Over the years, my weather-related expectations have changed and I’ve come to pray less for sunny days. Perhaps that’s because I’m getting older and wiser (oh, I hope the second is as true as the first). But I also like to think it’s from my cross-cultural experiences.
I do hear a lot of weather prayers around me, though. Sure, from time to time there are tornadoes and floods and droughts and blizzards to pray against, but most often in my corner of the world prayers concern the blessing of sunshine and the annoyance of rain.
Is that what Jesus is talking about when he says that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45 NIV)? Does he mean that good and bad things happen to good and bad people? I don’t think so now, but for much of my life I did.
In context, Jesus is talking about how we should give something good (love) to our enemies and persecutors, in the same way that God gives the sunshine and rain to us all. There certainly are places in the Bible that talk about bad things happening to good people, but I don’t think this is one of them.
Where did I come up with this misunderstanding of Jesus’ words? In Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien point out that those of us from the cultural West often miss the meaning of Bible passages when we don’t see them from the point of view of the authors and audiences of Bible times. I think that my interpretation of Jesus’ rain reference in the Sermon on the Mount falls into that category.
Growing up on a Missouri farm, I had parents who often checked the rain gauge that sat on a fence post behind the tractor shed. My dad and mom were well aware what effects too little or too much precipitation could have on the crops. But then I relocated to the city for college and became less concerned with how a rain shower’s timing coincided with the planting and harvesting cycles. I cared more with how it affected my personal plans.
I’m not the only one who’s made the move from an agrarian to urban way of thinking. According to the UN (as reported by the World Bank), in 1960, 34% of the world’s population were urban. By 2018, that number had grown to 55%. At that time, UN projections showed that the global proportion would be 57% in 2023, with 83% of North Americans and 78% of those in Europe and Central Asia living in urban areas. Compare that to how much has changed in the 2000 years since Jesus’ day, when an even greater majority of the people had a direct tie to the land and the goods that it produced. It makes sense that Jesus used so many agricultural metaphors to get his message across, and it made sense to his listeners to see rain as a blessing. But today, as I live and work in air-conditioned buildings with drinkable water only a faucet handle away, much of my thoughts about rain center around whether I’ll need an umbrella for my walk to the car.
Today, I often hear prayers for nice, sunny days. We want good weather for an outdoor wedding, for a trip to the lake, or for an outreach event in the park. But what would happen if all of our prayers were answered with sunshine? We’d probably end up with the longest drought in history—not good for farmers, agricultural workers, herders and, in time, for the entire world. But in the short term, I’d have some great days for painting my porch . . . which brings me to another aspect of my cultural background: a focus on the individual rather than the communal.
In Misreading Scripture, Richards and O’Brien have a chapter titled “Captain of My Soul: Individualism and Collectivism.” In it they discuss how Westerners often focus on a personal, private relationship with Christ, rather than on membership in a Christian community. This, they say, can be promoted for us English speakers by what the authors call “a flaw in the English language [that] works together with our love for individualism.” That “flaw” is that we, unlike Hebrew and Greek speakers, have only one word for a singular and plural you.
Thus, we tend to read verses such as Jeremiah 29:11 as if it were written for each of us individually. When God declares, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (NIV), we don’t hear a plural you referring to Jerusalem or a collection of people, but instead we hear a singular you aimed at each of us independently. God wants me to prosper, and soon—not my people in generations to come.
It isn’t easy, but I’m trying to remember that it’s not all about me. God isn’t going to, and shouldn’t, tailor every weather pattern to my scheduled activities. And that extends to myriad other circumstances in my life, as well. In all sorts of areas, what I want or need may be just the opposite of what others want or need. As C. S. Lewis puts it, my downhill could be someone else’s uphill:
Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going up hill. If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves.
I pray less for sunny days than I used to . . . and I think that being exposed to communal cultures, living outside my home country’s normal news boundaries, and reading the Bible more accurately has made a difference. Instead, I pray that I will be able to make the best of my day regardless of whether or not the sun shines. And I pray that others will see me handle rainy-day situations well. Yes, I do pray fervently when tornados touch down or when hurricanes or floods threaten, but I pray less for weather variations simply to accommodate my personal desires and goals. Actually, let me restate that first part: I pray fervently when severe weather threatens me or those close by, but my sporadic prayers are still less than fervent when it comes to famine or flooding half a world away. I’m working on that.
We all need to pray less for just our own locales and more for the huge swaths of people around the globe who face disastrous weather each day. We need to pray that those of us with much will be willing and able to help those at the mercy of the elements. We need to pray that in all areas our down-hill walk does not cause someone else a more difficult journey. We need to pray less for our will and more for God’s will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
This is a reworking of two posts I wrote several years ago at my blog here and here.
(Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible, IVP, 2012; “Urban Population,” World Bank Group, 2018; C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Centenary Press, 1940)
[photo: “Tomar – blue on a rainy day,” by Jaime Silva, used under a Creative Commons license]
