Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

Part One of Four

Does everything happen for a reason?

This is the first of a four-part Saturday Evening Blog series dedicated to a phrase that irritates as many people as it comforts. The phrase is: everything happens for a reason. Here we go.

Almost everybody has heard it. It is usually said at a funeral, or when something tragic or unexpected has happened, and it is usually spoken by someone who means well — someone who either doesn’t know exactly what to say, or who believes it with all of their heart. Everything happens for a reason. We just don’t know what the reason is.

I am going to end up defending that sentence. But not in the way it is normally meant.

The normal meaning runs like this. If we were omniscient — if we could see all the players and all the pieces and how the whole thing turns out in the end — we would conclude that there is more than cosmic bookkeeping going on here. There is a plan bigger than we can comprehend, and this event occurred as part of it, and it is all going to balance out, and we will finally feel blessed by God. If we could look long enough and hard enough at our own wreckage, we would stop sorting it into piles — this part was cruel, this part was kind — and the grander story would emerge, and we would all say together that every single thing happened for a reason.

There are many people who hear that phrase and cringe. They believe it is not merely false but cruel, and that the very people it is meant to comfort receive the exact opposite of comfort.

I want to say plainly that both of them are usually standing at the same graveside. The one who says it is not childish. The one who flinches is not faithless. What is missing between them is not sincerity. What’s missing is a better way to say it.

Thomas Edison once said that there is a better way for everything, and that his job was to find it. What I intend to do in this four-part series is find a better way to say everything happens for a reason.

So right off the bat, here is that better way:

The reason for everything is the cross of Christ. The reason everything happens traces its roots to the cruciform shape of reality.

Everything that happens is revealing, in its own unique way, both the glories and the horrors of the Crucified One. Not illustrating them. Not symbolizing them. Manifesting them.

That is an enormous claim, and it is not one I am going to defend in a single Saturday evening. Over the next four Saturdays I intend to call three witnesses who are not usually put on the stand in church. The first witness is a physicist. The second is a mathematician. The third is a biologist. Each of them will testify — without really even knowing that is what they are doing — about the event of Good Friday.

The remainder of this first blog is going to focus on one word: coincidence.

A coincidence is two or more events that happen by apparently mere chance.

Notice what that definition is really doing. It dispenses with cause and effect, and then it rejoices that there is no apparent cause. The absence is the entire delight. If you could find a cause, the thing would stop being a coincidence and go back to being just another one of the trillion events that happened today.

But take a close look at the weasel word sitting in the middle of that definition. Apparent. Without apparent cause.

Apparent to whom?

Because I am unable to see the cause, does that mean there is no cause? Maybe we have gotten a little sloppy about the difference. Every coincidence in your life is a confession about the limits of your vision, dressed up as a statement about the structure of the universe.

Finding the cross in, with, and under all things is a tricky business. Many people will recognize that phrase — in, with, and under. It is how we speak of the Lord’s Supper. I am using it here for the cosmos, and I am doing that on purpose.

Here is an example, and it is a true story.

A woman grows up in Chicago in the 1940s. When she is small, her mother gives away some of her childhood books to Goodwill. Fifty years later, in a used bookstore in Colorado Springs, she happens upon one of those books and finds her own name written inside the cover. Two thousand miles and half a century, and the book comes back to her.

Something in your emotions — maybe even in your soul — wants to feel magic for a moment. You want to reach for the phone and call somebody.

Here is the rest of the story. Her older brother had concocted the whole thing. He had kept one of those precious childhood books for all those years, and then he followed her into the store and set it on a shelf where he was fairly sure she would find it.

Now notice what just happened inside of you. Something drained out, didn’t it? The wonder went flat. There is a real diminishment in the event, even though the man was trying to give his sister a wonderful surprise.

And that is genuinely strange, because the second version is by far the better story. A brother carried his sister’s book for five decades and then arranged a miracle for her out of nothing but love and patience and a good memory. You wouldn’t trade that for random. Not really.

And yet the discovery of a cause deflated the whole thing. We have been trained from childhood to believe that having an explanation and being truly enchanting are competitors — that once we know why, a thing stops being amazing. Explanation is the acid we pour over wonder. That is the arrangement, and nearly every cause you have ever met has honored it.

There is exactly one exception in the entire universe.

There is one cause whose discovery does not shrink the event but enlarges it. One cause that makes everything it explains bigger rather than smaller. And that cause is Good Friday — the crucifixion of God himself. Every other cause is a mechanism you can hold at arm’s length once you understand it. This one is a Person, and he does not hold still for that.

Why that cause behaves so differently from every other cause is the payoff of this four-part series, and I am going to make you wait for it. Fair warning.

But you can already see the obstacle, because it is enormous and it is sitting right smack dab in the middle of the road. The crucifixion of Jesus appears to be a single, limited, changeless moment in history, with a chain of cause and effect that we think we can reconstruct. By every ordinary measure it is a part of history rather than the whole of it.

Everything that happens, happens because of the cross of Christ. That sacrifice on Golgotha captures the whole of history even though it appears to be only a piece of it. How can one event be every event? How can one moment contain all of life’s diversity?

I am not engaging in rhetorical flourish here, and I do not intend to dodge the question with flowery poetic language. This is a structural question. It demands a structural answer, and that is the entire burden of this series. Those rigorous scientific answers are already lying around in the sciences, in plain sight, waiting for somebody to notice whose shape they are and where they are pointing.

Next Saturday we call our first witness, the physicist, and he will hand us three things: symmetry, invariance, and entropy. He will explain — without knowing that is what he is doing — how something that never changes is the engine behind everything that does.

The Saturday after that we hear from the mathematician about faces and vases, about the axioms you are permitted to break, and about the very peculiar arithmetic in which a part of something is the same size as the whole.

And on the fourth and final Saturday, the biologist will look us right in the eye and tell us that we are not exactly who we thought we were.

I’m Frank Balgeman, the Physics Pastor from the Santa Cruz Mountains. God bless and have a fantastic Saturday evening.