Larger Than Outrage

What I need now must be large enough to name murder without falling in love with punishment.

Photo credit: Mitchell Griest, Unsplash

This week, the news carried more names than a heart can hold.

Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was forty-five years old. On Monday morning, he was found unresponsive on a transport bus, being moved between two immigration detention centers in Georgia. His family says he had asked for his medication and did not receive it. He became at least the twenty-second person to die in ICE custody this year.

A week earlier, in Houston, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as he drove his construction crew to a job site. Federal agents had been surveilling a white van; the men they were actually looking for were not in it. Salgado Araujo was fifty-two. He had lived in this country for nearly thirty-five years, had no criminal record, and had applied for legal residency. Officers say he tried to ram them with his vehicle. The men riding beside him say that is not what happened, and the shots came from the side. There is almost no footage. The county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

That same Monday, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. He was twenty-six, a Colombian man who cleaned buildings and delivered food, and who left behind a partner and a three-year-old daughter. He was authorized to work here. He was not the person the officers had come for, either.

Three deaths in a handful of days. And behind the count, the same shape repeating.

A man leaves for work and does not come home.

A person asks for his medicine and dies in the custody of the government.

A family learns from a stranger’s phone what the government would not tell them.

We must tell the truth about that.

I understand why people are using the word murder. I understand the fury. I feel it too.

There are moments when words like incident and encounter become a kind of hiding place. They turn a dead human being into an administrative event. They place distance between the body on the ground and the power that put it there.

There is nothing Christian about looking away. We must demand investigations, accountability, policy changes, and the removal of power from those who wield it without restraint. We must protect the people being hunted, detained, and disappeared from workplaces and courthouse hallways, treated as though their legal status has erased their humanity.

But I have also been paying attention to what happens inside us when cruelty appears to be winning.

I have noticed how easily my hope can shrink into a desire for reversal. Let the people inflicting terror become terrified. Let those who humiliate others be humiliated in public. Let everyone who blessed this someday feel exactly what they made other people feel. It is not hard to understand. When justice has been delayed, distorted, or denied, vengeance can begin to look like its only remaining form.

And then I came across a passage someone posted from the Scottish theologian William Barclay’s autobiography. Barclay called himself, plainly, a convinced universalist. He believed that in the end, every person would be gathered into the love of God.

He did not mean that evil does not matter. He did not imagine a sentimental God waving everyone through the door as though nothing had happened. He believed there could be judgment, severe correction, painful truth, and what he called ages of purification. But he could not believe that punishment was God’s final purpose.

He was reaching back to Gregory of Nyssa, who understood divine judgment as something closer to surgery, or to refining fire. Not the destruction of the person, but the burning away of what has distorted and diseased them. In that vision, judgment is not God abandoning people to evil forever. It is God refusing to let evil remain in them forever.

I do not know whether I am prepared to resolve every question about universal salvation. I do know that divine judgment must be consistent with the character of God.

God’s justice cannot be less loving than God is.

It cannot look like the cruelty we condemn, only magnified and made eternal. It cannot be the satisfaction of watching our enemies suffer forever and calling that holiness. It cannot ask us to believe that torture becomes righteous the moment God is the one administering it. Whatever judgment finally means, its purpose must move toward truth, repair, healing, and reconciliation.

That does not mean there are no consequences.

Reconciliation without truth is not reconciliation. Forgiveness without an end to the harm is not peace. Grace does not ask the vulnerable to stay within reach of those who are still dangerous. Love does not require us to pretend that the person holding the weapon and the person lying beneath it bear equal responsibility.

Some people must be stopped. Some must lose their authority. Some crimes must be exposed in full daylight. Some structures must be dismantled so thoroughly that no one can rebuild them under another name. There can be no restoration that does not reckon with what was stolen, whose body was broken, whose family was shattered, and who benefited from the suffering.

But accountability and annihilation are not the same thing.

This is where Christian hope asks more of me than outrage does.

Outrage can tell me what I am against. Hope has to tell me what I still believe is possible.

Christian hope is not the belief that everything will be fine. It is not optimism dressed in church language. It does not soften the names of the dead or ask grieving families to look for a silver lining. It tells the truth about death and still refuses to give death the final word. It tells the truth about evil without granting evil permanence.

I find myself returning to Paul’s strange, enormous vision of the end: all things gathered under Christ, every power and dominion brought to nothing, the last enemy, death itself, destroyed, until God is all in all. Not God presiding over a universe divided forever between the beloved and the abandoned. God all in all.

I do not know what such restoration would require of those who ordered the raids, separated the families, neglected the sick in custody, pulled the triggers, lied about the dead, and blessed all of it in the name of God. Perhaps it would feel like hell.

To face the humanity of every person you refused to see.

To face the full truth of the suffering you caused.

To face the sons whose father did not come home, and the child who will grow up knowing how her father died.

To face the God whose image you would not recognize in them.

Maybe judgment is what happens when there is nowhere left to hide from love. A love that does not flatter. A love that does not excuse. A love fierce enough to burn away every lie, and unwilling to surrender either the wounded or the one who caused the wound to the permanence of evil.

I want justice for those being harmed now. Not someday. Now. I want the raids stopped. I want the detention centers opened to scrutiny. I want the independent investigations the UN human rights chief has already called for. I want officers who kill people held accountable under the law. I want churches to stop calling state violence righteousness simply because it is aimed at people they have been taught to fear. I want what has been hidden brought into the light.

But I do not want cruelty to teach me what justice is. I do not want this administration, or any administration, to shrink my moral imagination down to deciding who deserves to be treated as less than human. I do not want to grow so used to vengeance that I can picture no victory larger than the suffering of my enemies.

The hope I need now has to be larger than that. Large enough to protect the vulnerable and confront the powerful. Large enough to name murder without falling in love with punishment. Large enough to demand consequences and still refuse to believe that any human being was made for evil’s keeping.

Perhaps the final victory of God is not that every enemy has been destroyed.

Perhaps it is that every enmity has been healed.

Until then, we resist. We tell the truth. We stand between vulnerable bodies and the powers that would consume them. We grieve every life that was treated as disposable.

I think of a porch in Houston where a man used to sit in the evening and listen to music, and of the empty chair now. I think of a three-year-old in Maine who will not have to be told how her father died on his way to work, because she was there to see it. I think of a sister in Georgia who begged them to let her brother keep his medicine.

These are not incidents. These are not encounters. These are the images of God, and the God whose image they bear does not forget them.

Cruelty will not have the final word. Neither will fear. Neither will ICE. Neither will empire.

The final word belongs to the God whose judgment tells the truth, whose mercy does not surrender, and whose purpose, in the end, is the reconciliation of all things. Amen

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Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.