Reed Mueller

As promised, I’m going to tackle the very difficult issue of abortion and the very real case of pregnancy secondary to forced intercourse like rape and incest. As I do, please know that I have not considered this in a vacuum; that is, this very situation is reported to be the reason for obtaining an abortion for at least 10,000 women per year (Guttmacher Institute Study, p. 297). This is a substantial number of women who have been violated and who are faced with this almost unimaginable situation. We need to consider this in anything we might say on the issue: real people have been hurt greatly in our broken and unredeemed world.

The typical ‘pro-life’ response to this question is something akin to saying (yes, I present it as a caricature here) “Don’t have an abortion now that you’re pregnant because two wrongs don’t make a right.”

This (somewhat callous) response is natural if one is working from the typical argument that the embryo or fetus is a person and shouldn’t be terminated as a result because they are a) innocent and b) have rights. I talked a lot about why I think this isn’t the foundational line of thinking we Christians should hold to, as a people called to faith, on the abortion issue. That goes for the issue in general, as discussed in my message over the weekend and in my post the other day, as well as for the issue in this specific context. Yet others, who are to be respected, make this a chief line of argumentation. This is understandable and works better in secular debate but misses (I think) the very gift we must offer women facing this circumstance. It also misses the best of what we are called to as a people of faith.

The gift we have to offer – a great gift indeed – is best seen in retrospect. Not a retrospective look at how this has played out in any woman’s life but rather how it worked out in one man’s life. This man, who was a few years younger than me, was brutally tortured and then unjustly executed. To say that he was unjustly executed is an understatement; he was completely innocent of the crimes of which he was accused. Yet this man, while being tortured, held no anger in his heart against his torturers, but rather, sought their good. Of course I’m talking about Jesus, crucified on a cross.

To be tortured on the cross was an unimaginable horror and yet, because of his trust in our Father, Jesus endured it and remarkable things happened as a result. The bible says that we were redeemed (Romans 3:23-25) because Jesus refused to cut short our Father’s redemptive plan (Matthew 26:39; Romans 3:26). Not only that, but all of creation was redeemed because Jesus refused to go his own way (Colossians 1:20). And in a remarkable turn, even the very image of injustice itself – the cross – was redeemed from being a symbol of oppression, injustice, and pain and was transformed into the very picture of hope, justice, and salvation for billions of souls. All this happened through as Jesus trusted in His Father’s power and love. Jesus endured that cross because of the hope and joy set before him – the hope of a redeeming Father on the other side (Hebrews 12:2).

The gift that we have to offer any woman facing this situation is this hope. Hope in the redemptive power of our God beyond any circumstance, beyond any cross, beyond any wrong even rape or incest. The gift that we have to offer – and which we must offer – is hope in the God who can bring good into the world and into our lives even beyond a terrible evil that has occurred. I have read of women for whom such redemption has occurred either through the blessing their child became to them personally or to others through adoption. Perhaps this is the healing they needed, not the healing of forgetting the past, but the healing that comes as God changes the meaning of the past by working in the present to bring good from evil.

As the people of Christ, we are not about what people shouldn’t do but rather about the fact that there is good news to be found in Jesus. To offer only the former or even mostly the former is to fail in our call to be a blessing in our world. And the good news is that we know a God who redeems not only individuals but the broken pieces of our history, corporate and individual. It is to this God that we must point everyone. It is to this loving God which we must especially point those who’ve been trampled under by the feet of injustice. And then, in reflection of this redeeming God we must love those in need as he loves them, with a radical, self-sacrificing, healing love, expressed daily on behalf of another.

There is no easy answer here. But the answer we have to give – Christ and the healing that comes through faith and trust in him even in this – we must give. To anything less is to cheat another human being from the hope we find so transforming.