A Few Pastoral Reflections on Newtown

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.