"Where was God on 9/11?" Such was the question posed by a two-hour PBS special the other night- a special I scrupulously avoided.
Oh, I couldn't avoid it entirely. The temptation to engage the issue was too great; I kept switching the channel back to catch bits and pieces. But my respect for the struggles of those who lost relatives on that tragic day ten years ago combined with my certainty that answers most have found to the question- to the degree that they had found answers at all- would be inadequate made me struggle to avoid an experience which I was convinced would only lead to frustration.
I was right. There were athiests, seeing the tragedy as confirmation of their belief that we live in a random and meaningless universe. Several of them.
An Episcopal seminarian who was a collegue of mine in the Clinical Pastoral Education program at Norwich State Hospital in Connecticut once jokingly explained that the material principle of his tradition as "justification by good taste." C.S. Lewis was no slouch in wrestling with thorny theological problems. But the Anglican tradition generally has almost defined itself by its avoidance of divisive theological substance, and I was somehow not surprised when the Episcopal priest who had lost a loved one in the attacks could find no particular meaning in the event. In the wake of 9/11, he said, "the face of God is blank to me."
There was an Orthodox rabbi- one of the more substantial theologians of the few on the program I actually heard- who drew from the experience the undeniable fact that there is a shadow side to religion. Catholicism has the Inquisition. Lutheranism has Luther's senile venom toward the Jews. Judaism has the crimes of Zionist zealots- and Islam has al Quaeda and its ilk. Despite all the power of religion and its utility as a force for good, he said, people of faith who deny this dark side of religious belief- who rationalize away its potential as a power for evil- are being less than honest.
Then there was the Reform rabbi who seemed to hold to something that might be termed Zen Judaism. The meaning of the
shema, he suggested, is not so much an affirmation of the nature and identity of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a statement of the oneness and the unity of all of us.
It might well be, for all I know, that somebody on that program did better. I was struck, though, by the infantile character of so many of the faiths which their holders reported as shattered by the attacks. No major Western religion teaches that God wills the evil whose existence in the world was rather obvious long before those planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Perhaps Islam, of the major world religions, comes closest. The issue is not why God willed the attacks- He didn't- but rather why He permitted them. This is a distinction most of those who shared their experiences on the program seemed unable to make.
Perhaps somebody on the show I didn't see did better.I hope so. But I heard precious little in the few voices of 9/11 I listened to on that program that seemed likely to offer much real comfort or meaning to anybody. Doubtless the difficulty of the struggle was finally the whole point of the program. But the human heart cries out for a better answer, for something more comforting than
the answer God game Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding." It's truly sad that none of those whose thoughts I heard were able to do even that well.
Where was God on 9/11? As a Christian- and a Lutheran Christian at that- I believe that there is an answer, and one that offers substantially more comfort than the mourners who shared their struggles on that program. Luther called it "a theology of the cross."
A Jew who has struggled more profoundly than most with the problem of evil approached that answer- but just missed it. Elie Wiesel came close in his fictionalized account of his experiences and those of his father in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Night, the book is called- the first in a trilogy in which Wiesel struggles, among other things, with the question of where God was in the Holocaust.
On
Rosh Hashanah, as his fellow Jews recite the ritual prayers blessing the Name, the protagonist, Eliezer, cannot bring himself to join in:
Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? ... But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
And then comes that near- miss. Eliezer relates the story of a child, slowly strangling on the end of a hangman's rope after being singled out by the Nazis as an example to the inmates of Auschwitz. The boy is too light; his neck does not break. He struggles and suffers, but his eyes- sickeningly- remain clear, and his protruding tongue pink.Yet as that little boy hung there, suspended in space and gasping his life away, a voice spoke within Eliezer. Where was God? Dead- or dying, with that boy:
Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now?
And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.
Ironic words, those. For Wiesel, it was a cry of despair, of a piece with most of what those who lost loved ones on 9/11 had to say on that PBS documentary. But it was also true in another and more comforting sense. As a Christian and as a Lutheran, I think he was very close to God's own answer to the problem of evil..
It is said that a man once burst into Luther's study demanding to know why God permits the innocent to suffer. The Reformer, according to the story, pointed to the crucifix on the wall- to the tortured image of the one truly innocent Man Who ever lived, Whom Christians believed to be that very God, incarnate. "I don't know," he replied. "But there He is. Why don't you ask Him?"
It's not the kind of answer we expect. It takes us by surprise. But it does offer us an answer. It speaks to our sorrow, our outrage, and our pain. To be sure, it doesn't speak in the way we expect, or necessarily in the way we want it to. But it
does answer our question, however unexpected that answer might be, and however little it might be the kind of answer we demand. Where is God when injustice strikes, when innocents suffer? On that gallows at Auschwitz. On the 84th Floor of the South Tower. On the outer ring of the Pentagon. In the flaming wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93.
When the innocent suffer, God is there, suffering right along with them in the person of Jesus Christ. The cross He came to bear was our cross, and in Him our sufferings become His, just as His sufferings become theirs. The cross is where He meets us, and identifies with us so completely that His cross and ours became one. And when God intervened in history to strike His decisive blow against evil and injustice, He did it not by blowing injustice away with a blast of divine omnipotence, but rather by becoming its victim- and, in a kind of divine
tae kwando, turning its own strength against it and conquering it by becoming its victim.
He could have done otherwise. He could have blown it away with a blast of omnipotence. He could have done that on 9/11. He could do it today. But before we wish for that, we should be careful what we wish for. Few of us send airplanes crashing into buildings. Few of us murder innocent people. But all of us channel our inner Osama. All of us inflict our own cruelties on those who don't deserve them. All of us pursue our own agendas, and other people be damned.
God, the cross says, is indeed just. But He is also merciful. And in His merciful justice, he does not respond to sin by willingly destroying the sinner. He does not necessarily even restrain him; that would make human beings mere robots, and not creatures created in His own image. Instead, He enployes a kind of cosmic
ju-jitsu. He uses evil's very strength against it. He becomes its victim- and makes it redemptive.
And those who He most favors- those whom He calls to be His children- get the cross in the bargain. They suffer right along side Him- but with the comfort of knowing that in their suffering, they share His cross. Their suffering, too, becomes redemptive.
No, God's agenda isn't that evil triumph, or that the innocent suffer. It's that the guilty be redeemed. And that includes all of us.
The self-righteous bigot in us- the Osama bin Laden, the Mohammed Atta- is not only not comforted by that thought, but is outraged by it. How can we, in our comparatively petty evil, be mentioned in the same breath with them, and theirs?
Funny. They would have said the same thing about America. In fact, they did. And they
do.
But in Jesus Christ, God says something else. He says that His agenda is "to seek and to save that which was lost," not to kill them. He does not offer us an easy answer there for the question of why He allows the cross to come our way. Instead, He offers us Himself, and identifies with us in our suffering so completely that it becomes His as well. He weeps right along with us. He suffers right along with us. And He, too, cries out in the darkness, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?"
Does that cry sound familiar? It is the cry of those who spoke on that PBS program about their own faith, shattered by the events of 9/11. And it is God's own voice that speaks it.
