The first thing you looked up

One · What happened

Six dead in Main Square and a house in Ostrowiec

The AP reported that a twenty-five-year-old Polish citizen drove into Main Square in Kraków on Saturday and opened fire with an automatic weapon. He stopped at several spots in the square and fired at each one. Kraków police spokesperson Katarzyna Cisło said he wore military-style fatigues and a bulletproof vest and carried a military-type long gun. Officers found other weapons and ammunition in his car. Six people were killed. Four were women and two were men, and one of the dead was a citizen of the United Kingdom. Police were still identifying two of the six when the AP filed. The AP’s headline counted sixteen wounded where its text counted fifteen, and two of the wounded were police officers with serious injuries. The man kept firing at officers after they shot him. Cisło said he appears to have acted alone.

The AP also carried what Poland’s leaders said about the shooting on Saturday. The defense minister called it an act of terror. Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński told a news conference that the man held “very radical” views. “Everything indicates that he was fascinated by far-right ideologies,” Kierwiński said. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said police had found the bodies of three of the man’s close relatives at his home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, about ninety-three miles northeast of Kraków. Two were women and one was a man. “We have the next acts of this tragedy,” Tusk added. Mayor Łukasz Gibała declared mourning in the city until Wednesday and said Kraków would stay open to visitors. The AP noted that mass shootings are uncommon in Poland. Three attacks on schools in the Mazovia province in mid-October had left one person dead and many wounded.

Two · What it is doing

The search before the names

A reader in Denver who gets the alert on his phone on Saturday afternoon learns the count and the man’s age within a minute. He also learns what the interior minister told a news conference about the man’s views. He has the name of none of the six. The AP itself reported that police were still identifying two of them. The next paragraph he opens is the one about the gunman, because a word like far-right tells him where to file the dead. Two readers can open the same paragraph and put it in opposite drawers. One hears an indictment of the neighbors who vote differently from him, and the other hears the press sorting a killer onto his own side. People who hold the file can argue about whether the minister’s label fits and what it proves about any party or any country. The reader in Denver does not hold the file.

The search does a job for him. A man who can say which camp the killer came from can decide what to feel about the six. He can feel a pity with a grudge in it, or else shrug at a headline the wrong people are using. The three relatives found dead in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski fit neither use. Tusk’s remark about the next acts of this tragedy leaves no flag to hang on them. A second reader never opens the thread at all. He closes the app and pictures the crowd in his church parking lot on Sunday morning. The crowd looks different to him than it did on Friday.

The mayor’s sentence, as the AP carried it, is built for neighbors in Kraków to say to one another. A reader abroad has no square in this story. He owns a screen and a Sunday, and the story is already working on both. The contempt he forms for the other camp costs that camp nothing. The evening he spends on it comes out of his own, and nothing of that evening reaches the six dead.

Three · Where the ground is

What Jesus did with news of Pilate

“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” (Luke 13:1). Luke puts that report at the front of the chapter while Jesus is still teaching. Pilate had killed worshipers at their altars, and the people who carried the news wanted a ruling. A story like that sorts a crowd into camps at once. Some hate Rome and some excuse it, while others suspect the dead had it coming. Jesus took up the last suspicion himself and asked, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2-3). He added the eighteen killed when the tower in Siloam fell and asked the same question about them. He turned the story toward the men holding it.

“What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” the Lord said to Cain after he struck his brother Abel (Genesis 4:10). The first death recorded in the Bible was a murder in a field. Scripture treats a killing as a killing and the dead as persons, and the nationality and the politics of the man who did it change neither. Abel was a keeper of sheep who left no speech in the record, yet the God who made him heard him all the same. Cain was made in the image of God like every other man (Genesis 1:27). The Bible gives a reader no way to put a killer outside the human family, and no label from the news moves him out of it.

On the mountain Jesus said that “whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire” (Matthew 5:22). The saying belongs to his teaching on the sixth commandment. John, a disciple of Jesus, wrote that “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). A reader who spends Saturday evening sorting a stranger’s file into a team and despising the team has done a small version of what those verses name. Distance from Main Square hides the sin from the man committing it.

Jesus stood before Pilate at his trial, where Luke 23:24 records that the governor gave the crowd what it demanded. The Gospel excuses none of the men who put Jesus to death. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” Paul wrote to the church in Rome (Romans 5:8). The verse puts a reader and a gunman in one category. God raised Jesus on the third day, and Paul told the Corinthians that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).

“Weep with those who weep,” Paul told the same church (Romans 12:15). The command reaches past the people a believer knows. A congregation in Denver can carry it out with a phone call to a pastor in Poland and a Sunday of prayer for six people, two of whom police had not yet identified. The last book of the Bible gives the end of the weeping in a promise to the church. God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4).

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Three of these five need only a pencil and a Bible. The other two need an elder and a pastor.

1. 01

   Learn who the six were before you read another word about him.

   Two of the six had no names yet in the AP’s account. The full list may be out by the time you read this. Search Polish and British outlets for the names and ages of the four women and two men, and write them inside the cover of your Bible. Read the list before you open any article about the man with the weapon or the label his government gave him. Mayor Gibała said the square will belong to his city again. Six names on a flyleaf give a reader abroad a small share in the remembering.

2. 02

   Count your own insults for the week before you count his.

   Take a pencil and a sheet of paper. List each time since Monday that you called someone a fool, in speech or in your head. Put the person’s name beside each entry on the sheet. Then read Matthew 5:21–24, where Jesus tells a worshiper to leave his gift at the altar and go to his brother first. Pick the first name on the sheet and go to that person with the sentence “I called you a fool, and I was wrong.” Keep the paper in your Bible until you have done it.

3. 03

   Walk the exits of the building where your church meets.

   Go through the building with the person who runs the doors. Learn which doors open from the inside and where the nearest ones are from the nursery and the sanctuary. Write the plan on one sheet and hand it to the elders. Hebrews 10:25 tells believers not to neglect meeting together, and a plan that takes an hour to make takes away one reason for staying home. Do it before the next Lord’s Day and tell the congregation the sheet exists.

4. 04

   Send word to a Polish church through your own.

   Ask your pastor if the church has a link to a congregation in Poland, or to a pastor there who would read a letter from strangers. Write that congregation a short letter this week and read Psalm 10:17–18 first. The psalmist says God hears “the desire of the afflicted” and promises justice for the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man “may strike terror no more.” Tell the congregation that your church is praying those verses for Kraków. If your church has no such link, ask the pastor to find one and send the letter once he has.

5. 05

   Include the man’s own family in what you pray.

   Three of the man’s relatives were found dead at his home. The gunman had surgery after the police shot him, according to the AP. Pray first for whoever is left of that family to bury them, since the AP’s account has nobody speaking for them. Then pray for the man himself. Paul wrote to Timothy that God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Set those prayers beside the six names from the first item.