to say, ‘And I don't believe in the existence of angels,’ but then he adds - very romantically - ‘But looking at you I wonder if that's true.’ I can go further than Nick Cave on this one. I can say a little more emphatically than he does that I don’t believe in angels - with not so many ‘buts’ this time, at least if we mean people clothed in dazzling white, perhaps with wings, or if we mean guardian angels assigned to take care of us. So I have trouble with the angel who rolled the stone away in Matthew’s account of Easter Day, whose appearance was like lightning, and whose clothing was white as snow.
But I do believe in messengers from God, which is what the word ‘angel’ actually means. I’m not sure what form those messengers actually take, though. The young man sitting in a white robe inside Jesus’ tomb in Mark’s version of the same story could be a less dramatic version of the sort of angel Matthew is thinking about, or he could be a fellow believer, someone inspired by God to come to the tomb and tell Mary Magdalene and the other women that Jesus has been raised and is going ahead of them; someone sent to make ‘bright and clear’ their path. And I do believe in angels if we mean people who are sent by God ‘to walk, like Christ, in grace and love’, and guide us into his arms.
And like Nick Cave, I do believe in love, and I know that you do, too. And I believe in a path that we can walk down, me and you, the path of love and self- offering that Jesus set out for us in his own life, death and resurrection. For those are the ultimate messages from the Easter story. First, that the love of God triumphs over everything, even sin and death. And second, that the living Lord Jesus still goes ahead of us - as he went before the first witnesses of his resurrection - making our journey bright and pure. And he will keep returning, always and ever more, just as the first Christians implored him to do in one of their communion prayers, ‘Marana-tha’ - ‘Come, Lord Jesus’.
Now you’ll say I’m messing with the words and sentiments of Nick Cave’s song. He was talking about his love for his wife whereas I‘m talking about the love of God revealed in Jesus. But then it was Nick Cave himself who said that any true love song is really a song for God.
So I do believe in an interventionist God. Not one who changes the traffic lights so someone can catch a train home for the weekend, but a God who raises the dead, who breathes new life into lost causes, who triumphs over suffering and loss, whose love can never be defeated, whose messengers still guide us into his arms, whose risen Son goes ahead of us on our path through life and even beyond death.
Comments
Maybe, the intervention only comes at death.
Certainly, not much evidence for its prior appearance if human lives are anything to go by. For your friends longer green light, was someone else's longer red.
He made commandments, he had angels come down and relay orders, he affected things, and yet there was still so much doubt in him and his existence. How dense can us humans be? And then he did the ultimate intervention, he sent Jesus down and Jesus performed miracles, actual miracles that could be seen with our own two eyes, and yet we (humans) end up crucifying him and years later the majority of the Jewish people believe he was just a prophet or something, not God in human form. I mean how dense are we humans?
I think God has proven his power time and time again and us humans have found ways to shrug it off, dismiss it and forget about it over time. So I think when he sent Jesus down to refine the message, that was his last big act. He's decided to take a backseat and watch how things go. What's interesting is there are many many Christians out there who believe in him without seeing actual miracles with their own two eyes, one could argue some believe more in God now that he doesn't intervene. I don't blame God, nobody has the right to blame God for anything, I blame humans and human nature. We have let him down, disappointed him, disobeyed him time and time and time and time again, how many more times can he get his heart broken?
That being said, I do believe God gives "nudges". Nothing big, but a nudge here, a small change there, etc. maybe to gently redirect the human race in a direction he wants us to go in, maybe to help out a Christian now and again, etc. but nothing BIG; and the nudge he gives could easily be explained off as luck or something scientific. It's up to us humans to see it for what it is.
Anyways I firmly believe in the Father (God, the Brain, the logic or intelligence), the Son (Jesus, the heart, the love, the emotion), and the Holy-Spirit (the muscle, the body); aka God. But I don't believe he intervenes anymore, not in a big way anyways, and I think it's our own fault.
"Yes and no", replied the deacon.
The Archbishop was aghast. "Explain yourself", he demanded.
The deacon replied. "If I were playing poker with God his pair of deuces could never beat my pair of aces".
If God were to intervene to change the rules of his creation it would make a nonsense of them
Think of this world like a cosmic sorter or souls. God sends a bunch of souls into it and then the ones coming out are sent to heaven or hell. This world is meant for us to prove where our soul will go. It's a test.
He's like a scientist who's setup an experiment in a exact way and then observes his creation. He has to be mostly passive, he can't make any big changes (anymore, I think a lot of the stuff from the Bible including Jesus was part of an attempt to steer us in the right direction, to provide groundwork and rules and such for the cosmic sorter experiment) or he risks ruining the experiment. But he loves us and he wants us to know he hasn't completely abandoned us and so he nudges things around once in a while, something we could easily explain away if we wished to remain ignorant and stubborn. This is God's world, his experiment, and that's fine. He's God, he can do whatever he wants, and lucky for us he wants us, he hasn't given up on us, etc. I could be completely wrong, I'm like an ant trying to figure out a human being, I may have some parts right or I could be completely wrong, but really it's just philosophical. I believe in Jesus, I accept him into my heart, I admit that I'm a sinner, and I do my best to follow his commandments. So regardless of what I think God does or doesn't do or why he does it, it really doesn't change a thing. I will continue to be a good good Christian and do what I can to make it into the kingdom of heaven.
choices and timing are mostly a mystery to me but I know it when I see it.
ery tho to me.
My question is how can you prove that God isn't intervening most of the time. If you had a parallel World with exactly the same people and conditions, one with God and one without God, you might be able to demonstrate that there are different outcomes from the two Worlds. But we can't, so we have to accept that God intervenes, no matter how awful we might feel when he doesn't!
Edward Sharpe sang that he wanted to be the prayer and not the pray-er in his song I Don’t Wanna Pray.
The problem with belief in an interventionist God is that all sorts of awkward anomalies crop up. Some people ask me why does God allow earthquakes etc to happen. Eathquakes are caused by techtonic plates moving over molten rock. If there was no inner heat the planet might be dead. Same with hurricanes and floods - they are all part of dynamical systems of the earth without which there would be no life.
A very good novel that touches on these sort of things is Incognito by Petru Dimitriou. At one point the lead character says God is in a flower, God is in the concentration camps. I can’t remember the exact quote so I’ll send a correction if I’ve got it wrong. The
I believe that prayer should be used as a conversation with God and not for asking favours from it/her/him. Even if those favours are for others there is nearly always an element of self interest in them.
So maybe the slogan should be “Actions speak louder than prayers”.
Anyways, all that said, I mostly pray to God to thank him. To ask for forgiveness. I thank him for everything he's done and will ever do, thank him for my family, for my life, for me waking up in the morning. I ask for forgiveness because I know that I'm a sinner. I ask for inner strength and willpower and yes I even make a few simple requests like that he keep my family healthy and safe or help my brother recover from a surgery, but I do periodically preface it with "if you will it, can you please ..." or "if you have no opinion on xyz event and it won't cause any problems with your plans, can you please nudge xyz event in this direction" basically I'm trying not to presume that I can alter his will in any way. But maybe I can influence a nudge in one direction or another as long as it doesn't interfere with his plans. I guess in my head "it doesn't hurt to ask" but I in no way pretend that it will happen simply because I asked.
In general I just touch base with God, thank him, ask for forgiveness, let him know what's on my mind, ask for maybe one or two small things usually involving helping my direct family but I don't give him a huge "laundry" list of asks/requests, 2 or 3 items tops, whatever is at the top of my mind.
There's an interesting futurama episode where Bender meets "God" and that God basically said to him "If you do things right, people won't be so sure you did anything at all". that quote has always been of interest to me.
Anyways, pray though. Thank him. Tell him you love him. Ask for forgiveness. He's still God, he deserves our praise and love. But don't "expect" him to actively do anything for you, don't expect him to get you a Job when your Jobless, so you sit at home and do nothing waiting for God to drop a job in your lap. No, go out there and find a job; maybe God will nudge you in the right direction or direct the hearts of the right employers. Don't expect him to heal your child and so you do nothing; no, bring your child to the doctors, give them medicine, etc. do whatever you can in order to help your child. Maybe there was a 50/50 shot whether the medicine would actually be super effective or not, and so God nudged it in the right direction to make it very effective.
Whatever works for you.