Haiti, Robertson and Lazarus

In the wake of the terrible earthquake in Haiti last week, Pat Robertson made one of his cringe-worthy comments.



When something terrible happens, we try to understand it. Sometimes we come up with foolish and offensive explanations. In fact, that's where the "pact with the Devil" story came from in the first place.

Haiti was once the richest possession of the French. They imported huge numbers of African slaves to work the cane fields. In the 1790's the slaves staged a successful revolt, winning freedom and equality for themselves. This was the first successful slave revolt and it terrified slave-holders in Europe and America. Shortly after this a story began to circulate that the slaves had held a huge ceremony in which they had pledged the island to Satan in return for his help in defeating the French.

It's debatable what actually happened, or if there even was a ceremony, but the story became popular and has been kept alive in some churches to this day. It's probably an attempt to explain how God could allow non-Christian slaves to successfully kill their Christian masters. Like other bad theology explanations, it's lead to a great deal of bigotry against the people of Haiti, which Robertson's comments have dragged out into the light.

I think we are at our worst when we try to explain away things that defy our understanding. I'm not saying it's wrong to try to understand them, only that it's a terrible mistake to latch onto some bogus explanation that makes us feel a little better. And when we grab hold of a bogus explanation that uses God as the reason, I think we are breaking the third commandment (Don't take God's name in vain) in the worst way possible. We are using God's name to try to justify our own judgmental ideas about things.

Of course, I've been trying to understand this catastrophe too, and I've also gone to the Bible. I haven't found an explanation, but I noticed something that seems significant to me.

Jesus once told a parable about a poor man named Lazarus. He sat at the doorstep of a rich man who lived very well while he struggled just to survive.

One day Lazarus and the rich man died and found themselves in very different circumstances. Lazarus was cared for and comforted (implicitly) in the presence of God while the rich man was cut off and in torment. We don't know much about the Rich Man. He may have been a crook or an honest business man. He may have been a villain or a pillar of society. The only thing we can say about him for certain is that he ignored the poor man at his gate. in the view of Jesus, that was unacceptable.

I can't say who the earthquake struck Haiti. A geologist has a much better shot of making sense of that question than a theologian. I can say that earthquake was roughly comparable in power to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that struck the Bay Area of central California. There were 63 deaths and nearly 4,000 injuries from that quake, which is tragic, but many orders of magnitude less than what the Haitians have suffered.

The reason is simply that Americans have the resources to build much better homes and buildings. In an earthquake, out structures hold up reasonably well, while the cheaper buildings of Haiti collapse, burying people in the rubble. No one could have prevented the quake, but if Haiti were more prosperous, the death toll would be vastly reduced.

For me the question isn't "why did God allow the quake to happen?", it is "what kind of neighbor has America been?" I think we've been a little too much like the rich man in the parable, enjoying our prosperity while our poor neighbor suffers on our doorstep.