Were you able to find it?
It took some digging around, but buried away somewhere in
your newspaper, there was a headline that read something like this one from the
Washington Post, ‘Chaos’ at Florida State University: Gunman wounds 3,
killed in shootout with police.
I can
remember a time when a school shooting was front page news. When my sister’s
high school was devastated in 1999 by two pipe bomb hurling students with
semi-automatic rifles and sawed-off shotguns, my relatives in Texas were
calling us in Colorado within an hour of the first 911 call. CNN, like every
other national TV and radio station, had canned its entire daily programming so
that it could follow the story around the clock. It would have been impossible for
my relatives not to have heard about it.
Columbine
was far from the first school shooting, but it struck a chord with the American
public for its size. Perhaps the sheer amount of Columbine exposure exhausted
or drained us. But whatever the reason, almost two dozen school shootings over
the next several years went relatively unnoticed. By the time a 10 casualty
shooting at Red Lake, Minnesota came around in 2005, it became clear that there
was an unspoken body count threshold that needed to be broken through for
significant media attention, and Columbine seemed to have slid that number
upward. The Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 was the next major headline, having
broken the deplorable record by a hideous margin. Sandy Hook got exposure not
only because it was big but because of the age of the victims. But basically we
have observed a steady waning of concern across more than 100 school shootings
that have happened since Columbine.
It’s terrifying
to contemplate a society which makes a big media circus of something like this
a couple times a year but then, as the months go by, and the initial shock of
it wears off, never moves on to a more substantial and long term conversation
about how to address the problem. But that doesn’t even compare to the dark
truth about a society that doesn’t even bother with the media circus—a culture
for whom a mass shooting in a school or a movie theater every few months has
become such an expected norm, hardly even an inconvenient pang of communal
guilt as we scroll through our morning newsfeed, that we have all silently
colluded to let it happen.
I’m
not actually writing this to advocate the policy changes that I think should
happen. It’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence to sit here and spell out
what those changes need to be. The issue
has never been about knowing what ought to be done. The issue has always been
about whether the darkness residing deep in our cultural soul will allow us to
do it. And that issue can’t be addressed by a political conversation but only
by a theological one.
The
cross is a symbol our culture is so familiar with that we hardly know anything
about it. It has all but lost any
significance in the secular mind and the popular religious mind has distorted
its meaning so badly that, in some circles, it is almost irrecoverable. Familiarity
doesn’t just breed contempt, it can also breed apathy and over-certainty, both
of which can’t help but neutralize a symbol that is only eight feet wide but a
million miles deep.
So
let me have a go at a little primer on a truth about the cross that was obvious
to everyone familiar with a particular event almost 20 centuries ago but which
has since become cheapened and contorted beyond recognition.
The
crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth was the moment when a society that had seemed
to come to terms with its own demons finally overstepped itself. Crucifying
hoards of violent insurrectionists and murderers was just par for the course,
and it rarely gave pause to anyone outside of some close friends and family
members of the accused. Beyond that, it accomplished many things that the
society found needful. It provided a brilliant outlet for public grievance as
the masses could transfer so many vague and undirected frustrations at the
guilty party, and it relieved the Roman occupiers of any irritating upstarts
that cost time and money to put away, all the while allowing them to flex some
muscle and publicly demonstrate the price of insubordination.
But
there was something in the air that was different this time. The Romans had shown just a little too much
of their hand. There was a powerful if inarticulate sense in the back of every
mind that things had gone just a little bit too far this time. Insurrectionists
and murderers are one thing. But can anyone remember why wandering rabbi had to
die?
So
when a no name group of fisherman and widows, who, for all intents and
purposes, should have been cowering away and grieving somewhere, began to
announce in every tavern and street corner, ‘He is risen’, they were not just
excited about an arbitrary magic trick that would give them another few decades
with their friend.
They
believed that God had numbered the days and started the clock ticking for death
and the things that lead to death. They believed that the creator of the raging
seas and the monsters that inhabit them, of the quaking lands and the
thundering skies, of the sun the stars and whatever terrifying expanses lie
beyond them, had made a statement about the way and life of the one who touched
the boils of lepers, who blessed and ate dinner with the women of the night,
who refused to retaliate against his enemies even if it would be his own
downfall—they believed that The Almighty had looked back upon all of that and
said, “Ah hah! This is the way that is eternal.”
At
this point, some jabbering fool will point out that someone rising from the
dead to eternal life seems a little implausible.
A
little implausible? It was insane.
What was sane was succumbing to a
somber acceptance of death. Normal was a mass outbreak of violence that needed
to be tolerated every few months or so. Reasonable was trading away any hope of
true shalom for the uneasy peace that
comes with a good weapon in hand.
So
God had decided it was time for a little bit of crazy.
They
insisted that God is crazy enough to believe that you can’t fix a culture of
death with death. Smiting the whole violent, bloodthirsty lot of them was
precisely what The Almighty was not going
to do. If given another aeon to do it, they would not be able to wear God down
into an easy truce with death. The early witnesses quickly interpreted the
resurrection to mean that God has no tolerance for death. God will continue to
come back with life, again, again, 7 times, 70 times 7 times, for all eternity,
if that’s what it takes.
And
so, they reasoned, if that’s how God is, then for the people who believed,
themselves, it must no longer be possible to succumb to a quiet apathy toward
death. Nor could they any longer tolerate the things that cause death.
In a
world where people are constantly drawing false choices by saying, “You’re
either for us or against us” the only all or nothing choice these witnesses
believed in was this, “We can either be for life or against it. Our God is for
it.”
‘Chaos’ at Florida State
University: Gunman wounds 3, killed in shootout with police.
Everyone
already knows what needs to be done. The question has never been about policy.
The
question is, what is the next crucifixion going to reveal about us?
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