Charlie Hebdo: Bullets for Words?

One of the lines in our communion liturgy says that “Jesus was beaten for what people thought he had done”.  They were false accusations.  Jesus died for lies in order to save us.  It was a horrible experience, one that we should accept with the humblest of gratitude.  That line rings in my head as I’ve watched the news reports on the executions in Paris of the staff of a satirical magazine.  Twelve people dead, names called out by the murderers, such a horrible, horrible waste.

It is like some kind of psychotic upping of the ante after “The Interview” was postponed due to terroristic threats, humans actually believing that they have the right, given by God and their own insanity, to kill people for what they say, what they write, what they draw.  Words answered with bullets.  So who has the more persuasive argument?

On a gut level, my reaction is that these murders should be hunted down and killed.  That is worth an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, life for life.  NOT cartoon for life!

My mind does not want to come back to the connection this has with the death of Jesus.  I do not quite understand why I want to avoid it.  Jesus’ death was senseless, he was killed by extremists who did not like what he had to say, but it served a far larger purpose in the history of humanity.  It demonstrated faith carried to death, even death on the cross.

Three days later, he was raised again from the dead that no one else may die.  That promise carries with it, I hope, relief for the future, but in the here and now, that promise feels thin against the weight and measure of our grief.

But the fact of it was that Jesus’ death was not in vain.  There is an object lesson.  How do we live lives after what happened there so that they will not have died in vain?  We do not let ourselves be scared into silence.  We rejoice in the spoken word, the written word, and the illustrated word as freedoms of our expression.  We exercise our right to express our disagreement, our distaste, our hatred, and our abhorrence for those words that are insulting and anathema to us.

But we defend in blood the right to be able to share those words.