By Paul Gallagher

An earthquake was strangely predictable in Melbourne this week! It’s not that I had an inside whisper from forces beneath my feet. But given how many disasters and distressing events have hit this part of Australia since the deadly summer of 2019-20, we should have expected a comet too, and maybe a tsunami to bookend the evening news.

Not only did we endure a 6.0 earthquake that rattled our city of 5 million people on Wednesday (22nd), but rioters took control of the State’s most sacred secular space, occupying the shrine of remembrance to our fallen war heroes.

At the start of the day, we were shaking and rushing for safety. By the end, we watched live feeds of Police on horseback and their colleagues on foot using rubber pellets with semi automatic rifles across ground reserved for grieving – from tears to tear gas in one day.

A people savaged by disease, a planet shaken by tectonic pain, and the sound of men with rifles seemed strangely connected.

It reminded me how a season of sickness, tremors and violence have an echo in Scripture. In Luke 21:11, we read how there will be ‘great earthquakes’ in a time of ‘pestilences’ (Luke 21:11). The prospect of ‘nations’ battling and ‘kingdoms’ in conflict is associated with ‘earthquakes’ when Matthew records the words of Jesus (Matthew 24:27).

Quakes also portend shaking of a glorious kind!

Paul and Silas were enjoying a worshipful karaoke night in a prison when a quake rocked the foundations of the walls they were chained between in Acts 16:26. So powerful was that divine interruption that every door was flung open.

Better still, a quake rocked Jerusalem twice in three days years before to mark the death and resurrection of our Saviour (Matthew 27:51, 28:2).

My peace comes from an almost casual moment following another seismic event. In Matthew 28:2, we read of a ‘great earthquake’ rocking the city, and how an angel sent to announce the glorious defeat of death merely relaxes on the very stone that was rolled back. In the words of Matthew, the angel’s response to a once immovable object was to merely sit on it!

And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.

Matthew 28:2 ESV

That’s my prayer this morning, the day after a day of days, even in the midst of a fearful time. I am going to picture the immovable rock now cast to the side, and follow the example of an angel two millennia past: Seated, relaxed, not running from scenes and sounds of defeat but merely sitting on them as memorials to what once seemed riveted and immovable for eternity.