There is no verse in Scripture that gives me more comfort than the simple phrase of, “Jesus wept”. It is the shortest verse in the Bible yet it speaks so intimately to my heart. It was the death of Lazarus and Jesus mourned with Mary and Martha. He held their pain and sadness. He carried their grief. He was moved with compassion. He loved them and He too was crying.
When something like this happens, we try to make sense of what went wrong. But it troubles my heart so deeply to turn on the television and hear people who publicly profess to follow Jesus say things like this tragedy happened because God is not in our schools. It hurts to see Facebook friends hit ‘like’ to simplistic one liners stating, “It’s time to put God back in our schools”. As Christ’s ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:20) , we must be so careful what we say, especially as the world is watching.
Just as Mary said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”, we are saying “Lord, if you were at Sandy Hook, this would not have happened”. Mary did not understand that Jesus was with her, that He learned of Lazarus’ death four days prior to His arrival. Just as Job’s friends offered no comfort to him in his time of utter devastation, they assumed that his suffering was the result of his sin and his separation from God (and it was not). Instead of helping Job bear his grief, they tried to explain it away and they left him feeling worse. We would be wise to take the advice of Job to his friends, “If only you would be altogether silent! For you, that would be wisdom” (Job 13:5)!
Please, for the sake of these parents who have lost their children, do not expound their grief by implying or explicitly stating that the shooting happened because God is not in our schools. Who are we to say that God was not at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday morning (or prior to)? Who are we to say that His Holy Spirit was not in the hearts of those teachers and policemen and those precious, innocent children? Remember the Amish school shooting in 2006 when 5 children were killed? Dare we say that God was not in their schools? Their lifestyle reflects more of the life of Jesus than most Christians I know. It is simply our pride that causes us to speculate. We believe that we hold the answers of why this happened or why God did not intervene even though the Bible clearly tells us that God’s ways are “higher than our ways” (Isaiah 55:9).
Even having lost a child, I can not fathom what the parents of these children are feeling. My child died peacefully in my arms, while theirs died at the hands of a killer. But what I can tell you is that after the cameras have left, when the funeral services are over, when the town of Newtown begins to live their new normal, these parents will be left weeping. They will be left with the reality that while you may be hugging your children a little tighter, they can not physically touch theirs. They will feel alone and isolated. What they need is not for you to tell them, now or then, that this tragedy happened to their children because God was not in their school. This phrase does not offer hope, or comfort, or even an accurate glimpse of the true God whose presence is not bound by man-made restrictions. I believe Jesus when he said that a child’s angel always sees the face of their heavenly father (Matthew 18:10). God is near to our children and I would bet that He was especially near to the children in Sandy Hook Elementary on that frightful day.
The difficult truth is that there is not a simple answer as to why this tragedy happened. I suspect it is a complex web of reasons tied to a culture of gun violence and mental illness. And yes, evil (Jesus taught us to pray against evil for good reason, Matthew 6:13). But evil will only be overcome with good (Romans 12:21). Personally, I will be calling and writing my representatives in Congress to ask for stricter gun laws. I will do this because I believe it is the right thing to do and that only soldiers and policemen should have access to semi-automatic weapons and high capacity gun magazines. I will do this because I believe that if we examine Scripture and the life that Jesus calls us to lead, it does not include picking up our weapons but laying them down. As the psalmist said, my confidence will be in the Lord, not in “horses or chariots” (which were the weapons of those days, Psalm 20:7). Is changing gun laws the ultimate solution? No, it is not. But I believe it is a good start and that we owe it to those children.
When Andrew died I received a sympathy card from a woman who lost her sister in a car accident -- her sister died while she fell asleep at the wheel. She has struggled feeling like this death was her fault and she told me that she pictured heaven as “complete understanding”. I like to think of heaven this way. Until then, I pray that we humble ourselves to know that our understanding is not complete. And most importantly, that we “mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15) while not offering simplistic or hurtful explanations to compound the pain of these families. They do not need to hear that God was not in their school that day, they need to know that He was, and that He was also weeping, and that He loves them so, so much. Jesus wept with Mary and Martha and Jesus is weeping with Newtown. We would be wise to do the same.
