Does the Bible have anything to say about Japan’s devastating earthquake? Because I wrote about biblical responses to pain some years ago, people occasionally ask me what the Bible says about natural disasters. It’s discomfiting — not the question (it’s a good one, and I’m happy to discuss it), but the absence of a single honest answer to give. Most people know the stories of Noah’s ark and Sodom and Gomorrah. Many are also familiar with Jesus’ describing “wars and rumors of wars,” earthquakes, and famine as “the birth pangs” of a better time, or of the apocalyptic prognostications of Revelation. In other words, they know how the Bible tells of God orchestrating cosmic events of destruction to punish people or clean the slate, but they suspect that’s not the only word or way of reading. The existence of such stories and passages has armed often well-meaning people with the slings and arrows of criticism, dismissal, and even hate. But the Bible speaks with many voices, each representing faithful efforts to understand our place in relation to God, to others, and to the world around us. There are different kinds of literatures in the Bible that deserve to be treated, then, in different ways. Some preclude literalist interpretations (Noah’s ark, for example); some demand contextualization (explanations of national defeat that exonerate God even at the expense of the people, for example); and some are unapologetically human efforts to express human experience, including suffering and pain (the book of Psalms is full of these). That there are so many different perspectives in the Bible, so many different ways of wresting sense out of senseless and comfort out of disaster, solicits sympathy and compassion. The Bible demands that we listen with whole hearts and minds, that we bring our humanity to bear on our reading. That posture and process may be the answer — not so much why did God do this, or how could God let this happen, but how do we respond with human kind-ness? I cannot answer with a single tidy word what the Bible says about natural disasters. But I can suggest that to its many voices, we are invited to add ours — of collective lament for great loss and enduring grief; of repentance for any way in which our actions, choices, or ideas may have contributed to the destruction (as an ecological response to human behavior, for example); and of hope in a future we cannot know full of possibilities we cannot yet imagine.
