How to Process Tragedy as a Christian

Four aspects of reality that help us process tragic circumstances

I’m still not used to the perfect blue canopy that crowns a day like paradise clouding to near dark in a few minutes. Seeing a postcard-perfect day in the rearview mirror and black clouds through the windshield still disorients me. But that’s life in Florida, where clumps of thunder, lightning and rain can push themselves into the world. Where they do push themselves into the world, nearly daily in the summer, in the mid- to late-afternoon. Even the most native Floridian can find themselves surprised by the thunderstorms at times.

We’re natives in the world, yet the world is not our homeland, so the clusters of black that thunder and electrify our weeks and days can still startle us. Maybe less from the surprise, and more from the sudden dark horror that violates our peace. Such violent dark has horrified us for the last couple of weeks.

A racist massacre in Buffalo.

A report about sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches.

Another incomprehensible assault and massacre at an elementary school in Texas.

Each horrifying us in different ways, at different levels of awareness and personal and cultural experience, but together they cluster together in the death of dark thunder and jagged lightning.

How in the world do we respond to these things? How do we make sense of things that make no sense, racism, sexual abuse and deceit, slaughtered children? There aren’t easy answers, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any answers. As dark and as real as the storm might be, the storm is not the only reality. In such times we need to hold tightly to the permanent reality above the clouds. Let’s explore four aspects of reality that help us process tragedy.

1. The Reality of God

The permanent reality is the reality of the God who is. Here among the forever-surpassing perfections of God, a twin reality stands out, spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “For the High and Exalted One, who lives forever, whose name is holy, says this: ‘I live in a high and holy place, and with the oppressed and lowly of spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the oppressed…’” (Is. 57:15). God is both transcendent and immanent, high above and beyond and also closer that our own soul.

First, God is transcendent. God exists above and beyond the passing realities of the world, he transcends all creation, time, and contingency. He is the eternal Creator, not the temporary creation. He is utterly unique. He is holy and high above. He is the burning sun high above the darkened skies. When the lower realms of the world flood with thunder and danger, the great sun burns all the same. As summer thunderstorms don’t dim the actual brilliance of the sun, the tragedies of the world don’t shadow the holy fury of the one true and living God. He is “the high and exalted one, who lives forever, whose name is holy.”

Second, God is also immanent. He doesn’t just sit above the fray with disinterest, but abides fully in the darkest and most dangerous centers of the storm. He is somehow most near to those who are most vulnerable. He moves into the worst neighborhood in town, and buys the worst house on the block. He doesn’t evacuate to safety but abides in the middle of the margins. Scripture tells—rather, sings—this to us all over the place: “The Lord is near the brokenhearted; he saves those crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18); “He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). The Spirit of the Lord is the immanent Song in the middle of the sorrow.

As the ever- and all-present Lord transcends the reality of the world and somehow abides in the midst of the reality of the world, he is always, only, and ever both sovereign and good. In his burning holiness he is sovereign and he is good. In his tender nearness he is sovereign and he is good. He is somehow in control over all the sorrow, sovereign over the trigger fingers of armed and armored evil men, and somehow good and pure and kind in the midst of bleeding. The Lord is good and he does good, in both his transcendence and his immanence, he is ultimate reality in the midst of the reality of sin.

2. The Reality of Sin

The good world that the Lord made has been corrupted because of rebellion against the Creator. The serpent tempted the woman and the man to disregard the word of the Lord. They listened, they ate the fruit. Sin has separated us from the nearness of God and sin terrorizes us with the holy fury of God. In other words, sin turns both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence into bad news rather than good news for us. Sin has infected every person and everything in creation. The consequences of sin show up in every moment in our own thoughts and every day in our news feeds. The consequence of sin against the blessed God can be nothing other than a curse. Thus, all of creation stands under the judgment of the curse of sin: for the serpent, a humiliating and crushing defeat (3:14-15); for the woman, pain and discontent (3:16); for the man and the world-garden the Lord had entrusted to him, futility and death (3:17-19; Rom. 8:22). The Lord says, “The ground is cursed because of you” (Gen. 3:17) and “creation has been subjected to futility” (Rom. 8:22), and the man “will return to dust” in death (Gen. 3:19). Sin is thus both an individual soul sickness and a structural social sickness. Sin affects and infects every human and every human heart, and it also affects the structures and systems of society, both because sinful people make those structures and because of the judgment of God upon creation. Sinful people do sinful things and sinful groups create sinful institutions, yet there is at bottom a curse of divine judgment that withers the best of beginnings and intentions. Sin has poisoned the soil of creation like a failed nuclear reactor poisons the earth around it. Even the best seeds mature with thorns embedded into their stems as they push through the dirt.

So, why does a racist target black people at a grocery store? Why do people fail to protect the vulnerable? Why does someone enter a school with intent to harm? We hear so many answers. “We need to ban assault weapons.” “We need to improve our mental health services.” “We need to educate people.” “We need to strengthen families and end fatherlessness.” Often these answers and solutions divide along partisan political lines, and then it becomes an “us” and “them” and very little gets resolved. The Christian view of the world and the reality of sin helps us see that society and culture are multilayered and complex. There are individual and structural factors at play. The answer to “Why?” is the ancient answer of human shame hiding from the presence of God in the garden. The answer is sin, not as a sort of cheap cliché, but in the deep and complex sense the Bible describes. From chapter three on, the Bible describes the world’s problems in terms of both individual soul sin and corporate structural sin; both infect everything under the sun. Individually, the horrors of recent weeks are discrete individual acts of evil caused by the sinful soul sickness in the heart of the human who perpetrates them. A gun can only hurt someone if someone pulls the trigger. Some take this and say, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” The Christian understanding of the world can say, “Yes, this is true, because people are sinners and have the capacity for unthinkable deeds of darkness.” Not only that, though, but structurally, we can see a whole range of social factors that might need to be addressed, because sin infects everything in the world around us, regardless of intention. So we can say that an evil person is responsible and that our social order needs to address the culture of gun violence, fatherlessness, and mental health.

Christians know the true story of the world, and so horrid acts of evil and tragic season of darkness grieve us, but they don’t fully surprise us, any more than a summer afternoon thunderstorm truly surprises a true Floridian. We understand that we live in a place broken and infected by the primal rebellion of humanity against the Creator. We understand that the world is in many ways a household haunted by the curse of divine judgment. We grieve this reality, but we (should) grieve differently than the world around us, “not like rest, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). There is truer reality than the reality of sin.

3. The Reality of Christ

The reality of God meets the reality of sin in the reality of Christ, who is the transcendent God made immanent in created, human nature. The songs of God’s nearness took form in the incarnate Word. The soul and system of humanity and creation needed intervention from the high and holy God, so the Word became flesh and moved himself into our neighborhood. He took the curse straight-on, yielding his sinless soul up to the consequence for the sins of our souls, bearing the judgment of God on the cross, vindicating his life by his resurrection from the dead. Unlike every other buried seed which has been corrupted by the soil’s contagion, the buried seed of Christ’s body brings healing and purifying for the soil of the world. He is the solution for our soul sickness of sin, offering in his death and resurrection forgiveness and reconciliation. He is also the hope for the social sickness of sin, as he reigns from on high in transcendence and abides in us by his Spirit in immanence. If you want to understand the way that the ascended Christ has transformed the world, read a book like Dominion by Tom Holland or The Air We Breathe by Glen Scrivener. The world we inhabit has been made better by the spread of Christian reality into it. In all of its simplicity and all of its riches, the most real reality in the midst of tragedy is the one kids give in their classes on Sunday morning: Jesus. He is the transcendent God made immanent in both sovereignty and goodness, incarnate and made a man, crucified and made the curse, risen and reigning over all the world. Jesus offers the hope of both soul transformation and social transformation, and in him we find our place to respond.

4. The Reality of Response-ability

We can respond, and we must respond. When we hear a brother from a different cultural mother tell us about what its like for his family when things like the Buffalo shooting happen, when an evil gunman travels for hours to make sure he can kill only black people, we can respond like Nehemiah did. In Nehemiah 5, wealthy Israelites were oppressing poorer Israelites, Nehemiah did what we should do: “I became extremely angry when I heard their outcry and these complaints. After seriously considering the matter, I accused the nobles and officials, saying to them, ‘Each of you is charging his countrymen interest.’ So I called a large assembly against them” (Neh. 5:6-7).

1. Listen: “When I heard their outcry and complaints.” We can listen with humble love. We can listen with loving belief. “Love believes all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Sometimes the most important step in the process of restoration, healing, and hope is simply believing that the horrid things that someone reports are, in fact, tragically, true.

2. Lament: “I became extremely angry.” We can all respond with the biblical practice of lament. Our culture does not value grief and lament, seeking solutions and healing without the hard pathway of mourning. The Psalms sing the songs of the mourning people of God: “How long O Lord?” (Ps. 13:1). “How long, Lord? Will you hide forever?” (Ps. 89:46). The practice of lament allows us to acknowledge that as much as we theologically affirm the immanence of God that we can functionally feel or experience a sense of the absence of God.

3. Learn: “After seriously considering the matter.” We can’t solve problems we don’t understand, and we can’t love people we don’t know. We need to study and read and learn our Bibles. As we learn our Bibles we must become so fluent in truth that we can then translate the realities of the world into the reality of the gospel. So we can listen to podcasts, news reports, read and learn, and explain the story of our world in light of the true story of the world in Scripture.

4. Labor: “I accused the nobles.” Nehemiah got to work, and so must we. We get to work on the spiritual, soul sickness of individual sin by declaring and displaying the glorious reality of God and the gospel as the remedy for human sin. We evangelize, because life is at stake and at stake is eternity. We do the work of spiritual renewal, and we also contribute insofar as we can to social renewal. For example, in almost every case of a mass shooting, the perpetrator lacked the loving presence of a dad in his life. We can solve that problem by being present as dads, and helping to cultivate an culture of fathering that stands in the gap. We can do the work of good citizens, like pastor Bart Barber in Texas, who was instrumental in passing a state law that allows churches to inform one another about unethical and abusive leaders in their midst.

The sun is still burning brightly beyond the dark sky of the moment. Let us be people, then, of faith, hope, and love.