The faces of the young angels dressed in white and the fake-bearded shepherds seemed especially vulnerable and innocent. Those precious faces will surely elicit from any sensitive heart a great sigh of grief for the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School whose children were slain last Friday. That someone would slaughter such helpless children is unthinkable.
“Where was God?” It is a question that has been asked times past numbering, rising as it does out man’s encounters with such evil. It surely arose long ago in Bethlehem, when soldiers carrying out the orders of Herod slaughtered the Holy Innocents. To us was born a Savior, but did it have to cost the lives of the infants of Bethlehem? Could there be no warning dream to the parents of these children? Bethlehem “makes ready” for Emmanuel, but for Herod, too?
It seems the answers to such questions remain opaque; the best we can do is respond simply with the word of the Christmas Gospel. Where was God in Bethlehem? He was speechless, lying in a Manger. Where was God when Herod’s men came? He was held in the arms of his mother while they escaped Herod’s soldiers by fleeing to Egypt.
Yes, he escaped for a reason. Years later he was scourged and nailed to a cross on Calvary; his body was placed in a new tomb. His mother, who saw him safely into Egypt, stood weeping at Golgotha. After the Sabbath, the women disciples made their way to God’s grave on Easter morning, broken-hearted and without hope.
Yet this God, also a man, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Moreover, he has promised to be with us to the end of age. And so he is, in the breaking of the Bread. For we shall find God Incarnate when we come to be fed by him, the Bread of Life. He is the One whom the shepherds found in the feeding trough (manger) of Bethlehem, the “House of Bread.”
The families of Newtown must bear their grief in ways most of us cannot grasp, mourning as did the bereaved parents of Herod’s Bethlehem and as countless others over the course of centuries. To those who grieve, who feel what they take to be the absence of God, the Lord says, “This is my body, broken for you. Take, eat.” We can become like children, comforted by being fed.
Thousands of young angels will continue to sing in their pageants and little robed shepherds will march to the manger to see Emmanuel, wrapped in swaddling cloths. As we ponder their sweet faces, our hearts should be troubled to think of anyone doing violence to any child, anywhere, at any time. Alas, our world has grown hardened to such love.
Like the myrrh-bearing women, on their grief-shrouded mission to the tomb, we must bear the weight of earthly sorrow and simply do what love and devotion demand of us. Our hearts break, but in their breaking we discover a path to another world where joy heals the broken heart and love wipes away every tear. We have heard the voice of the angel, greeting us with living words like a flash of lightning, “He is not here; he is risen. Come, and behold the place.”
“Make ready, O Bethlehem; for Eden hath been opened for all. Prepare, O Ephratha; for the Tree of Life hath blossomed forth in the cave from the Virgin. For her womb did appear as a supernatural paradise, in which is planted the Divine Plant, whereof eating we shall live and not die as Adam. Verily, Christ shall be born, raising the image that fell of old.” (Orthodox Hymn, Prefeast of the Nativity)
James M. Kushiner
Executive Director, Fellowship of St. James
Where was God? It is an amazingly arrogant question when even many who profess Christ have exiled Him from our hearts, from our communities and our nation while exalting the individual human will to His rightful place.
The tragedy and slaughter at Newtown is a consequence of the triumph of Nilihism and the will to power that Nietzche envisioned.
God is not a fascist dictator as so many people apparently want Him to be. He does not make the trains run on time nor does he artificially protect us from our own sinfulness. The people suffer for the sins of the rulers is a precept that has even more relevance in a culture that posits the people as the rulers. We visit our deadly denial of God on our children all the time and then want to pass laws instead of repenting: laws against guns, pedophilia, child porn, gender stereotyping, bullying when then fault lies within our own hearts, those cold, hard stones bereft of God, His love and life.
I take Shakespeare somewhat out of context by saying: “… see what a scourge is laid upon our hate, that heaven doth find means to kill our joys…” Of course it is not heaven that finds the means it is the wandering beast of lust, greed and convenience that we allow free reign in our hearts.
When we have exiled God, even our joys are not safe and innocence is no more.
It is no surprise to me that so many of the hypocritical hand wringers about the slaughter of innocent children have NO compunction about aborting millions of equally innocent children. Is it any surprise that some of the few allowed to live are later sacrificed to the same demonic lust?
Children have been offered for sacrafice on a mass scale to the souless god of our own will for decades and in the millions. Who crys out for them?
Now we, or course, must curtail freedom even further in the guise of protection while the same people calling for such curtailment want to deepen and continue the sacrifice of the innocents and force everyone to acquiese in that sacrifice; a sacrifice that exceeds anything done by the worst tyrannts in history.
Shame on us all. Shame on the hardness of our hearts. Shame on our unbelief.
I would not describe this question asked in this article’s context as arrogant, for the author has pointed to an answer to this question in every paragraph. And here he has in mind the families in Newton:
To those who grieve, who feel what they take to be the absence of God, the Lord says, “This is my body, broken for you. Take, eat.”
We have to admit this question has been asked throughout history in many contexts by those in despair. Here is a much more malicious context for this question: inscribed on at least one destroyed church in Kosovo by enemies of Christians.
Perhaps a more careful and faithful way to consider this question may be, God is always with us, are we always with Him?
Not the author, sorry for not being clear, but the folks actually asking that question which I know Mr. Kushiner does not. The “If God were real nothing bad would ever happen” crowd.
Mankind does not seem able to handle political freedom very well. It only emerged in human governance in the past couple of hundred years, and already it is collapsing everywhere it was once found in collectivism and anarchy (oddly enough, showing signs of both opposing trends at the same time). Could the same be true with the moral freedom given us by God? We were liberated by Christ from the consequences of our sins through repentance and reformation of our lives via the agency of the Holy Spirit. Yet, we both cast it aside in greater and greater sin (what nation has killed 50 million babies except ours) and at the same time seek an ever more powerful government to save us from the evil that we do. The old saying was, “Freedom isn’t free.” I’m beginning to wonder if it is even possible. Where it exists, it seems to be the product of a miracle. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the point.
John Adams famously said: “(The U.S. Constitution) is meant for a Christian people, it is wholly inadequate for any other.”
In other words, only the Chrisitan faith is capable of instilling the types of values in a populace that allows us to govern ourselves. Political freedom follows from a people who are free and therefore willing to attempt to live lives of virtue, and charity while resisting the temptation to feed at the public trough and promote licentiousness, lust of power and other types of sin.
In fact, the level of poltical freedom is always cyclical. We are created by God to be free and so will always attempt to move in that direction. Unfortunately, we are also slaves bound to sin and self-destruction which often gets the better of us as unique persons and in our cultures.
Some form of centralized control or total anarchy are the only possible alternatives to a system that allows for a great deal of political freedom (at least ostensibly). Harry Belefonte and others of his ilk in sympathy with the current governing elite would like to see direct tryanny imposed on their enemies. Such a rule would not be friendly to Christians.
Personally, I think we lost real self-government in the last half of the 19th century beginning with the Civil War and the subsequent industrialization, Manifest Destiny and the lust to spread democracy everywhere introduced by Wilson.
In a era of our global, neo-fascist economy, the ability to be a self-governing sovereign nation is almost meaningless.
But, God is where He has always been: “…everywhere present and filling all things” yet closer than hands and feet.
The predictable feeding frenzy following a tragedy is merely the relex of a dying people to find evil outside of ourselves.
Tell me Christian! Where was your God?
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