Guest contributor

Biblical authors sometimes describe events as though they occurred quite by chance. Two incidents in particular spring to my mind.

There is Ruth, newly arrived in Israel, setting off one morning to scrape a living for herself and her mother-in-law. And on that very first venture into the Bethlehem barley harvest, ‘she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz’ (Ruth 2:3). It sounds so haphazard. Ruth, it seems, could just have easily ended up gleaning some other farmer’s plot; it was merely the random gravitation of her legs that took her in Boaz’s direction.

And then there is Simon of Cyrene, the man compelled by Roman soldiers to carry Jesus’ cross. Simon, we are told, was ‘a passer-by…coming in from the country’ (Mk. 15:21). It makes his involvement in the story sound completely accidental. His commute to Jerusalem might have occurred half an hour earlier or half an hour later; it was just ‘one of those things’ that his journey intersected with Jesus’ journey at that moment.

It requires only a little thought, however, to realise that these are not at all the chance occurrences they appear to be. God’s Messiah, ‘foreknown before the foundation of the world’ (1 Pet. 1:20), was to have Ruth and Boaz as his ancestors (Mt. 1:5); there was thus no possibility of her drifting into a different field that morning, settling under a different employer, marrying a different man.

As for Simon, it is significant that his sons, Alexander and Rufus, are mentioned as men known to the original readers (Mk. 15:21). By the time Mark wrote his gospel, they must have been part of the early church, their conversions presumably linked in some way to their father’s encounter with Jesus. This means that Alexander and Rufus had been chosen in Christ ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1:4). Those soldiers on the road to Golgotha, therefore, had to pick Simon from the crowd – to set in motion a sequence of events that would bring some of the elect to saving faith. 

Why, then, are these moments presented as flimsy little flukes? The answer, surely, is that the authors are making a point. It is with a twinkle in the eye that they write like this. They are gently deriding the whole concept of chance occurrences, directing readers to the hair-splitting precision with which God controls the unfolding of events. That precision extends to the trajectory of a young woman’s footsteps upon entering a barley field. It extends to the coinciding of grabbing soldier and passing commuter on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It extends to everything. The God who has delicately situated our planet on just the right orbit, where the sun heats without consuming us, applies the same attention to detail as he rules history.

That should temper our fearfulness regarding Covid-19. It is not some kind of lottery whether or not I happen to walk through the air in which an infected person has just coughed; whether or not I touch a surface on which the virus has recently alighted. Where I walk and what I touch are no more at the mercy of chance than the movements of Ruth and Simon in those narratives. That does not mean I should recklessly walk anywhere and touch anything, for God has made us responsible creatures who should exercise prudence. But, getting up each morning, I may fall back on this as my ultimate assurance: every particle that will swirl around me – through every millisecond of the day – is under orders from its maker.