When The Greatest Evil Returns
I have been sitting here for about an hour now avoiding writing this post. Church is cancelled this morning because of the massive winter storm, so here I sit with this news and only prayer to comfort me. It wasn’t supposed to happen again, but it has.
A new report from Time Magazine:
As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME—indicating a dramatic surge in the death toll. So many people were slaughtered by Iranian security services on that Thursday and Friday, it overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead. Stocks of body bags were exhausted, the officials said, and eighteen-wheel semi-trailers replaced ambulances.
The doctors doing the estimating, think the count will climb and the use of explosives is postulated. Worse, there is a kicker:
The only parallel offered by online databases occurred in the Holocaust. On the outskirts of Kyiv on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi death squads executed 33,000 Ukrainian Jews by gunshot in a ravine known as Babyn Yar.
And so the greatest slaughter in the history of mankind has come again – and from an historical perspective, relatively rapidly.
I am revulsed. I am depressed. I am filled with rage and hatred. My advanced age not withstanding, I am tempted to pick up a weapon and return the favor. I seem to have every emotional response and impulse possible, but that one the apostles call us to – to not return evil for evil. I ponder the line between returning evil and executing justice.
And yet in this nation we are all up in arms over law enforcement killing one person, just one, justifiably. And that utter moral misjudgment is just as sick and just as evil as this slaughter itself. How dare we wring our hands and cry foul in Minneapolis when something like this is happening? HOW DARE WE!? How dare we be so self-absorbed – so self-indulgent? How dare we claim compassion while ignoring slaughter on such an unimaginable scale?
I mourn the 30,000 and I grieve deeply for this nation. Action on the part of this nation is a terribly complex question – but outrage at this massacre and a hunger for justice is not. Yet even those simple things we seem almost pathologically incapable of finding. I wonder what is the greater evil, the massacre or our inability to acknowledge that evil, for our lack of acknowledgement only encourages more and more and more evil.
God and God alone, through His son Jesus, is the only source of hope in such a dark world. I cling to that hope this morning. I hope you will as well.
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