Autonomy of creation
Influenced by an ancestral religious belief that when a calamity befalls us or others, we may not express it in words, but we always have the feeling that it was God's punishment, and we end up asking, "Did I do something against you, God?" or "Why is this happening to me?" To which I sometimes sarcastically reply, "And why not to you?" Anything can happen to any of us.
It was this idea that Job's friends tried to instill in him, "If all this tragedy has happened to you, losing your wealth, your health and your children, it is because you have done something against God who is now punishing you." Job professes his innocence and indirectly states that no one is free from tragedies, disasters, even though he has not broken any laws, neither God’s nor nature’s.
Creation is autonomous. God created it and gave it independence and autonomy, as He has done for us. God who creates nature with its laws, will not be the first to break them by capriciously intervening against these same laws. It is true that we no longer understand nature in the manner of Newton's physics, that is, functioning mechanically like a Swiss clock.
Even understanding reality as we understand it today in the manner of quantum physics, where the laws of nature do not always occur at all times and in all places in the same way but according to a statistical probability, even understanding a nature where there is room for chance, uncertainty and indetermination, nothing happens that God does not know and has not foreseen. Creation has a high degree of autonomy, but it is neither outside of God's design nor is God outside of it, for He is immanent, that means He is at the heart of everything that He has created.
God's punishments are human anthropomorphisms
The Bible in the Old Testament is full of episodes where God appears as vengeful and punitive: the flood (Genesis 6:9–8:22), the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:20–21, 19:23–28), and the ten plagues of Egypt (Exodus, chapters 7–12) among others.
The truth is that God does not punish anyone, God does not know how to punish, He does not know how to curse, He only knows how to bless, and He only wants what is good for us. The image we must have of God is the one that Jesus of Nazareth transmits to us. The Old Testament image is an anthropomorphism, that is, it is a way of imagining God in a human way. It is a human projection of God's identity. Since I am punitive and vengeful, I project onto God the image I have of myself.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9
God is not responsible, nor is it willed by Him, the evil that happens to us, whether it be in the form of an accident, calamity or illness. God who makes rain fall on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45) loves us all unconditionally, He does not love the good more than the bad, nor the righteous more than the unrighteous.
Nature punishes
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ Ezekiel 18:2
The fact that God does not punish does not mean that there are no punishments. Every good deed has a reward and every bad deed has a punishment. The rewards are given by God in the form of graces granted; the punishments are handed out by nature.
God always forgives, men forgive sometimes, and nature neither forgives nor forgets. What we do against nature, whether our human nature, individual and social, or the physical nature, will be paid for by either us or someone else somewhere down the line.
In other words, “what goes around comes around”; both the good and the evil that we do have a boomerang effect. As the Portuguese people are known to say, "evil stays with those who practice it", or even "what they do here is paid for here".
Take for example the consumption of alcohol: our liver has the capacity to breakdown a certain amount of alcohol, anything more than that amount will damage the liver and the consequences are always harmful, as we know. Sin is the e-mail, penance or punishment is the attachment.
The astronomical universe, whether that of physical nature, animal nature or human nature, is governed by the same laws; no one breaks these laws without paying the price.
At the individual level, therefore, what we do against our nature will be paid for by us or by some descendants of ours; what is certain is that someone will pay. Nothing is done against nature that does not have consequences. Punishment or penance follows sin, and is subsequent to it like the attachment of an email.
The planet's temperature is rising due to an excessive accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that prevents the heat of the planet from escaping into the outer space thus trapping it in the atmosphere. Some consequences are already visible, but they will get far worse if we do not start to drastically reduce the emission of this gas.
God adapts to us
God always writes straight on crooked lines.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
When we break a plate, God picks up the broken pieces and tries to put them back together. When Adam and Eve sinned, God did not just stand by unmoved and unperturbed, savouring nature’s vengeance which has turned against those who broke its laws, punishing them, instead He devised a plan to save them.
The prodigal son abandoned his father in search of a false freedom, and the father let him go, respecting his wrong choice, knowing full well that certain lessons are learned only experientially, by getting it wrong before getting it right.
Furthermore, we cannot force an adult to do good; a child who does not know the difference between good and evil, yes, we can force him to do good; for an adult, however, good has to be his choice, not an imposition.
God who, out of respect for our freedom, allows us to do evil, has no desire for revenge like the Old Testament tells us by means of certain anthropomorphisms. On the contrary, God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a compassionate God, not even slow to anger, but completely devoid of it. Like prodigal children far away from Him, He never forgets or loses sight of us, He is always on the lookout in the hope we come back one day, and when we eventually do, He throws a party to celebrate our return.
The sheep ceases to be orderly and wants to be the black sheep. It leaves the flock, wanting to see what's beyond to discover new pastures, to experiment, and ends up getting lost. But the shepherd does not abandon it in the face of danger, and when he sees that it is lost in its quest and wants to return to the flock, the shepherd searches high and low until he finds the sheep. When he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders and rejoices; he and his friends throw a feast to celebrate its return.
We men killed the Saviour of Humanity, we were free to do so, but God who writes straight on crooked lines and who manages to draw good out of our evil ways, who always adapts to our mistakes, seeking the best solution for them, rose him from the dead to make him the first of those who are saved.
God does not want the death of the sinner. In the face of our evil, even deserved evil, He always seeks ways to save us from situations in which we put ourselves or others, or nature puts us. This happens because God is the supreme law and everything is subject to Him no matter how crooked our paths may be.
God, because He loves us and respects our freedom and our bad choices, lets us enter the tunnel of error and anxiously awaits us on the other side. And if He sees that we do not come out and are in trouble, whenever we call upon Him, He shows up at the appointed hour with the seventh cavalry to save us from the cobwebs we got ourselves entangled in.
Conclusion: God always forgives and forgets, He always blesses, never curses; nature, on the contrary, does not forgive, nor forgets and always punishes.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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