All while God weeps...

*Disclaimer* I’m fine everyone! Sorry for 2 depressing posts in a row, I promise everything is 100% terrific! =) Just some things I’ve been thinking about recently.

I’ve never really been a big fan of the death penalty. Maybe it was that I saw the movie “The Green Mile” a little too early in my life and the injustice of it all bothered me deeply. Or maybe it’s just because as an excessively philosophical child, I could never wrap my mind around the backwards logic of it all. “You killed someone, so we’re going to kill you to teach everyone that killing is wrong.”

My Dad probably loves me and my siblings more than any father ever loved his child. (Which was embarrassing when we got into highschool and it wasn’t cool to get along with your parents anymore… but he persisted and put up with all of our teenage-ways.) Anyway, I remember him telling my siblings and me that if anybody ever messed with us that he would have no mercy. He would seek the death penalty and if the government failed to deliver, he’d have no problem taking justice into his own hands. Now that’s love.

I recently heard it said that “Anger is the sister of love”. So, when we love someone and their rights are violated, their life is taken from them or they are otherwise damaged, the appropriate response is anger; anger at the situation, anger at the perpetrator and so on. So when my Dad says his anger would rule him if someone were to hurt those he loves, it’s not really an expression of extreme irrationality, but an expression of extreme love.

I watch a lot of Oprah here in South Africa… Not at all something I was expecting would be a part of my life this year, but it is! The other day, she was interviewing a man whose entire family was tortured and killed in their Connecticut home about 4 years ago. He woke up in the hospital as the lone survivor of the incident and had nothing left. Even the home the horrible event had occurred in had been burned. About mid-way through the interview, Oprah clumsily asked about forgiveness and whether or not the man felt the need to forgive the men who did this. The heart-broken man explained that he doesn’t believe the pure essence of evil should be forgiven and that it would be inappropriate to do so. And Oprah replied “I love that answer.”

Sorry Oprah… I don’t love that answer.

In Desmond Tutu’s book “God Has a Dream” he writes of the brutal apartheid system;
“As we listened to accounts of truly monstrous deeds of torture and cruelty, it would have been easy to dismiss the perpetrators as monsters because their deeds were truly monstrous. But we are reminded that God’s love is not cut off from anyone. However diabolical the act, it does not turn the perpetrator into a demon. When we proclaim that someone is subhuman, we not only remove for them the possibility of change and repentance, we also remove from them moral responsibility.” (Page 10-11)

Thus if we refuse to recognize perpetrators of evil as humans… as God’s children who have gone horrifically astray, we release them of their moral responsibility and we release ourselves from the experience of looking at something which is terribly unpleasant and reveals a truth about human nature that we may not want to face. We don’t want to see such evil as being part of us. We don’t want to think that we have the potential to be that.

As we stand in the glow of the Easter season and hear the message that Christ has risen. As we sing “Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?” and hear that death has been conquered, are we not conflicted? Are we not confused when we turn on our TVs and see people celebrating death? Not celebrating life. Not celebrating the conquering power of the cross… but celebrating death.

Last week, the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death hit me like a ton of bricks. At the time, I was cut off from regular communication with the outside world. I was in a very rural area of Kwa-Zulu Natal, the Southeast province of South Africa, when a fellow American friend I was with got a call from someone in the states telling us that Bin Laden had been killed… and Americans were in the streets celebrating. From that moment on, we received a barrage of questions from South Africans about why Americans were celebrating. We didn’t know what to say.

I won’t celebrate death. Osama Bin Laden acted in ways that make my stomach turn and my heart sink. To know that one man could create such destruction and could perpetuate such evil is heart-breaking. However, our God is a God of reconciliation and of peace. A God of unity and of love. Our God loves each one of us because we are His own children. I believe that God wept when Bin Laden masterminded plots that killed thousands of innocent people. But I also believe that He wept when Bin Laden, His child, was killed. And now the cycle of hate continues and at least 80 more lives have been lost in Pakistan in an attempt to avenge the death of Bin Laden. When will it end? (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/12/pakistan.explosions/index.html?hpt=T1)

My Dad would kill for those he loves. But if the situation was such that one of his children killed the other, would he still seek the death penalty for the perpetrating child? One child who he loves so dearly has taken the life of the other who he loved equally as much. He would weep. He would find himself horribly conflicted and in an unnaturally terrible position. This is the state that God finds Himself in. His children are killing each other. They are celebrating the death of their brother. They are dancing in the streets in victory. All while God weeps.