Three nine-year-olds shot at point blank range in the lobby of their small Christian school, murdered by a person whose personal lostness vented itself in demonic destruction…
That fact from this past week demonstrates the absolute necessity of the week ahead of us.
We need Holy Week.
We need the Cross.
We need Jesus.
Nothing else – no one else – can help us.
We lose sight of this, don’t we?
In the pause between school shootings – when terrorism and state-sanctioned genocide and large-scale demonstrations of the malevolence embedded in human nature look like distant things, relevant to other parts of the world, affecting other people’s families – in those (admittedly rare) pauses, we can pretend that we have evolved beyond the need for salvation; certainly beyond the need for a Savior.
The sweat and blood, contortions of slow asphyxiation, agony of Godhead peeled away from Godhead and eternal unity severed in twain – these gruesome horrors of Jesus’s story have nothing to say to the glib, shiny Instagram stories that we try so hard to pretend reflect our real-life realities.
But what happened at Covenant School in Nashville hits us, hard, with the truth: We are broken. We are prone to inexplicable evils. We need saving from ourselves.
Inevitably, the media spin will seek to persuade you that the Nashville shooting is a story about gun access, or trans rights, or inadequate security.
But at its root, the Nashville shooting is not really a story about any of those things.
Rather, the Nashville shooting is a story about creatures made in the image of God, infected by a deadly condition called sin, helpless before spiritual beings Hell-bent on predatory dissolution…
It’s a story about us, God’s beloved, and our hopeless situation.
Holy Week is the continuation of that story.
Holy Week is the story of God entering into our brokenness, bearing the weight of our twisted and depraved thoughts and actions, suffering to an extent incomprehensible to finite minds and inaccessible to finite bodies…
It’s the story about God dying, because we killed Him.
It’s the story about God dying, because He wanted us to live.
As we look at photos of the faces of Evelyn Dieckhaus, Mike Hill, William Kinney, Katherine Koonce, Cynthia Peak, and Hallie Scruggs, and as we pray for those whose lives have been shattered by those deaths, we must remember that Jesus died for them – specifically, individually.
And we must hold fast to the corollary that Jesus lives with them – even now! – and that the promise of reunion is integral to the fact of Resurrection.
Friends, what happened in Nashville demands that we recall accurately: Holy Week is holy because it culminates in the defeat not of Jesus but of sin, death, and the Devil.
The Cross is not the end – it is the means to the end of evil.
Happy children’s parades of palms on Sunday will provoke more pathos than usual this year, but the rituals of this week ultimately point us beyond the grief of who is so tragically missing toward the promise that there will come a time when no one will be missing ever again.
We need Holy Week.
We need the Cross.
We need Jesus.
Nothing else – no one else – can help us.
But – praise the Lord – Jesus has, Jesus is, Jesus will!
