Christianity, from the perspective of the Episcopal Church, recognizes that acts of depravity, like the Virginia Tech shootings, are part of the human condition. A sign of humanity’s brokenness is precisely that people are capable of such acts of unspeakable cruelty. The word of promise that Christianity offers is God’s assurance that such brokenness is not life’s final word. We can be healed both of the causes and the consequences of such depravity. Death is evil, but evil is finally not triumphant. God’s love, God’s life defeats death.
Unfortunately this ultimate hope sometimes leads to what amounts to a minimization of life’s horrors. It is that well meaning, but misguided, spirit that causes someone to ask, or to look for, God’s will in such a tragic act of desperate rage; as though God, for some unfathomable reason, had intended such a dreadful act. Nothing could be further from the truth.
God wills goodness, health and wholeness to all people and to creation itself. Speculation as to the source of such evil is understandable, because evil is so very real. Further, there is nothing in Christianity that should make us shrink from the recognition of the reality of evil. Anything but. The fact is that Christianity was born in such evil. We Christians literally hang our hope on the love of a God who, through the Person of the crucified and risen Jesus, has demonstrated that evil can never be life’s final word.
To the family and friends of those who were murdered (and to the family and friends of the one who did the killing) there can be no easy answer why. But there can be the assurance that the love with which they hold their beloved is a love that will not die, now or ever. That love is an expression of God’s word reaching across the abyss of pain that threatens to engulf them. It is not an easy promise, but it is a sure one.
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