There was something of a trend over the last twenty years or so in the world of popular culture that had to do with telling a well-known story from the perspective of a different character within the story. One of the most famous of these was the musical Wicked, which told the story of The Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the wicked witch. Some of these adaptations have been entertaining, others not so much, but I won’t bore you with my literary criticism. Instead I bring this up to simply point out that sometimes in stories there are characters that we either forget exist or simply see as a means to an end. The Wicked Witch exists to be wicked just as the Big Bad Wolf’s raison d’etre is to be big and bad and a wolf.
And because you figured I would eventually get to something from the Bible this same thing can be said of out parable today. The parable of the wicked tenants is generally looked at as concerning two groups – the tenants and the landowner, with the landowner representing God and the tenants the chief priests and Pharisees. The moral of the story is that those whom God has left in charge have not been doing a very good job and as a result will not inherit the kingdom of God. But I want to take a moment and instead of focusing on the main characters to look at the characters that are thrown in to make the larger point and those are the three groups of people that the landowner sent to the tenants – the first and second are a group of slaves while the third is the landowner’s son. From the little information we are given one or two of the slaves are beaten, one or two are stoned and at least two slaves and the son are killed. Now, I don’t want to enter a creative writing contest so I am not going to start fleshing out these characters, but rather, instead, want to focus on the shedding of innocent blood. All three groups that went to the tenants were not doing anything wrong or even out of the ordinary; they had been given a routine job, which was to collect the rent. But as a result of the wickedness of the tenants they ended up losing their lives. And with events like we have had this past week in Las Vegas this is not something just found in fiction. People who were doing nothing wrong or even out of the ordinary were killed in Las Vegas. And when things like this happen the human impulse is to ask why. Why do people doing nothing wrong or even out of the ordinary suffer and die. Our brains are ill at ease when the cause and effect do not seem to work.
If someone gets drunk and smashes their car into a telephone pole we will mourn the loss and see it as a waste of a life, but still we know why it happened – there is a straight line from the action of getting drunk to the tragedy of crashing a car. But that is not the case with the slaves, or the son or those who went to the concert in Las Vegas; there was no action on their part that should have led to their death. And so when things like this happen we move from seeking human explanations to seeking divine explanations. The question becomes how did God let something like this happen? If God loves us why would he not stop this senseless evil? In one sense the “why question” is easy to answer. We can say that we live in a fallen world and that in this fallen world God has allowed for free will and that free will often results in wicked and evil behavior. However, I am not sure if this is really getting to the heart of the question. For at times when great tragedy has struck, logical explanations always seem a little trite. I mean it is true that more people die from bee stings every year than die from mass shootings, but does that do anything to help a grieving parent or spouse? Acts like the terror in Las Vegas tear at the very fabric of our society because they are so unfair and so unjust that the answers as to why will not satisfy. And so in many ways when we ask the question of why there will never be a satisfactory answer because actions like this go against what is good and noble and just. They reveal something very wrong about the world and the loss we feel points to something deeper within us.
Many of you probably know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a German Theologian and Pastor who was killed for his part in a plot to try and assassinate Hitler. In one of the letters he wrote before his execution he wrote this concerning the loss of a loved one and the pain that we feel:
Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.
This is an interesting way of looking at tragedy and loss. The pain is part of keeping alive our former communion. And while I realize that he is talking about someone we personally knew and loved I do think it speaks to us about mass tragedies. Because when he says that the pain keeps alive the former communion I think it can also be used to address the communion we share as human beings - what is sometimes referred to as our common humanity. The senseless destruction of human life causes pain because something of humanity has been killed. A creature made in the image of God is no more and that causes a tear in our common relationship.
These days I think pain may be harder to deal with than at other times because modern science has solved many of the problems of pain and led us to expect that there is something that can make it go away. But what of the pain that will not go away? What of the pain that cannot be quickly solved? In many ways it is a reminder that all is not well with the world. I once heard the story about a person discussing with a friend that they would not fly because of the front-page stories about airline crashes. The friend replied that this is exactly the time to fly, when those stories cease to make the front page is when it is time to worry. What the friend ,of course, meant was that if crashes became routine than they would no longer be on the front page indicating that travel is much more dangerous. The fact that we are outraged and grasping for answers shows something of God. God the Father had to watch his son crucified, he knows what it is to stand by helplessly and watch evil happen. The heartbreak that we feel is the same as God feels and it shows our link to the creator and sustainer of the universe.
And so when we ask why, I don’t think that we really want the answer because that does not make the pain go away, but rather the reason we ask why is us reaching to God who dwells in us. It is showing what brokenness and sinfulness look like to God and by extension to us. It is a reminder that we don’t want to live in a world where people merrily gun down total strangers. It is a call to look to something greater to something beautiful. In the coming weeks we will probably learn more of this shooters motivations, just as this morning we learned why the tenants killed the slaves and the son, but understanding motivations is different from justifying evil. Evil should never be satisfactorily explained because if it is we have lost the fact that we are made in God’s image. Hurt and sorrow are painful markers within us that tell us that humanity was created for something greater, to be in communion with God and to follow in his ways both now and forevermore.