A Reflection for the Seventeenth Sunday in Unusual Time
“Please, let not my Lord grow offended if I speak up this last time.
What if there are at the very least ten there?”
He replied, “For the sake of those ten, I won’t destroy it.”
I sat down to write down today’s reflection on the identical day the country discovered that almost 400 law enforcement officials responded to Robb Elementary School. 400 massively armed and trained officers of the law who apparently did nothing in any respect while a gunman roamed across the halls and slaughtered nineteen children and two teachers at his leisure.
400 people, I said to my husband, is just like the population of a small town. And never a single one among them thought it was as much as him to intervene.
The reading for the day: Abraham pleads with the Lord to spare a small town, Sodom, if only he can find some innocent individuals who live there. What if there are fifty innocents, says Abraham. Surely, the judge of the world will act with justice and won’t sweep away the innocent with the guilty. If he can find fifty innocent residents, will God spare the town? And God agrees.
But Abraham apparently knows this town well, and he immediately begins to bargain God down. What if there are only forty-five, or forty? Will God forbear then? And God agrees that he’ll.
That is about Uvalde, yes. That is about police reform. That is about forcing ourselves to take a tough have a look at what type of narratives we consider about who is actually good, and why we consider it.
Abraham persists. What if he can only find thirty innocent men, or twenty? What if he can only find ten? And God agrees: Yes, that will make a difference.
What if only ten policemen had chosen to be good?
What if just one had?
What if just one had chosen to do anything in any respect? What number of fewer brightly-colored coffins would they’ve had to construct?
The Uvalde report says that there was “systemic failure,” and that is manifestly true. Nobody was in charge, and all the pieces proceeded as wrongly as you may possibly imagine. All that vast, grotesquely muscular firepower was poured into doing nothing in any respect, while the little innocent ones had nobody on their side, nobody to beg mercy for them.
That is about Uvalde, yes. That is about police reform. That is about forcing ourselves to take a tough have a look at what type of narratives we consider about who is actually good, and why we consider it.
However it’s also about this concept of systemic failure butting up against the concept that one single good man could have made a difference. One! If one officer had said, “That is insane. This just isn’t my job, to face in a hallway, sweating through my armor and waiting for orders while second graders are blown apart. I’m here and I can do something. A minimum of I can do what one man can do.” It might have made a difference. But no person did. Not fifty of them. Not forty-five. Not thirty. Not ten. Not one.
Every one among those officers will die some day and can face the judge of the world, utterly alone. No commanding officer, no body armor, no union rep to plead his case, no qualified immunity. Just him and the blazing face of the Lord, demanding an account of their actions.
So will all of us. So will all of us.
