Praying Through Aurora

When I heard the news of the horrific “Movie Massacre” in Aurora, CO, I shuddered: surely this perpetrator is diabolical, demonic, demon-possessed. After all, people like that have to be under demonic control.

Or do they?

We want these things to be the work of some otherworldly evil that takes control of a willing participant, because to face the alternative is too frightening. What is the alternative? That James Holmes committed such heinous work out of his own human evil.

This is a very discomforting possibility: every human has the capacity for immense evil. The wiser among us have always known this. The late Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn trenchantly explained: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

The evil committed by James Holmes is not some special unique kind of evil. It was the outworking of a process wherein he gave himself over little by little to cooperating with evil within his own heart (or much by much - we can only guess).  His work was the bitter fruit of wicked seeds cultivated in human soil.

And what about us? We may console ourselves that we are not wicked. Or are we? Do we not also cooperate with evil when we participate in murderous slander? Do we not further evil when we erode the fabric of reality by spewing falsehood – even white lies? Do we not give a little over to evil when we allow the filth of our heart to be released in degrading words and actions? Do we not collaborate with evil when we abuse the weak and disenfranchised? Holmes does not have a special evil. Perhaps not even a possession. He simply yielded to that same battle within our own hearts.

This is the Christian message: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked…” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Yet there is more to our message: “Behold I make all things new” (Revelation 8:5).

As we consider the tragedy in Aurora, we grieve, we experience anger, we pray, we consider the war in our own soul, we extend love, and we have hope.

Our hope is that this shattering massacre is not the end. Even in the midst of this situation the Spirit of the Lord is hovering over the broken chaos of the earth tying it all to another horrific blood-letting: the cross. That brokenness was remade in a resurrected glory.

Today, we share in that journey from bloodshed to re-creation. We all, with the families and friends of the victims in Aurora, to some degree share the sufferings of this world. We grieve and groan and hope for a day when all things will be new – where there will be no death or sickness or wars or massacres. We scream with creation in pain and frustration: “This isn’t right!” And as the most honest of us confess, we do not know what to do. We cannot put the pieces back together. We cannot replace the bullet to the gun or return the lives lost. We cannot undo the brokenness.

So we groan. We weep. We sigh. And that is not a bad thing to do. In doing that, we are sharing in the process of making a new world: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans…in accordance with the will of God” (Romans 8:26, 27).

The brokenness cannot be undone. The blood cannot be unshed. But it can be made new. Jesus is already there in the bloody mess. In prayer and love, we join him there with hope that this old order of things is already passing away and a new way is coming even in the middle of the distress. In God’s mysterious way, Aurora is found at Calvary. A new Aurora can be found on the other side of the tomb.

So let us pray.