I was halfway over the Atlantic, returning from helping to lead a pilgrimage in Rome, when I learned about the shooting of Charlie Kirk in a push notification delivered via airplane Wi-Fi. I had also been out of the country last summer, during my final phase of Jesuit formation, when Donald J. Trump survived an assassination attempt during a campaign rally. 

The news of political violence would feel destabilizing under any circumstances, I am sure, but there is an added edge to wondering what darkness one’s country is heading toward when you are wondering from far away, from outside, already a bit unrooted from the place you call home. The comfort and consolation of home—home as a metaphor for fundamental security and belonging—suddenly seems fragile. Not that it becomes a false metaphor, not at all. But the threats to it loom larger, and the resources to defend it seem scarcer.

Yesterday, the push notifications carried news of the search for the shooter all day, while we again marked the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks; today, those notifications brought news of the arrest of Mr. Kirk’s presumed assassin. Today I am also preparing a homily for Sunday, when the liturgical calendar will replace what would otherwise be the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time with the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

This column is not that homily—or at least not the completed version. There is still another day of prayer, reflection and writing before that will be done. 

It is, however, where I find myself wrestling with what to hope for in the aftermath of terrible violence. While the assassination of Mr. Kirk understandably commands our attention, there is a cascade of recent violence to accompany it. A school shooting in Colorado preceded it that morning, and only two weeks before that was the shooting at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis during a school-wide Mass. Throughout that time, we have the seemingly endless horror of the war in Gaza, the nearly forgotten tragedy of the war in Sudan and the dangerous escalations of Israel’s targeted strike in Qatar and a U.S. military strike against a Venezuelan ship.

The first reading for the feast of the Holy Cross places us with Moses and the people of Israel wandering in the desert, complaining against God and beset in punishment by saraph serpents, dying from the poison in their bites. The cure God offers them is in the form of a bronze serpent mounted on a pole. When those who have been bitten look at it, they live.

In the Gospel, Jesus invokes this serpent in describing his own mission to Nicodemus, saying, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (Jn 3:14-15).

To put it mildly, this ought to be confusing. Why is an image of the source of the poison a means for healing? And what does it mean for Jesus to treat the lifting up of the serpent as prefiguring his own being lifted up on the cross? Yes, the bronze serpent becomes a source of God’s mercy and healing—but first the living serpents were the means of God’s punishment.

We are in the deep waters of the mystery of salvation when we speak, as the liturgy does this Sunday, of the exaltation of the cross, or when we pray, as we will in the preface of the Eucharistic prayer, to God who “placed the salvation of the human race on the wood of the cross, so that, where death arose, life might again spring forth and the evil one, who conquered on a tree, might likewise on a tree be conquered.” Anyone who would purport to understand this mystery fully has not spent anywhere near enough time praying with it.

One consistent element of the mystery is that God does not summarily conquer violence, sin and death by announcing that they are overthrown or by dominating them through force. Instead, violence, sin and death are engaged, suffered and transformed. The source of the poison becomes the source of the healing; the means of execution becomes the means of salvation; the body of the one upon whom our sins are laid becomes the bread of life. Violence is overcome by mercy, not by greater violence.

What should we hope for, in the shadow of this violence? What should we hope for when it seems, as I wrote after the shootings at Annunciation Church, that “our culture and our national psyche is enslaved to the logic of violence”?

We keep looking at the violence streaming through our screens. Many of us saw more often than we wanted the video of Charlie Kirk being shot, repeated over and over again on social media. But though the Israelites wandering in the desert were able to find healing in looking at the image of what caused their suffering, our multiplied images of violence seem to be functioning more as idols, consuming our attention and our hope and offering nothing back in return for the mute and despairing worship they demand.

Perhaps we are not looking rightly. Perhaps we, enslaved as we are to the logic of violence—whether the violence of guns or the demonization and scapegoating of political opponents or the illusion of final and definitive victory over our enemies—are looking at the image of violence and trying to solve it or even to turn it into a solution. Perhaps we are still trying to overcome it by force.

Among the many mysteries bound up in the mystery of the cross is that violence, sin and death are only overcome by mercy. They are only dissolved by grace. We are only freed from their chains when we bind ourselves to the one who suffered them freely for our sake.

So if we must continue to look at violence, and it seems that we will have to during this time of division and rancor, let us try to look at it aright. Let us see that violence offers no hope in itself and turn instead to the one source of hope. Let us be moved to offer each other words of mercy rather than of vengeance and conflict.

The bronze serpent will continue to be lifted up. Life again springs forth from the tree where the Son of God hangs bearing the sins and suffering of us all. Let us pray that we can look upon him and be healed.