Self-harm and the Cross

ABC News has reported that Youth self-harm is up 43pc in the last decade: “In the most recent statistical year, more than 7,000 young people were taken to hospital because of self-harm. The two main causes were poisoning and cutting.” (UPDATE: expanded article)

Self-harm isn’t new, even Job was a cutter! How should Christians and Youth Pastors respond to self-harm? I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but I think that the cross of Jesus helps us to think it through.

Mark Driscoll made a great comment on teenage girls and self-harm in a recent sermon on the Cross of Jesus:

In Jesus, God is not angry with me, he loves me. In Jesus I know God is not punishing me when I sin. You need to know this! Some of you still believe that when you sin or if you suffer that God is punishing you and making you pay him back. Some of you in an effort to hasten his wrath will punish yourselves.

Sometimes this takes curious forms like with many teenage girls taking razors and cutting themselves so that they suffer and bleed. Something deep in them says “I’ve done wrong and there needs to be suffering and blood so that God would be appeased.”

Teenage girls should put down their razors, religious people should put down their efforts to pay God back and readily accept the doctrine of propitiation. Jesus has propitiated the wrath of God.

ps – someone searched for “emo lamentations” recently and found dmdc!