Gunman in King Soopers: A Report on the Banality of Evil
In 1962, The New Yorker commissioned Hannah Arendt, a German-born Holocaust survivor to report in Jerusalem on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, remains an important examination of how evil arises– over time, a perpetrator such as Eichmann sees himself is a mere cog in a bureaucratic machine. His sense of agency diminishes and he becomes numb to atrocity as he sees himself as a “Nobody.”
Arendt’s work is primarily about evil arising out of banal life. What about, though, when it erupts in a banal place?
Is there any place more mundane, more banal, more normal, than a neighborhood grocery store? Part of the weight I continue to feel about this shooting is where it happened. It did not happen in an obviously holy place, such as a church, or synagogue, or a school. It happened in the most everyday of places, where you buy yoghurt and Claritin and bananas; “a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.” All of my memories of that store are largely tangential to the store itself: selling girl scout cookies with my daughter when she was in fifth grade, picking up a free doughnut with my son after a Broncos win, doing doughnuts in my Toyota pickup in the parking lot after a snow storm in college. None of this is to say that the Table Mesa King Soopers was not a special place. By all accounts it was. It was special, though, holy, precisely because it was so common.
Part of my work as a pastor is to try to break down the divide between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the mundane. The beauty of the Divine can be seen not only in grandeur, but also in the quotidian: a conversation with a neighbor at the mailbox, a loaf of freshly baked bread, walking your dog in the evening. Jesus repeatedly spoke of this by saying “the kingdom of God is at hand.”
Evil, though, is apparently–disturbingly, threateningly–also “at hand.” It is near, not distant, and can invade the most normal and mundane of places. Those in the King Soopers that day heard soft rock from Spotify coming through the store’s speakers in between the sound of the gunshots. “I just nearly got killed for buying a soda,” said one survivor of the shooting. What do we do with this at-handed-ness of evil?
In the Bible, evil often invades banal moments and places. Cain murders Abel in a field (Genesis 4), Tamar is sexually coerced by her father-in-law at the annual sheep shearing (Genesis 38), and Jesus dies on a Roman cross.
The normalcy of crucifixion is easily lost on us. It was violent, and gruesome; it was also everyday and commonplace. The accounts of Jesus’ death make this clear. Jesus is crucified alongside two criminals for the sake of efficiency, for he was not the only one who needed to hang on a cross that day. The centurions overseeing the event had seen it enough times that they could casually gamble over Jesus’ clothes. Bystanders could callously jeer at Jesus, knowing another common crucifixion would happen the next day.
The Cross is where the Kingdom of God’s nearness meets the nearness of evil, where Love’s at-handed-ness overcomes the banality and commonness of evil and violence.
Good Friday is the nadir of the Triune God’s descent into darkness, into the banality of evil. It is the terminus of the Son of God’s “journey into the far country.” At this sojourn’s end is evil in all of its forms, including its mundaneness. That evil is not only exceptional but also common certainly disturbs our view of the world. Still, it may be “at hand,” but the kingdom of God is even nearer.
On Good Friday we walk, with David, “through the valley of the shadow of death.” It is important to note that this valley is not utter darkness, but shadowed. This shadow is cast by the light of resurrection. And so, “I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” Evil may be close, as close as the produce section, but the divine Thou is closer, and his kingdom even more at hand.
Whence hope, if this is not so?
Hoping, with all of you, for resurrection.