It was the end of my first year at University. Having risen early to study, I turned on the radio and heard the news. I remember wondering whether to wake my parents and tell them, but it was such shocking news I decided that they had to know. So I went in and told them of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
It seemed to be a day in which the world changed, but it was not the first assassination of an American president and within a few years we were to see the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And life went on—after a few days of mourning and grief people worked, students went to lectures, people fell in love, people married, had children, got old and died.
Even on the day itself, life went on. It was on the same day that JFK died that the famous writer CS Lewis also breathed his last, but the news of his death was swallowed up by the prominence of the Kennedy assassination.
What of September 11? Did it change the world?
It was the media event of media events. The essence of a good TV news story—good action footage—secures it in the media’s mind as significant.
But did the world change, as many commentators are suggesting?
In one sense, of course it did. If a butterfly flapping its wings can change the world then the death of nearly 3000 people due to a horrific political statement certainly will, too. JFK’s assassination did not change much in my life, but it did change me. Subtly, it helped me grow up and face reality; it helped me see that the security and safety and certainty were illusory. I suspect, for many, this was the effect of S11.
When the first tower stood burning and chaotic, there was no Bruce Willis no Harrison Ford who could race to the top, pull out the victims, overcome the enemies and stop them slamming into the second tower.
Life is not safe. September 11 was a shock—a message of warning to the complacent and the comfortable. It brought changes, massive changes, to the little people caught up in it, especially those widowed and orphaned by it. The aftermath brought significant changes, especially to those in Afghanistan where the Taliban were forcefully evicted from power as part of the war on terrorism.
Had the events not been televised so comprehensively, and had it not happened in the heart of the Western world, it may have seemed just another senseless act of destruction, one amongst thousands.
Yet it has brought a change: it has signalled the death of a culture, the comfortable materialistic culture of pluralistic relativism. It ruffled the arrogant confidence with which we had persuaded ourselves and the world that there was no right and wrong, no evil, no moral truth, just opinions. Perhaps we hadn’t quite persuaded ourselves at all—moral relativism isn’t a very intellectually satisfying idea. A better word may be ‘purchased’—we had used economic well being to purchase moral indifference, to afford the right to live as if it were always possible to sit on the fence.
S11 has rubber-stamped a new concern for justice. We have seen the growth of this concern in the current ‘zero tolerance’ attitude to paedophilia. Contrary to the approval of paedophilia expressed by the French existentialist intellectuals of 1960’s, today it is widely condemned. And before S11, would a gang rapist have received a 55-year prison sentence, as did one man in Sydney recently?
September 11 brought back into public discourse a word that had almost been abandoned: ‘evil’. Without it, the vocabulary of the chattering classes was not sufficient to deal with the killing of nearly three thousand innocent people.
Sept 11 has declared war on relativism.
We had to return to some kind of absolutes—if we want peace, we have to say something is evil and undesirable. We were living with a false peace; for a while we did not suffer; for a while we felt secure. But now the search for peace is on again, and notions of justice and moral truth are returning to the language.
Longing for peace
The Old Testament expresses that fundamental yearning of the soul for peace. The prophet Isaiah predicted the coming of peace with the Messiah, who was to be called the ‘Prince of Peace’. The Hebrew concept of peace was more positive than just the cessation of hostility; shalom meant more than that. Shalom meant health and prosperity, harmony and good will. In Australia, peace with my neighbour means ignoring his presence, building a great fence between him and me and interacting as little as possible. But biblical peace tears down fences so that we can live in harmony, love and fellowship with each other.
The question for Christianity is: did Jesus bring peace? Did he live up to his princely title?
The angels declared to the shepherds at the time of his birth: “glory to God in the highest and on earth peace …”. But since his coming, as Jesus himself predicted, there have been “wars and rumours of wars” (Mat 24:6). Where is the peace that the Messiah was supposed to bring?
On the night he was betrayed Jesus spoke to his disciples and told them, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (Jn 14:27). A little later he said, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33).
Jesus promised a peace different to that of the world’s peace. For the world did not know, and still does not know, the way to peace. How Jesus wept over Jerusalem, for when the Prince of peace came, riding not on a warhorse, nor in a chariot, nor at the head of a great army, but riding on a donkey colt, they did not recognize him.
And still the world does not know the way of peace. We can recognise September 11 as a dreadful evil, but then what do we do with it?
We play the blame game: we blame the terrorists, we wage war on terrorism, but we do so with vague definitions. For one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
We blame the nations—Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan Pakistan. And America—we blame America, because it is so rich and powerful, so morally superior.
We blame religion—Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians—forgetting that the barbarous wars of the 20th century were started by atheists and the anti-religious, such as Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tung.
We blame the isms: communism, capitalism, materialism, consumerism and totalitarianism. Especially, we blame fundamentalism, a cover-all word that can barely be defined except as “those extremists over there”.
But we rarely find the blame within. Whenever do we turn the accusing finger back on ourselves, to see the evil present universally in the human heart waiting to be fanned into flame? We look to blame others; we fail to see ourselves.
Were those people who died on September 11 more evil than the rest of us that God should allow such a thing? Obviously not. But were they really innocent—or only as innocent as we are? And just how innocent is that?
Living here in our comfortable, peaceful society, a long way from fear threat or danger, we are liars, greedy, self-centred people, bound up in the conflict of a litigious society, caught in the collapse of family relationships, in a society funded out of the misery of gambling, riddled with the agony of substance abuse and its concomitant evil of crime and corruption. We have shaped a society built on the exploitation and oppression of indigenous people, a society suffering from the spiralling negation of depression and suicide.
Just how innocent are we? If there is no such thing as evil, I guess we are innocent. But September 11 has given us back our belief in evil—so we must take our own evil acts seriously, too.
The way of Jesus Christ
What approach did Jesus take to the problem of evil? What attempts did he make to bring about justice and restore right relations in the world?
Jesus did not use armies and warfare; he did not take over governments; he spearheaded no revolution; he did not come up with policies to iron out ‘problems’. Instead, he took the way of the cross. For by his death, Jesus brought us peace—peace with God and peace with each other. There, on the cross, he paid a price for our rebellion against God. He took evil seriously, not just the abstract idea of evil but the reality of evil that is in every human heart—the evil of terrorists and the evil of their victims, your evil and mine.
And there he made peace between God and us, the kind of peace that reconciles the warring parties into a new form of love and fellowship, harmony and well being. It is a peace that is Shalom itself, not just peace with God but peace with each other as we share our common need for salvation. Each of us alike can find forgiveness and pardon through the death of Jesus.
Through the cross of Jesus, the Jewish Christian Paul sees non-Jews (Gentiles) being granted the same privileges and blessings of God that Jews had enjoyed:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace (Eph 2:13-15)
In 2002 we remember September 11. In the coming years we are bound to remember it less and less. We pray for those families directly affected and we remind ourselves of the many thousands of others around the world who are the victims of human sin.
Yet we must remember that we are not only the victims and the media consumers of people’s suffering. We, too, are the perpetrators of evil. Let he who is without sin throw the first stone, said Jesus. Remembering that, we need to resist the relativistic rationalisations which deny the existence of evil anywhere, let alone in our own hearts. We need to turn back to God to find the forgiveness that he has provided at the cost of his one and only son, not just for my sins and yours, but for the sins of the whole world.
