Here we are again. With the gunshots in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio still echoing, shrill voices are demanding the government do something to stop this senseless violence and the only thing anyone can think to do is to control the sale of guns. Defensive voices are once again “gunsplaining”: the problem is multidimensional; restricting access to firearms will accomplish nothing. Meanwhile, politicians survey the landscape, trying to decide whether to charge or to retreat.

Here we are again and here will soon return. The only thing that might change that is a wave of national repentance, in the ancient sense of the word. The idea of repentance was never simply that a person or a group of people change their behavior but that their behavior changes because of a radical change of mind. What they once thought they could not live without, they now see as unnecessary. What seemed indispensable to their identity, suddenly seems quite alien.

At the deepest level, a change of mind of this magnitude is a gift of God. It does not happen because people marshal their arguments and hurl them at each other in a war-like clash of ideas. If anything, verbal violence multiplies acts of physical violence rather than decreasing them.

While such root-level changes of mind originate with a benevolent heavenly Father, he employs salt-of-the-earth people as instruments of change. These are not the people who shout at each other from the sidelines or from opposite sides of the aisle. They are people who enter the fray, share the suffering, yet display a love and forgiveness that are unknown and unthinkable to most people. If a national change of mind comes to pass, it will happen through the instrumentality of such people.

Each mass shooting reverberates in loud demands for change. Then come the quiet voices, drowned out by the initial uproar. We heard them after the 2006 Amish school shooting in West Nickel Mine, Pennsylvania. A young white man entered the school, shot eight girls between the ages of 6 and 13, killed five of them and eventually killed himself. When members of the Amish community comforted the murderer’s family and 30 of them attended his funeral, the media was nonplussed and some social commentators were angered by this display of forgiveness.

The same kind of thing happened after a young white supremacist murdered nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The church refused to give in to hate. Bishop John Bryant, speaking at the lead pastor’s memorial service, said, “Someone should’ve told the young man. He wanted to start a race war, but he came to the wrong place.” The mourners erupted in applause. Once again, people were baffled by the church’s forgiveness and criticized it. They criticized it, but they could not ignore it.

Such instances of forgiveness are manifold. Consider Eva Kor, who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She said, “I discovered that I had one power left in life. I could forgive.” Or take the families of Coptic Christians beheaded my Muslim extremists on a beach in Libya. They sent a message of love and forgiveness to the murderers. The examples go on and on.

In the movie “Shazam!”, the title character is an adolescent who is abruptly transformed into a superhero. In a series of scenes, he discovers his superpowers, one after another. The discovery that he is impervious to bullets comes only after the bad guys shoot him. This is not unlike what happened to Eva Kor and to the people in West Nickel Mine, in Charleston, and in Egypt. They discovered they possessed a superpower: forgiveness.

Christians believe this supernatural power comes from God and is displayed preeminently in the suffering and slaying of his son Jesus. Jesus did not stand on one side of the aisle, criticizing the world and calling for change. He entered the world, shared its suffering and forgave.

In this way evil will eventually be overcome. It will not be defeated because people debate methodologies (though this is necessary), but because they follow Jesus’s example and “overcome evil with good.”