Iām old enough to remember JFKāsĀ assassination, the Texas clock tower sniper, Son of Sam, Jonestown, 911, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, and probably other horrors that are not now coming to mind. With the exceptions of a presidential murder and a terrorist attack on our largest city and our capital, I canāt recall the national attention being galvanized the way it has been in the wake of Fridayās killings at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. How can those who profess Christian faith account for this, or otherwise put it into some meaningful context?
The reason this incident ranks so high on the horror scale is probably because most of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooter were children, and rather young children at that. Anyone who is a parent or grandparent, or can imagine being a parent or grandparent, is pretty much turned into a mass of quivering jelly by the mere thought of what happened in Newtown. It is essentially the sum of all our fears. But thatās not the real horror. The real horror is this: Yes, on December 14, 28 innocent people (and I include the shooter in the number, who was an innocent victim of his own mental illness) lost their lives suddenly and violently at Sandy Hook School. But Iām quite certain that at least 28 others, and probably many times over, also lost their lives suddenly and violently on the same day, just in our own country, to say nothing of the rest of the world. Each of those lives was equally precious as the lives lost in Newtown. Each of those victims have people who love them, and whose hearts are broken today. And there will be more tomorrow, and the day after that. Our attention is arrested when such events are aggregated, when they happen in one place and at one time. But they happen every day, and that is theĀ realĀ tragedy.
Human beings live under the power of sin and death. Life is nasty, brutish, and short for a great majority of people in this world. That is a fundamental data point of our experience. And delivering us from this power is precisely what we mean byĀ salvation, when we say that GodsavesĀ us. GodāsĀ project, as it were, is to bring forth a new creation, one in which perfect love reigns supreme (which itself obviates any need for justice or peace), and every tear is wiped away.
So when the world asks us, as Christian believers, āWhere was God at Sandy Hook School?ā, there (almost literally) are no wordsāor, at least, not very many. The best thing we can do is pointāas always, pointing to Jesus. We point to Jesus, lying in a feeding trough in a barn as an innocent newborn infantācompletely vulnerable, completely exposedāand say simply, āThere is God.ā And there is no truer statement we could make, because there is God; indeed, GodĀ with us. We then point to the cross, to a naked and bleeding Jesus dying there, still as innocent as the day he was born, and we say, āThere is God.ā And there is no truer statement we could make, because there is God; indeed, GodĀ forĀ us.
The only other word we can then speakāor, perhaps, not speak at all, but singāis an ancient hymn that is preserved in the Eastern liturgies, but some westerners know: āChrist is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.ā When used liturgically, this hymn is sung over and over again, at increasing tempo and increasing volume. It is worth singing over and over, at increasing tempo and increasing volume. It is precisely what we can say when the horror we confront is untellable. It is what weĀ mustĀ say. While the wound is fresh, we cannot say very much more, and we ought not to say anything less.