A time to search for something other than vengeance
When disaster strikes, our reactions as a society tend to follow a wellworn pattern, but what if we could rid ourselves of the impulse to find a scapegoat for every event that negatively impacts us,
Our little islands have been through a lot since the turn of the millennium. The Christchurch earthquakes, the March 15 mosque attack, the eruption of Whakaari White Island, Cyclone Gabrielle. There are many more I could name.
I’ve noticed there’s a familiar pattern to how we respond to national tragedies.
On day one, we bathe in our collective shock. We drown in hours of footage of broken places and people, letting the unimaginable wash over us until we adjust to the temperature of the new waters we all now swim in.
Our world has changed, and we need a moment to get our heads around it.
A day or two later, we move into meaning making. We tell stories that help us make sense of what has happened to us, and these narratives seem to play a pivotal role in helping us to transmute our pain into something more meaningful or bearable.
We might empty our cupboards or bank accounts to help, or spend hours searching for more information online.
But perhaps the most human response of all is to ask: who is to blame?
Did emergency services respond too slowly? Did structural engineers take shortcuts? Did a government agency overlook the signs? Did a healthcare professional miss a cry for help?
Who failed to stop this tragedy from happening? Who was meant to protect us? Who let us down?
Big questions feel like they need big answers. If we are hurting so deeply, how can it be that no-one is responsible? There must be a source. And whatever that source is, it needs to suffer. Someone needs to pay for our pain.
There are times, of course, when accountability is crucial. Those who rob us of our dignity and humanity must face the impacts of their actions.
And yet, if some of us are honest, we might confess that there will never be enough vindication for us to stop asking who is responsible for the things in life that deeply disappoint or disillusion us.
History is littered with scapegoats and straw men who became bulwarks for others' pain.
And unless something changes, there will be many more to come.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot recently as I spend time with my 3-year-old girl, Luna – an adventurous soul with a smile so wide she is constantly bumping her head on things.
In these moments, she will run to me and collapse into my lap with tears in her eyes – holding out a finger, a foot, or an elbow in need of a magic kiss from Dad. Moments later the pain has miraculously disappeared; I have been amazed by what a kiss can heal.
But of course, it’s not the kiss that does the curing. The magic isn’t in the action, it’s in the paying attention.
Her hurt doesn’t need to be transmitted onto another person or another source, because it has been absorbed by her Dad’s attention.
It makes me wonder, does our pain always need a perpetrator?
Do we always need someone to blame? Or might there be another way?
As Christians move towards Easter, we are acutely aware of the callous power of a mob desperate for someone to crucify.
Reading the accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion, you can’t help but notice there’s a momentum that takes hold when the truth no longer matters.
A wave of hysteria crashed within the walls of Jerusalem, and as the waters receded, an innocent man was left dead, torn and beaten beyond recognition.
As we look at the present state of our world, we know it wasn’t the last time in history an innocent individual would be left trampled under the feet of the mob.
When the insatiable hunger for a scapegoat kicks in, we cease to be human.
We stop breathing. We stop thinking. The prefrontal cortex of society goes offline.
Worst of all, we stop paying attention. When we are so wrapped up in the crowd that we don’t notice who’s under our feet, we risk becoming the very thing that hurt us to begin with.
My 3-year-old daughter knows better than most adults that attention is a powerful balm for pain.
As the poet Mary Oliver once said: “Noticing is the beginning of devotion.”
The Easter story is the story of the God who notices.
A God who left the heavens to dwell in the suffering of humanity, who wandered the dark corners of society with the sick and the reviled and offered them names and families.
And who, even as he died on the cross, conversed with a dying criminal to offer him peace.
When he breathed his last breath, he declared to our obsession with blame and recompense: “It is finished.”
This weekend, the words of Jesus invite us to a radical new idea.
What if he is the last person who needs to go on a cross for our pain?
In God’s noticing of us, and our noticing of one another, there is a new way.
Big questions feel like they need big answers. If we are hurting so deeply, how can it be that noone is responsible? There must be a source. And whatever that source is, it needs to suffer. Someone needs to pay for our pain.
Easter is, literally, the crux of Christianity. At Christmas, Christians celebrate the Incarnation: the audacious belief that God comes into the world as a baby, vulnerable and receptive to experiencing all the complexity of human life: joy and despair, pain and pleasure, love and grief.
But three decades later, the life of this Jewish rabbi is ended brutally. Viewed as a political agitator, his ideas, actions, and growing popularity threaten the imposed status quo and fragile concord of firstcentury Palestine.
Jesus, like thousands of others before him, experiences the horror of execution by crucifixion – a mode of state terror, humiliating and excruciating, devised to invoke fear and serve as a deterrent.
Over Easter, Christians around the globe will gather to remember this story.
Gospel accounts draw attention to Jesus’ awareness that he was under surveillance by authorities, his life under threat. He is betrayed by Judas, deserted by his supporters, subjected to a hastily arranged kangaroo court, and condemned by a political bureaucrat uninterested in providing moral leadership.
The gospels don’t shy away from the physical, emotional, and mental suffering of Jesus. They describe how unwelcome occupying military forces, despised by locals, unleash their anger on the helpless innocent prisoner in their hands.
The Easter story is thus a very human story. Parallels between this episode from two millennia ago and our contemporary world are clear to see. Overseas, dissidents are murdered by despotic regimes, corrupt courts perpetuate injustice, descendants of victims of historical hatred perpetrate violence on others. Closer to home, populist, pragmatic politics takes precedence over principles and due process.
On a personal level, the story also rings true. Who of us hasn’t experienced the loss of friends, the betrayal of colleagues, a sense of abandonment, isolation, physical pain or psychological suffering? Which of us has not felt, at some point in our lives, the emotions present within the Easter story: anxiety, loneliness, anger, hatred, guilt, grief?
Good Friday, of course, is a misnomer. Little in the story is uplifting or morally praiseworthy. As an account of man's inhumanity to man, the Easter story is a brutal read.
For Christians, the episode illustrates the depths of human depravity. Jesus, who creates and sustains the cosmos, enters creation – and humanity, pronouncing ourselves self-made rulers, nails him to a cross. Good Friday exposes the full horrors of the human condition, past and present: our tendency to deny and thus deform the image of God in ourselves and others – our penchant for dealing in death and desecrating the created world.
Good Friday is a disturbing tale of injustice, abdication of leadership, and human viciousness, and yet, in snippets, it displays the best of humanity.
Faithful family standing vigil at the foot of the cross, attentive to the suffering Jesus. The wealthy and well-connected man who prevents a final indignity – Jesus’ body left on the cross to be picked upon by birds before being tossed into an unmarked grave. Instead, this secret follower of Jesus claims his body and lays him to rest in his own family tomb. And yet, for Christians, there is more to be said. Easter is not merely a human story, but ultimately, a divine one.
The primary agent within the events of Easter is God. The gospel accounts climax not with the violence, grief, and pain of Good Friday, but with the resurrection of Jesus, performed by God’s power, that occurs on Easter Sunday.
For those of Christian faith, this miraculous resurrection turns the world upside-down, establishing the basis for a new way of being. The earliest Christians laid claim to the promises of the Hebrew Scriptures, in describing the consequences of Jesus’ resurrection: “Death had been swallowed up in victory. Love is stronger than death.”
And the nature of this new way? In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus, on the cross, asks his Father to forgive those responsible for his murder. This practice of forgiveness and reconciling love, displayed in his bleakest moment, typifies the post-resurrection episodes recorded.
In the Gospel of John, encountering again those who had deserted him in his moment of greatest need, Jesus declares: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
He extends his forgiveness and commissions them to be people of peace – a people who, having received forgiveness, now forgive themselves and those who harm them, thus breaking the spiral of hatred and violence.
Polarisation, distrust, and violence is on the rise in our contemporary world. We are prone to see other people as obstacles to our own ambitions; to hold onto historical hurts that fuel animosity; to normalise the demeaning, devaluing and violent destruction of others.
But at a global, local, and personal level, Easter is still our story. Jesus’ invitation for us to follow a new way as people of forgiveness and peacemaking still stands.
Responding to that invitation is as vital as ever – for ourselves, our communities, and the world.