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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Fight evil, tell different story Andrew C. Thompson, Apr 27, 2007
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson Special Contributor
There is a gulf that divides murderers.
Genesis 4:8 describes one type of killer. Overcome by jealousy, Cain killed his brother Abel in history's first recorded crime of passion.
The story reads, "Now Cain said to his brother Abel, 'Let's go out to the field.' And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him."
The story of Cain describes a type of murder that could be committed by any one of us, under the right circumstances. We all have sin in our hearts, so the potential for black deeds arising from that sin resides in our hearts as well.
But on April 16 at Virginia Tech, we saw a different type of killer. Seung-Hui Cho was not simply overcome by rage or hurt, though those emotions were certainly present in him. Cho suffered from a deeper sickness.
An April 22 New York Times article recounts evidence of mental illness that Cho probably suffered from since childhood. Virginia Tech officials were aware of Cho's dark personality. But the Times article describes signs of Cho's illness that were present early in his life. Still, neither his family nor the university community at Virginia Tech realized just how sick he was.
The sickness represented in Cho is not confined to a culture or ethnicity. For this, we need only remember Charles Roberts, the European American who killed five Amish girls and wounded five others in the Pennsylvania schoolhouse shooting last October. This is particularly important in light of the fears of backlash against Korean Americans as a result of Cho's rampage.
But though we know such sickness exists, for most of us the story of Cho is baffling in a way that the story of Cain is not. His actions leave us perplexed and horrified. We cannot comprehend the human mind that would carry out such deeds.
So we are left with questions of how to respond. Statewide days of mourning and flags flying at half-mast are appropriate signs of a nation's grief. But without a story to counter the story of Cho, such grief contains no hope. It is only an expression of sorrow at tragic suffering, which the world has no real way of combating.
But the Christian response is something else. Christians do have another story, one that runs radically counter to the story of the world's endless suffering. It is a story of love.
Our story is embodied in a man called Jesus, who was murdered unjustly by evil men full of sin. But Jesus overcame these men's sin and his own death by the power of resurrection. And through his resurrection, he has offered us the hope of overcoming sin and death as well.
We live even now in a world where suffering and sin and death seem to reign. But we also know that we cannot arm ourselves to the teeth, lock ourselves behind high walls, and shut the world out of our lives.
Instead, we are called to love the world. And the best way we can do that is by telling the world our story.
Our story says that the suffering of the world is not without hope. The deaths of Virginia Tech students, and the deaths of Amish schoolgirls, and our own deaths, are qualified by the hope in God's promise of resurrection.
This hope offers us consolation in the present. And it calls us to love the world with a fierce love, so that the world might know that a better way exists.
There is a terrible vulnerability in combating evil by telling a story. But because it is a story of love, it must be vulnerable. It must be as vulnerable as Jesus himself, who defines love by the vulnerability of his willingness to suffer for the world's sins.
The blood that cries out from the ground of the Virginia Tech campus finds its redemption in resurrection. Death is overcome in a victory that we are called to live out today, so that the world might be transformed. That is our story, and it is the only story that can counter what happened on April 16 in Blacksburg.
The Rev. Thompson is working on a doctoral program at Duke Divinity School. He blogs atwww.genxrising.com.
Andrew C. Thompson
