. . . for the Lord makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Matthew 5:45
I think a lot of people assume that in Christianity God is the great punisher. If you do bad things, God punishes you. If you do good things, He rewards you.
This is the God we fear and this is the God we long for in a way and this is a God we can easily reject. Because bad things happen to good people all the time. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to things, and so the rhyme-and-reason God can just be dismissed. This is the God the atheists and agnostics have in mind and they’re right. That God doesn’t make sense. That God is dead.
But in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says something really astonishing, something I think we miss. He says that God makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and he causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
He’s saying to all of us, you’re right. The Big Daddy God doesn’t deserve our worship. He can’t be sustained. You’re right, life is way more complicated than that, way more apparently random, way more incomprehensible, and I am, too.
But in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says something really astonishing, something I think we miss. He says that God makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and he causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Or not random. Profligate. Abundant. Random in the sense of God showering down grace all the time, showering down reality. All we have to do is see it. Pick it up. Take it. All of us. It is like the sun and it is like the rain, that wild and generous and unpredictable.
No one is better than anyone else. No one is more deserving than anyone else. If we have good things, it’s not because we’re so great, spiritually or any other way. If we’re suffering, it’s not because we deserve it and it’s not because God doesn’t exist.
This is a God the atheists and agnostics cannot dismiss. This is a God who is not simplistic and easy. This is a wonderful, radical theology.
And there’s more. There are consequences to this theology. If God is like that, if he loves without reason, if he just loves, if he loves in some mysterious sense that at the same time doesn’t deny suffering and loss but is somehow present in it—if God is like that—then we have to be like that, too. That’s what Jesus is saying. Love like that.
Be like the sun. Be like the rain.