After a Mass Shooting: A Reflection on Evil
“The Tortured Christ” (1975), by Brazilian sculptor Guido Rocha
Another mass shooting has taken place and the problem of evil has reared its ugly head yet again.
A mother has lost her son, a sister will never share a car ride with her brother to school, two girls no longer have their father to tuck them into bed at night, and a husband will never share dinner with his wife, a beloved math teacher who, in not being able to have biological children of her own, chose to pour herself heart and soul into her students.
Journalists will try to get to the bottom of this story, therapists will comfort and counsel the living, politicians will bicker and dither, police will investigate the cause of the crime, authorities will make arrests, and social scientists will seek to solve the root cause of this tragic act of public violence.
Gun-control campaigns will be launched and thwarted. Thoughts and prayers will be proffered and, in time, dismissed. Anger will be vented. Hashtags will be unleashed. Mothers will grieve.
And the question of “why” will be asked once again.
Why did he kill innocent children? Why did he become this way? Why does this keep happening in our country? Why do bad things happen to good people? And why do good people do nothing about it, not really.
Reasons exist, of course. You’ll read about them eventually in the papers if you’re still interested three days from now and not singed in your conscience or benumbed in your soul.
And actions can naturally be taken in order to avoid such horrors in the future. Policy changes can make a difference. Political activism can sway the will of judges and legislators. Ads can soften hardened or fatalistic. hearts. School administrators can enact safety protocols to protect children more effectively and school counselors can create trusting spaces for troubled youth to process their anger in more productive ways. People can make a difference, not just “thoughts and prayers.”
But evil?
There’s no sane explanation for the evil that plagues our world. No philosophical explication can explicate it, no police investigation can solve it, and no psychological analysis can assuage the sheer madness that overcomes us when we try to make sense of these utterly senseless acts of violence.
For evil is fundamentally absurd. It defies logic, it outstrips reason, it eludes sense, and it exceeds any sane explanation because the impulse towards evil is essentially insane.
No person who kills another is in their right mind—and every attempt to purge evil from the human heart with more education, more HR training, more therapy, more democracy, is guaranteed to fail.
If it were only in our bones, we could do a bone marrow transplant in order to eradicate it. Or if it were merely in our genes, we could splice it out of the gene pool once and for all. But it’s neither “in” our bones nor “down” in our genetic code. It’s nowhere and it’s everywhere, for evil is hidden in the inaccessible depths of the human heart and it sabotages all human efforts to expunge it.
It baffles the scholar, it taunts the scientist, it confounds world leaders and it haunts human history at every corner. Every attempt to solve it, moreover, reaches into a black hole of futility.
What’s our hope, then? Is there hope?
There is, but it’s not within our grasp; it’s beyond our metaphysical grasp, in fact, for it lies both within us and beyond us. That is the mystery of evil. And the way forward is far simpler than we may at first imagine, even if it may demand far more of us than we may feel capable of giving.
The problem of evil can only be properly dealt with, I suggest to you, in the death of the Incarnate God. This is done not by thinking about this death, nor by feeling sentimentally about this death, but only by throwing ourselves wholly upon the One who swallows up death whole, and evil along with it, and in so doing, defeats all powers that threaten to distort and to despoil God’s good creation.
God’s solution to the problem of evil in our world isn’t chiefly an idea or a plan of action.
Biblical and theological arguments matter, of course, because they make faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ plausible rather than implausible, and it is a mass shooting, among other instances of theodicy, that cause us to doubt the plausibility of the good news that this God discloses definitively in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
And the activities of sympathetic preaching, community building, compassionate service and loving mission contribute to the well-being of our communities by God’s grace. And we thank God for all such activities.
But they don’t “solve” the problem of evil.
God’s solution is only a Disfigured Lamb who enters fully into the agonizing pain of our lives and who offers his wounded side to us in love, over and over and over again.
God’s solution is only a Man of Sorrows who abides with us in the depths and who carries our griefs in his own heart, broken by the willful stupidity of our world and the indiscriminate damage that sin causes everywhere.
God’s solution is only a Faithful Psalmist who cries out to his Father with guttural shouts and visceral bellows, and who weeps with those who weeps.
God’s solution is only a True Job who enters fully into our afflictions, for our afflictions have ever and always become his afflictions.
God’s solution is only a Forsaken Son who abides with us in the awful silence of unanswered prayer and who carries our own desperate and disconsolate prayers to his Father in heaven, doing so with the help of his Spirit who intercedes on our behalf with aching groans.
God’s solution is only a Suffering Servant who absorbs death and sin into himself, along with all the terrible and catastrophic pain that they cause in this world, and thereby frees us from the dread of such sinister forces.
It is with this One that we wail in anger at all the good gone wrong in our world and that we shed our bitter tears of sorrow.
It is upon this One that we cling to desperately for consolation in the hours of our need.
And it is to this One, within the company of those who have been wounded and aggrieved by the cruelties of this world, that we pray our most honest prayers to the God inclines not just his ear but his very self to the lonely and afflicted.
That’s what I’ve attempted to capture in my section of prayers, “Prayers for a Violent World,” in Prayers for the Pilgrimage, and more particularly in my “Prayer After a Mass Shooting.” I do not presume that these prayers will “solve” anything in the face of such painful losses; they won’t. But perhaps we can hope that they may give language when such language seems altogether wanting in order to make sense of the senseless.
May the Lord have mercy upon us all.
