Rape Will Not Go Unanswered
I read a story on CNN this morning that broke my heart:
Three of four minors accused of taking part in a brutal videotaped gang rape of a teenager will face full prosecution, a spokesman for a South African court said Wednesday. …The images of the assault of the 17-year-old girl, believed to be mentally ill, swept across the Internet last week and touched a nerve in South Africa. The shocking footage shows the girl pleading for her attackers to stop, and it has some activists saying it is an example of the country’s problem with rape.
My life group has been studying Revelation together for the last few months and this week were thinking through chapters 18-19 together. In an email to them today I said:
“I suppose my main response to chapters 18-19 is the response of the saints in the narrative itself: Overwhelming joy. I feel so incredibly… what’s the word… glad? Happy? Thrilled? … that God wins and that everything we see that’s wrong and ruinous and corrupt in the world (as symbolized by Babylon and the Beast) will be destroyed. These chapters are the answer to the frustration I feel in my gut when I see things like I saw this morning on CNN: A young disabled girl in South Africa was gang raped by a bunch of teenage boys and they filmed it on their phones and put it on the internet. When I see stuff like that my stomach turns inside out and my fists ball up because it’s such a perversion of God’s desire for the world. It’s so ugly and corrupt and evil. And these chapters tell us that there will be an answer to that. That crime will not go unpunished and unhealed. God will undo the badness done to the girl and the penalty for it will be paid by the offenders–unless they repent and follow the King, in which case the King himself will pay the penalty for them.”
I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s famous quote from The Great Divorce: “[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
That reminds me of something Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov…
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage… that in the world’s finale… something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”
That’s a great quote, D.