Like many Americans, I wept when I heard the news from
yesterday. Perhaps it’s because I have a
kindergartener myself. Perhaps it’s just
the utter disbelief that it happened in an elementary school. Whatever it was, the news of yesterday’s
shooting in Connecticut hit me harder than any story since 9/11.
Now after this tragedy, as is the case after every tragedy,
we are once again faced with the question, “Why?” For those of us who believe in God, we are
faced with the even more difficult question, “How could God allow this to
happen?” While I don’t really know the
answer to that (and anyone who claims to is lying), I wanted to jot down a few
thoughts just in case they might be helpful to someone somewhere asking these
same age-old questions.
1.
This
school shooting was not God’s will. Sadly,
Christians are coming out of the woodwork to explain how this could be God’s will. I’ve heard it said, “This is God’s punishment
for our nation removing prayer from schools” and other such nonsense. Plain and simple, this did not come from
God. To think that it did is to turn God
into the devil.
2.
Yesterday’s events can be best understood as an act of human free will. Perhaps God could have created a world in
which free will did not exist, but he judged that human free will and all that
comes with it – both good and bad – was preferable to a universe populated by
robots.
3.
This
shooting is not the end of the story. As Christians, we must insist that evil does
not have the final say. To paraphrase
St. Paul, “We mourn, but not as those who have no hope.” We do not know what the end of the story will
look like exactly, but we do believe that even the worst of evils will pale in
comparison to the beauty and goodness that will envelop us. This is not to downplay what happened and how
horrific it was; it is just to insist that what happened yesterday is not the
end of the Grand Story. We believers
insist on the truth of Jesus’ words:
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)
4.
The
victims did nothing wrong to deserve this.
It’s truly remarkable that some Christians today still see tragedies
like this as a sort of retributive justice from an angry God. We heard the same drivel after Katrina. To those who make such hurtful and misguided
claims, I plead, “Please read the book of Job.”
Or perhaps recall the time Jesus said: “What about those twelve people
who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them? Do you think that they were more guilty of wrongdoing
than everyone else in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4). The point:
there is no correlation between tragedies and the morality of those who
suffer from them.
5. If we
feel pain over loss, God feels it all the more. The picture of God in Scripture is the
Suffering One. When we want to see the
heart of the divine mystery, we look upon the cross. Let’s not get this mixed up: God is
not the one inflicting pain; he is the one feeling pain next to us. Too many Christians get this wrong and
make God out to be evil rather than good.
I realize that I’m not saying anything new here. There’s nothing very profound in what I’ve
written. Yet I feel that people need to
hear this simple theology in the midst of tragedy. As many struggle to make sense of what happened
this week, we join them, recognizing that we don’t have all of the
answers. But in the meantime we cling to
hope. If we believe anything as
Christians it is this: God is good, all
the time. All the time, God is good.
