What would Jesus do?
It’s generally seen as a trite marketing question, yet if you are a serious
Christian, it is supposed be a strong guiding principle as you move through life. The problem for many Christians, particularly
the fundamentally oriented ones, is that the real answer – at least the
Scriptural answer, isn’t always what they want to hear.
Such a question confronts me now as I begin to frame my
response to today’s school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. As I wrote
earlier today, my initial reaction is grief. And there I had planned to stay for a time,
as any parent would.
Unfortunately, Governor (and former Presidential candidate)
Mike Huckabee roused me from that comfortable denial late in the day. As reported on Facebook, Governor Huckabee
apparently tied this tragedy to the lack of prayer in the schools. This on a day when pundits on both the left
and right tried to convince us that we shouldn’t talk about gun control. No, they say, we have to wait and mourn
properly. Well apparently the Governor
didn’t get that message.
But still, what would Jesus do? Were He to be walking among us, how would He
respond? And what would His lessons mean
for the grieving families in Connecticut tonight?
First, I have no doubt that He would rend his clothes in
grief, and that the stream of tears would be almost unending from His
eyes. Time and time again in Scripture,
we hear Christ talk about both the innocence of children, and how we most all
return to that open, forgiving place in our hearts to truly experience the
gifts that God give us. No doubt He
would both try to hold and support the many grief stricken parents as well as
the many who responded to the scene, risking their lives to protect the
survivors. Christ would echo the word of
the President, that we have seen this sort of thing too often. He would also seek to welcome the dead home
to God, for there is nothing they could ever have done to merit their lives
ending in this way.
Second, Christ would have begun to teach us all, as he did
in every time of tragedy recorded in Scripture.
Just as He threw the money changers out of the temple to drive home a
point about how we should all treat each other, He would no doubt have taken
our society to ask over this. What, He
would ask, would you expect in a a society which chooses to solve it’s problems
by invading and occupying foreign countries, instead of bringing those
responsible for the last attack on our soil to justice and punishment. How, He would lament, can you expect young
men to learn to deal with life’s tragedies and triumphs when you take fathers
from their lives and remove the rites and rituals that define the transition
from childhood to manhood. And finally,
in perhaps His greatest teaching, He would ask us what we have done for the
least of those among us, no doubt pointing out along the way the least of these
include those who suffer mental illness and psychological damage. If we meet this heinous event only with
restrictions on gun ownership, then we miss the greater need in our society,
and we miss the second highest calling from Christ to His flock in America.
Perhaps His toughest lesson, however, would be the lesson of
forgiveness. Troubling though it will be
for many, Christ would no doubt instruct all of us that if He could forgive
those who hung him on a cross, if He could call to God for forgiveness even as
His own body weight was slowly and inextricably crushing the life from Him,
then we must, as part of our own healing, reach forgiveness of all those
involved. Forgiveness of the shooter
will be the most challenging part of this, of course, and many will never be
able to do it. But if we who choose to
follow Christ are to be completely true to His calling, we have to embrace ALL
of His teachings, not just those which are most convenient or easiest to
fulfill.
What Would Jesus Do?
It’s not a trite question by any means, and in Newtown tonight, it’s a question
with nothing but tough answers.
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