As you can imagine, a talk by John Bell from the Iona community, a veteran contributor to the “other” TFTD on radio 4, was always going to be popular at Greenbelt. But with a title of “Did God save Donald Trump?” it was guaranteed to be a sell out!
John Bell started with the premise of “if God saved Trump, why didn’t he save the guy behind him?” So, does God intervene sometimes, and not others?
There are many stories of how people have been saved from disaster by divine intervention, fate, serendipity. A man travelled by train every day from his home to his place of work in the north of Scotland. He was a creature of habit and took the same train every day to work, and at the same time on his return home in the evening. On this particular day, the man was delayed and had to stay in the office to finish a piece of work. It just so happened that a storm blew up and the train he would have normally caught was derailed, resulting in multiple loss of life. The man could have claimed divine intervention, but what about those people who had tragically died?
In John’s gospel there is the story of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda. Jesus spots the man and says to him “take up your mat and walk,” and this is exactly what the man, who had been unable to walk for 38 years, does. But we are also told that “a great number of disabled people” would lay at the poolside. Why does Jesus heal just one and not the others?
Later in the story, the man encounters Jesus again and says to the man, “see you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”
So was Jesus healing that particular man divine intervention or was it an opportunity for the man to act differently?
In another story, Jesus picks Zaccheus out of the crowd and chooses to go to his house for a meal. As a result of that encounter Zaccheus, a tax collector, declares that he will give half of his income to the poor, and if he has defrauded anyone he will repay them four times over.
Was Jesus’ encounter divine intervention or an opportunity for Zaccheus to act differently?
Prayer: Gracious and merciful Father, thank you that we can meet with you and in doing so we are given that opportunity to act differently. Forgive us that it often takes some prompting for us to do so. Forgive us when our lack of humility makes us think we are more deserving than others for that grace you so freely give. AMEN