From Boston, With Love

Image courtesy of Theological Graffiti

We posted some of T. C. Moore’s reflections on the Open 2013 conference earlier this week. T. C. lives in Boston and was deeply moved by the violence and terror that came to his city. Now we want to share his most recent blog post Oz and the Cross: Reflections on God’s Love and the Boston Marathon Bombings. In our rage and grief it’s all too easy to frame this tragedy as the “evil other” attacking the “righteous us.” But this is not the way of Jesus. We challenge you to sit with T. C.’s piece and view the recent bombings and the victims and perpetrators through a lens that moves us to prayer and peacemaking rather than revenge and self-righteousness. Can we view these events and confess, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”?

From T. C.’s blog:

Contrasting ourselves with an evil other does not produce the wholeness of God’s loving reign (shalom). Setting ourselves up against those who are trapped in sin, have succumb to a spirit of violence and death, does not magically make us the peculiar people who reflect God’s love. Instead, the only way for us to become the embodiment of God’s loving reign, is to model our love after the love of God demonstrated on Jesus’s cross: a love that prays for its murderer’s forgiveness. In Jesus’s death and life, he modeled a love that identified with those who were wounded, as well as those who were stigmatized—even with violent Zealots. The Apostle Paul, himself a violent murderer, was transformed by God’s love and called to herald the glorious Gospel of God’s Kingdom among the Gentiles. That’s the power of God’s love that is at work in this Jesus movement we call the Church!