This is Not Okay

The shock of 9/11 remains. And yet, the bloodshed won't seem to stop.

In the last few days, three reports have left us numbed and shaken.

The first concerns yet another school shooting, this time in Colorado.

The second concerns a defenseless, 24-year-old Ukrainian refugee woman named Iryna Zarutska. Having fled violence in her homeland, she came to the United States seeking safety—only to have her life senselessly and mercilessly ended when a stranger stabbed her from behind while she rode a bus outside Charlotte.

The third report, just yesterday, told of a well-known 31-year-old commentator and husband and father of two young children named Charlie Kirk, who was shot in cold blood at a public event.

All victims were young. All were caught off guard—one sucker-stabbed, the others sucker-shot—completely unaware and without any chance to defend themselves. All were assaulted without warning, violated in a way that leaves millions of people stunned and grieving.

Cancel culture has moved from smearing reputations through gossip and slander to extinguishing personhood itself, all from the same cowardly shadows.

This is not okay.

Cold-blooded violence, especially the kind that that catches its victim entirely off guard, is not merely “unfortunate” or “tragic.”

It is evil.

To try to justify, excuse, or minimize such actions—whether by pointing to ideology, cultural differences, or political grievances—is absurd. Asinine. Heartless. Beyond the pale. To shrug and blithely say, “How sad. More gun violence. Another stabbing. What’s for dinner?” or, much worse, “He had it coming to him,” is to harden our hearts against the voice of conscience and the witness of Scripture.

Out, Damned Spot

These are not isolated tragedies.

They are symptoms of a deeper sickness, a culture of death that has plagued us ever since the day of our nation’s founding.

Consider the lynchings of our not-so-distant past. At the height of that national sin, an African American was lynched every four days in the United States. These were not random crimes but public spectacles, often applauded by laughing and high-fiving crowds. As men, women, and children looked on for sport, the church remained silent and the state looked the other way.

Or consider abortion. Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, more than 60 million unborn lives have been extinguished in the United States alone. Even now, nearly 900,000 abortions occur annually in our country—each one a fearfully and wonderfully made image-bearer of God, each one a human story cut short before it ever began. And contrary to the common narrative, only a tiny fraction of these—around one percent—are performed because of a genuine threat to the mother’s life or physical health.

Or consider our handling of the death penalty. The Death Penalty Information Center estimates that at least 4% of those on death row are innocent—men and women condemned to die despite being wrongly accused. That’s four out of every 100. Imagine filling a room with 100 death row inmates and knowing that four of them should not be there. That’s our current national reality.

Let’s also remember Native Americans, driven from their ancestral lands, often violently, through policies like the Trail of Tears. Let’s remember the Chinese immigrants who were excluded, mistreated, and in many cases massacred—like the 1871 mass killing of Chinese residents in Los Angeles, one of the largest lynchings in American history. Let’s remember Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II, their dignity stripped away because of suspicion and fear. Let’s remember Jewish synagogues attacked by gunmen, mosques vandalized, Sikh worshippers murdered in hate-fueled shootings, and Latino immigrants harassed and targeted for speaking Spanish in public.

And today, on this twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11th, we remember nearly 3,000 men, women, and children killed in a single morning of premeditated and coordinated terror. Whole families were shattered in minutes. The smoke, the fire, the falling towers, the desperate phone calls, the stunned silence across the nation—it all reminds us how quickly human life can be vandalized and stolen.

There are also the funerals. In the church I once pastored, we hosted service after service in the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting here in Nashville. Children, educators, and a custodian—all gunned down in a place meant for learning and safety. Parents burying their children, classmates and siblings left to grieve in confusion, a city demoralized by senseless sorrow.

The damning evidence against us mounts. From buses to public squares, from abortion clinics to prison cells, from lynching trees to execution chambers, from reservations to internment camps, from skyscrapers in New York to classrooms in Nashville—we are confronted with the cold, hard truth that ours is a culture that puts up with, excuses, and sometimes even applauds the shedding of innocent and defenseless blood.

Shakespeare captured something of this in Macbeth. After participating in murder, Lady Macbeth is tormented by the imagined bloodstains on her hands. “Out, damn spot!” she cries. But the spot will not go away. The more she tries to wash it away, the more it seems to spread.

So it is with us.

The blood of lynching victims still cries from the ground. The blood of the unborn continues to stain our collective conscience. The blood of the wrongly accused on death row accuses us still. The blood of those lost in 9/11, the blood of children in school shootings, the blood of the dispossessed and those cast aside—all testify against us. And now, the blood of a young woman on a bus, and the blood of a young man gunned down at a public gathering, join the chorus.

The Absurdity of Justifying Violence

And yet, in every generation, people attempt to justify such things.

Some appeal to ideology:
Our cause is righteous, so our methods do not matter.

Others appeal to grievances:
We have been wronged, so we are free to get even.

Still others reduce everything to Darwinian fatalism:
The world has always been violent; the weak must accept their fate.

But this is absurd.
Crazy-making.
Senseless.
Hard-hearted.
Wicked.

If we lose the ability to call cold-blooded violence what it is—wicked and evil—then we lose our moral bearings altogether. The prophet Habakkuk voiced the same lament we feel today: Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Why do you remain silent while the wicked swallows up the one more righteous than he? (Habakkuk 1:13).

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail cell, put it this way:

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.”

Yet despite King’s courage and unifying vision, critical theory has stepped in—posing as a solution, but in reality perpetuating and prolonging the same destructive cycle.

King’s words remind us: violence does not heal wounds, it deepens them. Eliminating people we disagree with does not restore community, it poisons it.

The Way of Jesus

The witness of Jesus Christ speaks directly into the despair of it all.

When soldiers came to arrest Him in the night, He did not retaliate with violence. When Peter drew a sword to defend Him, Jesus rebuked him:

“Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

Jesus Himself became the defenseless one. He became the innocent victim. He became the activist who spoke words that offend, the refugee caught off guard, the wrongly accused prisoner awaiting execution, the Son who was dismembered and aborted from the world. And as He was nailed to the cross, He prayed for His enemies: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

Here is the scandal and beauty of the gospel: Jesus absorbs violence into Himself. He refuses to perpetuate it. He allows evil to unleash its fury on His body. Then, by rising from the dead, He robs violence of its ultimate power.

Death does not get the final word.
Resurrection does.

So how should we then live? We must refuse to grow numb. We must grieve with those who grieve. We must resist the temptation to answer evil with evil. And we must embody an alternative: peacemaking, courage, reconciliation. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said, “for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).

Our living hope is that the risen Christ has already disarmed the rulers and authorities of this world, “making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15). Our living hope is that one day, “nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4).

Until that day, let us confess our complicity, let us name the spreading stain, and let us hold fast to the promise that evil—however loud and harsh and boisterous it may seem—will not win in the end.

This is not okay.

And because Christ is risen, evil will one day be crushed, bloodshed will one day be mended, and death will one day die.

May it be so. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.