I used to play football in the local park, in the red ash playfield, on the tarmac of the school playground, in the farmer’s field, even on proper football pitches – the worst that ever happened was skint knees, and later torn ligaments because of a bad tackle. That an 11 year old boy, playing football in a pub car park, is shot with a handgun and killed by another young man riding on a BMX renders all the usual inner mechanisms of moral response stuck. I’ve no idea what to think, or feel, or write – pain, anger, sorrow, revulsion, compassion, – an entire spectrum of human response to inhuman behaviour seems redundant.
But it wasn’t an inhuman person who did this – it was a young human being who acted out the ultimate violent fantasy of ending the life of another human being. As easy as the flick of a joystick – more fun than the limits of virtual violence – translating the familiar comic book violence of movie and computer game onto the streets where real people can die. The causal connection between a person’s preferred entertainment, and the patterns of their own behaviour is not established, researchers tell us. There is a lack of evidence-based documentation so we’re told.
There is a longstanding way of viewing reality called the Scottish Commonsense School. One of its assumptions is that we can trust the evidence of the common experience of people. Human experience of the real world whether moral, intellectual, emotional or volitional, is to be seriously considered as itself having evidential value. The desensitising of a young mind, by exposure to regular pre-packaged violence in a virtual environment, or the pumped up messages of music that celebrates violence, is not, on any common sense reflection, irrelevant to patterns of behaviour where inexplicable and lethal violence result in dead people – in the real world.
There are profound and disturbing changes taking place in the moral fabric of our culture. Now and again events such as Dunblane, the killing of Jamie Bulger, the knifing of Damilola Taylor, and….and….. You see, what was once unusual and unprecedented becomes a list, routine, a series of heinous crimes so that the word heinous becomes a regular adjective, its edge blunted by constant use.
Whatever else I might want to try to say or think, as a Christian, I instinctively consider two theological truths that underlie such happenings like theological bedrock –
1. Sin is a catastrophic reality in the human story and can always visit the inexplicable and unimaginable upon the innocent; and as evil it must never be explained away by finding more comfortable explanations in social determinism, psychological profiling or genetic programming. The killing of a boy playing football was an act of hellish indifference to the reality of a human life.
2. Redemption is that action of God, creative and costly, in which the suffering and death of Christ demonstrate the inexplicable and unimaginable mercy of God, on creatures capable of that same hellish indifference to human suffering and death. I believe in sin; I believe in redemption through Christ even more. As my theological mentor and hero James Denney never tired of asserting – sin is not the last reality of the universe – here it is, eternal love, bearing sin.
For this young boy, Rhys Jones, for his mother who held him as he died, and for all touched by this tragedy, I only offer words of perplexed intercession –Lord in your mercy.
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