My friend Virzola is a pastor in Texas. On Wednesday, between prayers and outrage, she wrote a post about her granddaughter. “Ava had lots of questions still this morning. We tried to shield her from the news. Her mom put her to bed … but she woke up and saw us watching the news. And this morning she said, ‘Today is super hero day at my school.’” Virzola did everything she could not to cry, but tears flowed as her little girl, dressed in pink tights, with a shiny pink satin cape draped around her shoulder, proclaimed, “Ava will save the day.”
“She had questions,” Virzola wrote, “and she had answers.” And I have a lot more confidence in a little girl’s super powers, than in the ability of some of our political leaders to stand up straight with anything resembling a backbone. Dressed in their navy power suits, they repeated the old talking points of the gun industry. “What we need now is a top-to-bottom security overhaul at schools all across our country. Every building should have a single point of entry,” one of them said on Friday in Houston, at the great assembly of the true believers. “There should be strong exterior fencing, metal detectors and the use of new technology to make sure that no unauthorized individual can ever enter the school with a weapon.”[1]
They refer to this as “hardening soft targets.” We need to harden schools, and I assume that means we must also harden grocery stores. And churches, and synagogues and temples. And don’t leave us vulnerable at malls and movie theaters. And perhaps we ought to consider replacing school busses with armored personnel carriers? The hardening of soft targets goes hand in hand with the softening of constitutional thinking that insists, against all historical evidence, that the Second Amendment “gives anyone, anywhere in the country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons.”[2]
Asking for prayers, the archbishop of Chicago reminded the faithful that “the Second Amendment did not come down from Sinai.” But the second and third commandment certainly did. Another bishop spoke of sacrifice, stating that “this bloody sacrifice of children enabled by the death-culture of guns cannot be justified by appeals to ‘rights’.” And a chaplain at Harvard also spoke of sacrifice, “Our society is in deep crisis. We desperately need to relearn how to sacrifice for one another.”[3]
The bishop’s decision not to call the massacre at Robb Elementary School a tragedy but a “bloody sacrifice of children” shocks us into realizing that what we have witnessed again is the idolatrous ritual of a blasphemous death cult. And the chaplain’s words point to the reversal that is needed: from sacrificing others on the altar of our presumed “rights” to “relearning how to sacrifice for one another.”
After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ten years ago, Garry Wills wrote,
Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture.
Wills quotes lines from Paradise Lost, where Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:
First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol.
Against the noise of distractors Wills insists that
The horror [of the massacre] cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. … Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. … The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.[4]
How can we turn away from this horrifying idolatry? How can we “relearn how to sacrifice for one another”? I am convinced little Ava knows the power that’s needed. “Ava will save the day,” she declared with great confidence, ready to step into the world, with her pink satin super hero cape. Ava knows she is loved by her mom and dad, her granny, her siblings and cousins, and she knows all of them are loved by Jesus, and that God, who is big enough to love all people and all animals and the whole universe, does indeed love all people and all that God has made. Ava knows she is loved, and that’s the best super power of all. In her family, and in the company of Jesus, she is learning how all people and all thing are one in the love of God, and that gives her the courage to love others.
The gospel reading for today comes from Jesus’ last night with the disciples. He has shared a meal with them. He has washed their feet and told them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”[5] He has responded to all their worried, anxious questions about his going away. And now he stops addressing them, and starts praying for them, praying for us. His final words that night aren’t last-minute instructions about how to be God’s people in the world. His final words are words of prayer, and we have the privilege of overhearing what he says. In the other three Gospels, when Jesus prays before he is arrested, he is in Gethsemane, and he prays alone. Even his most trusted disciples are some distance away from him, and rather than praying with him or keeping watch, they fall asleep.[6] In John, the disciples, and we with them, get to witness the intimacy of the relationship between Jesus and the one he has consistently called “my Father” and “your Father.”
“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you,” Jesus prays, “may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” He prays for us to be drawn into the intimacy and mutuality of their life. And he prays for us to be drawn into the communion of love that is God, he doesn’t just make it so, because there is nothing coercive about this love. The commandment he has given us is new not in commanding us to love one another, but to love one another as he has loved us. This means that the center of the circle of love that holds us, as well as the radius that determines its reach, have been marked and drawn by Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. And the purpose of this wide-reaching unity is not only for us to find fullness of life in our communion with God and one another. The purpose is beyond us. The purpose is for the world to be fully alive. It was for love of the world that God sent the Son, and in Jesus’ great intercession, the farthest horizon of love’s reach is still the world, even the hostile world, the idolatrous, violence-torn, gun-obsessed world. He prays for us that our unity in love will be a living witness to God’s love for the world, and that the whole world may let itself be drawn into the consummation of life in the communion of love that is God.
We have been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of making the love of God visible and tangible in the world. Frightened and prone to stumbling into idolatrous paths as we are, God has entrusted the continuation of Christ’s mission to us. And John wants us to know that we belong to the community for whom Jesus prays. We are not alone in our mourning. We are not alone when our capacity to hurt each other breaks our hearts. We are not alone in our prayers for the world’s healing. We are not alone when we sacrifice for one another. And we are not alone when we ask for the courage to love as Jesus has loved us.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-schools-must-harden-after-uvalde-texas-already-tried-that-1711100
[2] See Garry Wills’s article from 1995 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/sep/21/to-keep-and-bear-arms/
[3] Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; Archbishop Elpidophoros, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain, Harvard University https://religionnews.com/2022/05/25/uvalde-school-shooting-faith-leaders-offer-comfort-call-for-reform-of-gun-laws/
[4] Garry Wills, “Our Moloch,” New York Review, December 15, 2012 https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/12/15/our-moloch/
[5] John 13:34-35
[6] See Mark 14:32-42 and parallels