Rain

He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matt 5:45 (NIV)

Rain can ruin your weekend
Or rain can spare your life
Depending on who you are and what your thirst is like

From “Some Folk’s World,” by Mark Heard. © 1983 Bug & Bear Music.

Do Jesus’ words in Matthew only imply that good comes to both good and bad people or that both good and bad come to each of them?

Being raised in urban southern California, rain was ordinarily considered a bad thing. Oh, it might have its uses, like washing away the smog so we could see the nearby mountains for a few days, but the L.A. lifestyle is predicated upon sunshine. For me, the sun in this verse was God shining down his good things and the rain was God pouring out bad.

In subsequent years, I have lived in places where rain is something other than inconvenient. In the deserts of New Mexico, where seven inches was the average annual rainfall, almost any rain was welcome. Anything less than the average was cause for concern. In the late 1990s we suffered a five-year drought that nearly dried up the Rio Grande.

Average rainfall in the St. Louis region where I live now is thirty-eight inches, which is a whole lot more than I am used to or even enjoy. I found it amazing that the local weather forecasters were lamenting our drought conditions after rainfall totals of thirty-three inches in 2006 and 28 inches in 2007. Drought? Let me take you to New Mexico if you want to see drought.

Of course, it is not just the departure from normal that was a problem here. For the farmers, not getting expected rainfall did impact their crop yields of corn and soybeans. While there was more than enough rain for me, there still wasn’t quite enough for them.

This year (at the time of writing this) was a different story. For just the first half of the year we have reached thirty-one inches. The ground won’t dry out long enough for many farmers to plant. Everyone has seen the news reports of the Mississippi River breaking through levees and flooding cities and towns from Iowa to just north of St. Louis.

Depending on the time, the place, and what one does for a living, a certain amount of rainfall could be good for some and bad for others. Just as I suppose there can be a downside to too much sun. So perhaps, as Mark Heard suggests, Jesus’ words are ambiguous. Maybe he did not mean for either the sun or the rain to be seen as good or bad, but merely to understand that most of what happens in this life occurs equally upon all people, good or bad.

And the real message behind that point is that we would understand that all people, Christian or not, are under God’s watchful eye. Therefore, we must treat even non-Christians as people deserving of both God’s love and ours.