My view is that God does not intervene directly in human affairs: to do so would make us like robots. We are surely meant to meet the many set-backs that we inevitably encounter and learn from them. The Church’s teaching that God sent Jesus into the world to die an appalling death in order to redeem mankind, is entirely an invention of theologians! Jesus would have foreseen that the moment he began to challenge the way the Pharisees taught the Jewish faith he would be arrested as a trouble maker and executed, for Pontius Pilate loathed the Jews and had thousands crucified during his rule. Jesus, as a man, had to endure the terror of knowing what would happen once he was arrested, leading to an excruciating death.
The words of Jesus on the cross – ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ – have such a ring of truth. But, significantly, they were not his final words, which were, ‘It is finished.’ In other words, as he says elsewhere, ‘Abba, I have done the work which you gave me to do’. This should be our prayer too. God may not intervene directly, but God’s presence, nonetheless, surrounds and holds us: we are never ultimately alone. As in the words of the mantra I use: God is present; God is here; God is now.
