Alex & Renee: Where was God When They were Murdered?

Christ with me,


Christ before me,


Christ behind me,


Christ in me.

St Patrick

It helps me to read Scripture and think about it. It centers me and, when chaos reigns, it sustains and calms me.

I’m not a sophisticated Bible scholar. I just read through the Bible, from In the beginning, all the way through to, the grace of the Lord Jesus, be with you, every year. Right now, I’m reading the Book of Job.

If you look at it on the surface, you can dismiss Job as a fanciful morality play, a rest stop on the way to the “real” stuff in the prophets and the New Testament.

But Job is a pivotal part of the Old Testament. It asks the hard questions. If God loves us, why do we suffer? If God is just, why does injustice so often seem to win? Why do evil, cruel people prosper and good people live and die in poverty and oppression?

When Job asked these questions, he was confronted by “friends” who were really accusers. Their accusations laid out the arguments that are still being used to justify heresies today.

The book of Job doesn’t explain suffering and injustice from God’s viewpoint. It couldn’t. It was written 2,000 years before the Answer — Jesus Christ — was born. What Job does do is put the heresies themselves down. Job tells us several very important things, all of which are pertinent to this time in our history as a nation and a people. 

First of all Job teaches us that God does not necessarily reward good people with wealth and power. Vast wealth and power are not signs of God’s favor. They are also not rewards for righteous living. 

Second, poverty, powerlessness, and suffering do not mean that God hates you. Being on the bottom of the wheel so far as money and power go is not a punishment for having been a bad person. Neither is illness.

Third, when wealthy and powerful people (and the people who worship wealthy and powerful people) make attempts to redefine the plain teaching of Scripture to condemn, insult and degrade those who are impoverished and powerless by claiming that their life situation is a result of their weakness or laziness, they are, in fact, just repeating the accusations Job’s “friends” leveled at him in his suffering.

Fourth, we can’t “buy” wealth and success in this life from God by reciting special prayers, engaging in rituals or following certain rules. God isn’t an idol. Shamanistic behavior does not persuade Him. 

The Book of Job does not explain why God allows injustice. But it does make it clear that wealth, health and power are not rewards for righteousness, and that poverty, powerlessness and illness are not divine punishment for sinfulness. 

Two thousand years after Job, Jesus took this Old Testament teaching and pushed it to its fullest limit. Jesus was — and is — God in human form. Jesus testified repeatedly to the fact that He is God — before Abraham was, I AM, He said; the Father and I are One, He told them, If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father, He explained. 

Jesus is God. He told us that He and God the Father are One. Then, He took the Old Testament teaching that the Book of Job tried to explain and, as we say here in Oklahoma, “nailed it to the wall.” 

If you do something FOR the “least of these,” — that is the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable; the people who can’t fight back — you do it FOR Me. That’s what He said. 

He also taught the converse: If you do something TO the least of these — the weakest, the poorest, the most vulnerable; the people who can’t fight back — you are doing it TO Me. 

This is Truth. It applies to all human beings. It is the totality of the Law and the Prophets, the answer to Job’s lament and Solomon’s bitter disillusionment against the seeming meaninglessness of life that ends in the grave, boiled down to two simple statements. In a way that is so profound I cannot really express it, Jesus was telling us what it means when the Scriptures say that God made us, male and female, in His Image.

If you do it to the least of these, you do it to me, He said. Because every human being is made in His Image. We are called to love God, and love other people. That is the Scriptures. We can break all sorts of rules, but if we break those two things, we break ourselves. Our lives, our nation, our world dissolves into nihilism, lies, greed, cowardice, cruelty and murder. 

We are all God’s children. That isn’t an easy truth. It’s a hard one. It puts an impossible load of moral expectation on us that we are far too weak to live up to on our own, without the Holy Spirit.

Job’s answer to the arrogance of the wealthy and powerful was to remind them that they would end up in a grave, the same as everyone else. Job’s answer, like all the answers in the Old Testament, was incomplete.

He didn’t have Christ, so he didn’t have the Answer. He longed for Christ. His longing for the redemptive power of the Cross, for the deep, personal relationship with God that is freely available to us through the open doorway of the Empty Tomb, is woven throughout the narrative of his lament.

He wanted more from God; more than he had, more than he got. He wanted an answer to the riddle of God’s goodness in a suffering and unjust world. 

He couldn’t square that circle. He ended by having to accept that he couldn’t and wouldn’t ever be able to square that circle.Without Jesus Christ, no one can. 

But with Jesus Christ, the circle squares itself. If you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to Me. 

God doesn’t sit and watch us like a student in a genetics lab counting fruit flies he gassed for an experiment. Cold, unfeeling indifference to what happens to us as individuals is what satan offers. God offers us Himself. 

God is with us, and not just in a nebulous, after-we-die way. He is with us in a very real, here and now, way. 

We are made in His Image. We have the spark of the Divine in us. It is how we are made and who we are. We are God’s children. When we suffer, God, in the Person of Jesus Christ, suffers too. 

Wealth and power are not rewards for righteousness. If anything, they are stumbling blocks to righteousness. 

Poverty and powerlessness are not punishments for sinfulness. They can, like wealth and power, become stumbling blocks to righteousness, but they can also be a gift that leads us to genuine closeness with the Lord. 

If you do it to the least of these, you do it to me. 

I don’t think Jesus meant that metaphorically. I don’t think He was overstating things to make a point. 

I think He meant it in a literal and absolute way. 

We’ve seen two people murdered by our government. We watched as the people at the top of our government have told bald-faced lies in an attempt to coerce us into allowing them to continue murdering American citizens anytime they want without so much as a whisper of constraint or justice.

Everything in us cries out “Where was God? How did God let this happen?”

First of all, God didn’t let this happen. We did. We put the Mad King in power. We knew what he was and we chose to trust him instead of the teachings of the Gospels.

As to where God was, He was right there, with Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

I don’t think Alex Pretti and Renee Good were alone when the bullets hit them. I think their angels were with them. I think the Holy Spirit was holding them.  I think when those bullets hit Alex and Renee, they hit Christ, as well. 

Alex and Renee were in the situations that led to their murders because they were defending the least of these from a tyrant and his private army of killer thugs. Alex died trying to help a woman who was being brutalized by a gang of heavily armed men. Renee died forgiving the man who murdered her. 

The circle of suffering squares all by itself when you realize that everything we do matters, and that we never suffer alone or in vain. 

To paraphrase St Patrick, Christ is with us, Christ goes before us, Christ stands behind us, Christ is in us. 

Note: I didn’t reference any specific verses in the book of Job. I have found Job to be a great comfort to people who have been subjected to sadistic societal injustice and persecution; especially victims of violence such as rape who were rejected and shunned by their faith communities. The phrase If you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to Me is a close paraphrase from Matthew 25: 31-46 in which Jesus describes how we will be judged when we stand before God. This part of Scripture has been heavily disparaged and disregarded by right wing clergy, probably because it condemns most of what they’ve been preaching. Before Abraham was, I AM, is from John 8:58. The Father and I are One is from John 10:30. If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father is from John 14:9. When I said that our call to love God and other people was the Scriptures, I was paraphrasing Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:40.

Lastly, I am not a theologian. I do not speak for the Church. What I have written is my own insight, gained from a lot of prayer, reading the Scriptures daily and, to the best of my feeble ability, walking with Christ for many decades.