(The Nationalist, 19 March 2004)
Does God punish people for sin? I know some who answer that question with a Yes. For example, they say, that people who contract AIDS are being punished by God for their sexual sins.
There are problems about that. For one thing, the fact that people contract AIDS does not necessarily mean they have committed sexual sin. A simple example is where one partner is faithful, the other not; but the faithful partner may still contract the disease. For another, those who hold that God punishes people for their sins usually have sexual sins in mind. They seem also to imply that the punishment fits the crime, sexual sin leading to sexual disease. But have you ever heard anyone apply the same logic to those who steal, make false claims for insurance or compensation, evade just taxes, or pay wages to people below the legal limit? Does God punish their greed with impoverishment? It doesn’t seem to work that way. And drunken drivers who kill pedestrians often escape with little or no injury but walk away laughing.
Misfortunes of various kinds have their own significance. For someone who believes in God, there is no such thing as coincidence, luck or chance. Nothing is without meaning; everything has a purpose. But what the ultimate purpose may be in the sight of God is often not clear to the person concerned.
For instance, history tells the story of two young men, one called Francis, the other Ignatius, both of them soldiers wounded in battle. During convalescence, they had the opportunity of thinking about their life and what they were doing with it. They used it well, Francis becoming Saint Francis of Assisi, and Ignatius Loyola founding the Jesuits. Were their wounds punishment for having gone into battle, or a heaven-sent opportunity for needed reflection?
I don’t want to replace one facile understanding of God’s will with another one. You can’t read through history, attributing all the good to God, and all the evil to people, the devil, or the fall of Adam. I feel uneasy with people who say that this or that is “God’s will”, as if they had a hot line to heaven. Such attitudes are simplistic, and, in the long run, lead either to fundamentalism, or to its opposite pole, atheism.
What is God’s will? It is, simply, to love. Our job is to love, and leave judgments to God. At the end of live we will be judged on how we have loved.