I hesitate to write anything about the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School last week. The violence was pointless. The futility of the act leaves me as a parent numbed by the agony of the grief over those children
and parents. Words really are poor comfort for them or me.
As much as we try, we humans cannot make
sense out of the acts of human evil. To rationalize evil almost calls the forgiveness of the
resurrection into question.
To understand evil, we have to see the world through God’s eyes. Frankly
we just cannot do that.
Margaret Mohrmann, MD, PhD, a faculty member of the UVA Medical School
and UVA Department of Religious Studies reflected on the tragedy of evil in a meeting
last summer. She has worked in the hospital seeking to deal with “inexplicable
tragedy.” She has a book entitled, Pain Seeking Understanding: Suffering,
Medicine, and Faith (Pilgrim
Press, 1999) that helps us struggle with answers.
She points out the obvious; namely, that evil
is a scholarly intellectual problem until you talk with people who have
suffered from inexplicable and seemingly unjustified grief – parents of a
terminally ill child, a person facing imminent death from a medical condition
or action of another person. The kind of things you encounter daily in a trauma
hospital.
The easy
explanations are painful and facile. “God is good but evil is deserved,” or “evil
helps us grow” ring hollow. Remarkably such arguments can be traced to the
early church fathers such as Iraneus.
The fact is a person may only ask the “Why?”
question once. There is no easy answer for the presence evil in the world, but we had better have ready some kind of response else we
may drive them away from any answer that gives even a modicum of solace.
Perhaps we can
learn something from the reflections of Martin Buber. Buber notes the Genesis
creation story does not describe creation in terms we see commonly used these
days by theologians, "creation ex nihilo" or "creation out of nothing." "Creation out of nothing" suggests the creation of a perfect, divinely guided existence; something we do not have or cannot see.
Consider our scriptural tradition. Genesis describes God creating
the world out of chaos: (Gen 1:2) "(T)he earth was a formless void
and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind (ruach) from God swept over the face of the waters." "The deep" was
the chaos of the waters. It paints the image of being lost on the surface of
some storm-swept windy sea in the blackness of total night with who knows what
lurking below the surface.
In this view, creation exists amidst chaos. Perhaps God created reality by forging peace from an
all-pervasive chaos, a chaos that continues to seek to infiltrate and corrupt
from the outside. It raises the question I resisted answering earlier, “Do we
see God only through our own eyes or through God’s eyes?”
Laura Becker placed her sermon of Dec 16 on her facebook page today. In
her sermon she said that advent calls us to the way out of the trap of the world, to embrace
our humanity and the humanity of Jesus. She continues, "Our sure hope in the
resurrection means death does not get the last word." While I may quibble to
substitute “faith” for her word “hope,” she is onto something.
In advent we
cannot avoid looking towards our future, a future sealed in the events of a day mentioned in Simeon's blessing to Mary and the child after his song, the day when the true meaning of advent is revealed. In Genesis (49:5) we learn Simeon and Levi are brothers and the sword is their weapon of
violence. They avenged the rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob by the slaughter of all the males of Schechem. In Luke 2:29-32,
34-35, this namesake Simeon is a man of God who beholds the culmination of the prophecy all hoped for, a prophecy that he knew would end in chaos and violence. Beholding the child Jesus, he proclaimed to God:
'Master, now you are dismissing your servant
in peace,
according
to your word;
for my
eyes have seen your salvation,
which
you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a
light for revelation to the Gentiles
and
for glory to your people Israel.'
Then
Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, 'This child is destined for
the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be
opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will
pierce your own soul too.'"
Advent
points towards the day when the most innocent and powerful human became the
least powerful and took on our guilt, suffering alone in unjustified agony and human death. He cried to God, “Why have you forsaken me?” while his mother and the other women stood at a distance in grief watching his agony. This cry from
the cross validated his humanity and sealed our own resurrection.
Sometimes the only thing we can be is a faithful, silent presence to the other person.
I cannot explain to you why
there is evil in this blue world. I can only tell you that my faith rests on the cry to God that validated the humanity of Jesus. I know there is a home.
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