A Boy, a 450 Pound Gorilla, and a God Who Is Not In Control

Harambe was his name. Last Friday, he celebrated his 17^th birthday. He was killed the next day, shot dead by the people who were supposed to protect him.

Harambe was the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens. He was killed because a three-year-old boy managed to climb under a fence, through wires, around bushes, and fall 15 feet into Harambe’s enclosure. I don’t know how a gorilla is supposed to act – not being a gorilla myself – but video shows Harambe acting as you might expect. To the horror of the boy’s mother, he grabbed the boy and began to drag him around.

Was Harambe about to harm the boy? Or was he trying to protect him? We don’t know for sure, but the boy’s life could well have been in danger. Zoo management decided that a tranquilizer would take too long to work. They decided to kill Harambe so that the boy would live.

People quickly wanted to find someone to blame for the incident. Many assert that Harambe is the victim. And while his death is a tragedy, naming the victim has led many to seek out a victimizer. Some blame the zoo’s leadership for its inability to find a more nonviolent alternative – because, you know, we’re all experts at making split second decisions with someone’s life on the line. The zoo says it had to make a difficult decision and laments Harambe’s death. Management also claims innocence because it has protective measures to make sure these types of events don’t happen. In fact, “Gorilla World” at the zoo has such an impressive safety record that this is the first security breach “since it opened in 1978.”

Others blame the mom. She makes an easy scapegoat. Accusing her of being a horrible parent allows us to think that we are so much better than she is. I would never let my child get in such a dangerous position. I can tell you that because I have three young children and I never take my eyes off of them. Ever. I wouldn’t know anything about preparing my boys to go to a park, telling one of them to stick close to me while I turned to help the other put on his bicycle helmet. When I turned back around, I saw my son riding his tricycle down our neighborhood sidewalk. Suddenly, a neighbor backed her car out of her driveway, narrowly missing him by about 10 feet. The nightmare often replays in my head, and then I repress it … because I’m a good parent, unlike that horrible mother who turned her head…

Blaming others is an attempt to claim a false sense of moral superiority over them. It’s exactly what mimetic theory means by scapegoating. But blaming also reveals a natural desire for answers, which brings up all kinds of questions. How could a boy have managed to crawl under a fence, through wires, around bushes, and fallen 15 feet, leading to the death of a gorilla?

Why did my son barely miss a car while riding his tricycle when countless other have not been so lucky? My parents tell me that in 1983 we went to the Oregon State Fair. I was four-years-old and had wandered off – my Mom thought I was with my Dad. Of course, my Dad thought I was with my Mom. I was lost for 30 minutes as they frantically looked for me. A stranger noticed I was lost, took me to the lost and found, and stayed with me until my parents came. Why was I so lucky, while other lost children have been kidnapped?

It wasn’t because I had bad parents. There’s no other way to put – it’s because sometimes shit happens. We are not in control of life. No matter how vigilant parents are, children fall into a gorilla enclosure, boys ride their tricycles down the street, and sometimes a kind soul lead a lost child to a state fair’s lost and found.

I don’t blame the mom or the zoo, but the mom did do something that bothered me. She wrote on Facebook that, “God protected my child until the authorities were able to get him.” She ended her post thanking God, “for being the awesome God that He is.”

I’m a religious person. I like to praise God. And I understand the absolute sense of relief this mother must have felt as her son was saved from potential death, but I’m uncomfortable with thanking God for protection.

A God who is in control, who protects us from harm, wouldn’t let a child crawl under a fence and fall 15 feet to come face to face with a 450-pound gorilla. That God would make sure no child was ever hit by a car and that no child was ever kidnapped. And, certainly, a God in control wouldn’t come to the point of needing to violently sacrifice an innocent gorilla so that a boy might live.

And here we come to the Christian view of Atonement. There’s a deep seated view of God that looks similar to the story about Harambe and the boy. This view of Atonement says that, like the managers of the zoo killed Harambe so the boy might live, God killed Jesus so that humanity might live. Humanity sinned and deserved death. God became wrathful with sin and Jesus took God’s wrath upon himself. This idea claims Jesus was a substitutionary sacrifice, channeling God’s violent wrath upon himself so that we might be saved from divine fury.

But the analogy fails when we consider that Harambe wasn’t killed by God. Harambe was killed by humans who had to make a difficult decision. In a similar way, the Gospels claim that Jesus wasn’t killed by God, but by people. It was human violence that killed Jesus, not divine violence. J.D. Meyers perfectly describes this as the “non-violent atonement” when he writes in his book The Atonement of God, “The basic idea of the Non-Violent view of the Atonement is that while Jesus did indeed die a violent death on the cross, it was not God who put Jesus there, but humans.”

Like all parents, ultimately the Father couldn’t protect his Son from going through the pain and suffering that we all experience – often at the hands of our fellow human beings. God is not the alpha-parent who protects us from harm, let alone a 450-pound gorilla.

Rather, on the cross Jesus reveals that God suffers with us. That means God does not scapegoat. Jesus’ prayer that the “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” reveals that God has nothing to do with the human tendency to blame, but everything to do with sharing in our suffering and ending the cycle of blame through acts of forgiveness.

Instead of blaming the mother or the zoo, God calls us to compassion for the boy, the mother, and the zoo. Compassion literally means, “to suffer with.” For parents, part of that compassion is empathizing with the mother. The mother is not much different from any other parent because none of us has absolute control over our child’s safety – and neither does God.

Still, I give thanks to God for showing us the way to end the cycle of scapegoating. I’m thankful for compassionate people who care for anyone who is traumatized by events like this. And I’m thankful that God helps us through our sense of shame when we blame ourselves, healing us and guiding us into a future where there are no scapegoats.

Image: Harambe eating celery (Screenshot from YouTube)