Another mass shooting.
Five people killed — six, including the gunman.
Gary Martin, who had a prior felony conviction in Mississippi, used a handgun to kill five co-employees at the manufacturing plant in Aurora, Illinois where he worked. Two of the victims had connections (one an alumnus, the other a student) with North Illinois University, which had marked the eleven year anniversary the day before of a shooting incident that took the lives of five students in 2008.
The shooting in Aurora brought calls for stricter gun control measures. I listened to one member of Congress remark on satellite radio that other countries like England, France, etc., don’t experience mass shootings like we do here in the U.S. (I couldn’t find the interview online so I can’t quote it).
Actually, other countries do experience mass shootings, although past that you get into arguments about how to measure them statistically.
But wait a minute.
Five people were killed Friday, February 15, 2019 — six, including the gunman.
Can you name any other occasions this year in which five or more people were killed in an incident involving a gun? Do you remember reading about them? Do you recall where they occurred, much less the names of the victims?
If you did, you’re better than I am — I had to research it online. At least I can report that I remembered them when I looked them up. Shootings in which at least five people were killed so far this year occurred in:
It’s not easy to find links to those shootings even though the communities where they occurred haven’t yet recovered from the grief and shock that resulted.
Do you remember the headlines from 2018? Do you want to guess how many incidents there were in which more than five people were killed?
Seventeen were killed in the “Parkland, Florida” incident, while thirteen lives were cut short in the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. Eleven people were killed when a gunman decided to go on an anti-semitic rampage at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And then there were eleven other mass shootings in 2018 in which five or more people were killed.
Are We Becoming Inured to Death?
Have we become numbed by the sheer number of mass killings in the United States? I thought it would be easy to find stories and statistics on how people become inured to death and violence the more they are exposed to it. Maybe I’m not as good with boolean searches as I’d hoped, but I had trouble finding support for this premise, although I did find a few articles. Here’s one result and here’s another, and here’s one more.
But I’ve only chosen to spotlight mass shootings because of the incident in Aurora. I’d already been thinking earlier this week about other examples of how we’re exposed to stories of death in the media — there are plenty of other examples to consider: death tolls from natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes or tsunamis come to mind. The story of the Syrian refugee boy’s body washed up on a Turkish beach sharpens the focus and engenders greater empathy than mere statistics.
Then there are the fictional depictions of killing and violence in television, movies and increasingly graphic video games. Some research indicates that these can cause desensitization in those (especially younger audiences) exposed to them, although there are arguments to the contrary.
What started me thinking about this issue of becoming desensitized to death wasn’t the Aurora shooting, however — it was the thought generally of how any of us might become inured to death from violence or from death generally.
Some, like soldiers and their families in war or victims of natural disasters such as the Black Death or the influenza pandemic of 1918 must surely become immune from ordinary feelings of grief and compassion as a coping measure if nothing else.
You have to think there’s a limit to how much suffering and death can be handled — that’s when it struck me that God has, by God’s very omnipresent, eternal nature, witnessed every single death since the beginning of time.
God’s Grief
When we read of God’s “grief” in Scripture it’s usually grief in the sense of his disappointment in humans and our bent to sinning. So, we read in Genesis, Chapter Six, Verse Six —
And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
That grief found its denouement in the flood, so it doesn’t really tell us much about the extent of God’s reaction to death so much as it tells us about his willingness to countenance death as the consequence of a fallen world.
The lesson seems to be the same later on, when God is disappointed in his chosen people:
Once again, the consequence of God’s grief is bad news for his people —
But they rebelled
and grieved his holy spirit;
therefore he became their enemy;
he himself fought against them.
Thankfully, that’s not the final word on the nature of God’s grief. Yes, there are consequences to turning away from God. You can complain that the consequences are too dire, that God should allow us to go our own way or lead us back to the right way through gentle persuasion and compassion. Until you read the whole story for yourself, you’ll have to take my word for it — he did try that way repeatedly.
In the New Testament, we find God experiencing grief as well. The Gospels record that Jesus is grieved as he approaches Jerusalem. We’ll use Luke’s Gospel, although Matthew’s account is virtually identical —
Again, the consequences for Jerusalem are dire, but that’s a matter of choice.
So far we’ve seen that God experiences grief, but it leaves open the question of whether God has become inured to death on account of witnessing and so often visiting death upon humankind.
For me, the answer to that question is in the Gospel of John. You know the story. Jesus’s friend, Lazarus, whom he loves, has fallen desperately ill. Jesus is sent for, but does not come until after Lazarus has died. After meeting briefly with Lazarus’s sister, Martha, Jesus approaches the tomb where Lazarus has been laid and there encounters Lazarus’s other sister, Mary —
Jesus, for Christians the eternal Logos, who has witnessed every death since Creation, began to weep.
Volumes have been written about this short passage, but surely we can conclude from it that God’s heart has not become hardened despite an eternity of witnessing death after death after death.
Death is the consequence of evil. It is the natural, immutable result of separating ourselves from the Creator. When the Creator allows that separation to be complete, death follows. The only way out is for God to defeat death and offer us a way back.
Today’s Gospel reading is Luke’s account of the Beatitudes in which Christ says —
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.”
And then, unlike Matthew’s account, Jesus adds —
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.”
The lesson I take from this is that the time for laughing has not yet come. Until then we are to weep, to detest death and to strive to imitate God, whose heart is never hardened.