The reason for the Arizona massacre

Last updated on: January 13, 2011 at 6:40 am by Dave Griffey

The reason for the Arizona massacre 2011-01-13T06:40:00-04:00 Dave Griffey

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Is best summed up in this little phrase:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

You see, this tragedy, like so many, showed something we just don’t want to admit. IT showed we live in a fallen world. Why did the shooting take place? Why was Julius Caesar assassinated? Why did William invade England to seize the crown? Why did Muslims and Christians fight over the Holy Land? Why did Christians sell slaves to Muslims by way of Jewish merchants? Why have there been wars and atrocities, torture and crime? Why did the 19th century, convinced that by eradicating old, worn out notions of God and religion, and replacing it with the latest revelations of scientific thought, give birth to the 20th century – a century almost entirely motivated by secular ideals that would kill more human beings in a hundred years than any five hundred year period before?

It’s because we are sinners in a fallen world. We can’t help it. No matter what good, we can still corrupt it. No matter how noble the cause, or pure the ideal, the sinful nature of humanity will cause it to warp and become a tool for short sighted, self centered interests. Hence the immediate politicizing of this horrific mass murder before even the blood on the streets had dried. Hence many in the media using it to attack those on the ‘other side’, and those on the other side defending themselves by bringing out endless streams of examples of the hypocrisy behind assuming only one side is the problem. It’s in our genes. Our Founding Fathers were not post-19th century secularists, influenced by the likes of Freud and others to think that humans are a blank slate with the potential for unfettered goodness. They were still heavily influenced by the historic Western Christian tradition that insisted, among other things, that humans will sell their birthright for a bowl of stew every time.

That is why this happened. It’s why leaders, journalists, pundits, and other notables were flagrant in their attempts to seize upon this carnage. They may not even have realized what they were doing. Sometimes as I watch our society in decline, and see what people are capable of, I wonder how aware a slave owner in the South really was of his sins. I wonder just how justified the most heinous inquisitors of Europe were. I wonder how any humans, when living out the capacity of our sinfulness, may be so immersed in their own way that they are oblivious to what is so obvious to everyone else.

But then, as I have said so many times, sinfulness is like body odor. We tend to recognize it in others long before we recognize it in ourselves. Perhaps if anything is to be learned, it’s the lesson that no one movement has the sinless path, or for that matter, wants the sinless path. For all the talk I heard growing up of relative truth, no country having the right to impose morality, and the dangers of closing a debate, it’s all I see today. Are those who once screamed open mindedness and tolerance, but now call for the stumping down of debate, or even utilize the deaths of innocent people to gag those with whom they disagree, evil or liars or hypocrites? No, maybe not. Maybe they are just children of sin in a fallen world. A lesson the Christian tradition has taught for 2000 years, but sometimes I think we have forgotten.

None of this is to say we should throw our hands up and say let’s sin boldly. It’s not to say we can’t learn from lessons, see where problems are, and try – preferably through self refelction, but with the ability to diagnose problems – to fix what we can in the time we’ve been given. But the thought that something new has happened. The idea that we are at some plane that has never been, or the events of Saturday could ever and only have happened because of, well, all the things we disagree with, is simply false. It’s happened ever since the serpent said, “Indeed, did God really say?”

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