Where is Superman?

“Nuke ’em til they glow!” I felt that way after 9/11. As a technician in the Air Force during the cold war I spent six years in my job of making sure ‘the button’ would do just that. We had 64 H-bombs parked at the end of the runway. We would say, ‘Close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and thermo-nuclear war!”
Once again since Monday’s bombing in Boston that feeling is felt by many.
When God came to live among us He could have been born as a ‘Superman’ capable of executing justice on behalf of millions and preventing such calamities from ever taking place. So why wasn’t Jesus ‘the Man of Steel? After all, as God He could have chosen where, when and how He would come to live among us. But with all that power He never hit back.
This week I felt anger and hurt. I nursed it for a day or so. Every thought of the offense against me renewed my desire for justice and bitterness began to root. Today I just walked away from it and in doing so peace returned. It was God in me who ‘talked me though it’.
If I did not have God deep within to wrest my anger and my desire for retribution from my hand then what would I do? It has been said that if we all lived by an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the whole world would be blind and toothless. No, Jesus came not to exact revenge or force justice but to change the human heart. The only answer in a world filled with hate and violence is the One who took the anger from my heart once again. Only God can change the heart and make the world right again.