How Do We Respond to the Virginia Tech Massacre?
Like most of you I have been watching in disbelief the events that have transpired in the past couple days at Virginia Tech. For me it hits home doubly hard because my youngest daughter is away in college.
When you see this senselessness, you feel helpless. The first tendency is to turn away, move on, not watch it, and ignore it. And then the other, just as unhealthy, is to obsess over it, to not be able to pry yourself away from the TV, to want to hear everything 50 times, to sift through the information, to find out the name of the person who did the killing, then the names of the persons killed. What’s the motive? What’s the sense of it?
This tragedy and others call us back to a fundamental decision, a decision we must make before we can respond. Is there such a thing as objective good and objective evil? Can evil people do evil things, or is it just a case of mental illness? That’s how we describe the behavior of people in order to avoid the moral and ethical dilemma of good and evil. If there is no such thing as good and evil, then there is no such thing as accountability. And the bad that people do is a simple product of mental illness and therefore they should be medicated or locked away.
But the moment we deny there is evil in the world, that evil people do evil things, we also deny that there is any objective good in the world. And if we do that, we lose our ability to respond because the only response to true evil is true good. In the Scriptures we’re told that the only way to overcome evil is to overcome it with good. So if there is no good we’re defenseless.
How do we respond to the events at Virginia Tech? By advancing the good.
How, specifically? In this case we are learning this young, South Korean man felt like a nobody, felt isolated, felt dehumanized, was a loner, had no close friends.
As a person who believes that there is good because there is a good God, I’m called and commanded to live as though every life matters to God, to not allow the people around me to be disenfranchised, to not make fun of people, to not ignore people. It was Jesus who said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” That’s the good.
So how do we respond to Virginia Tech? Look around you today at the people who feel ignored. Who are you ignoring? Who have you shut out of your life? Who has become invisible? Maybe it’s the person at the market. Maybe it’s the person who cleans your offices. Maybe it’s someone on your staff. Maybe it’s your neighbor. Who around you is disconnected from people, disconnected from love, disconnected from feeling recognized, loved, and celebrated?
How do you advance the good today? By making sure that no one can live within themselves, by themselves, without the human connection of love, not being appreciated, accepted and celebrated. That’s something you can do today to respond to Virginia Tech. For if we fail to recognize good and evil, that this was an evil act, we also deny our greatest weapon – good. And from good comes mercy, peace, forgiveness, kindness, gentleness, and most of all, hope.
This will happen again so we need to be on the offensive today searching out people who feel lonely and unloved, and bring them into our lives.
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