Where was God on 9/11?
Strange as it is in this day when so many are deeply offended by the public expression of any religious belief at all, nobody objected. It was, after all, a grave site, if only a temporary one. But many of the people who died that dark day were not Christians, so it was understandable that it quickly came down. But while it lasted, it was a profoundly appropriate symbol from a Christian point of view.
There are lots of reasons why the cross is associated with death. Jesus, after all, died on one. It's a traditional marker for Christian graves, especially in the absence of a tombstone. But the cross is above all else an emblem of the almighty God choosing to share our helplessness, of the Invulnerable One not only becoming vulnerable for our sake, but sharing our hurt and are suffering and our sorrow, and of the Eternal choosing to share our death. It's a reminder that it's in tragedy and suffering, not in moments of joy and exhilaration, that God is always the closest.
Ellie Wiesel, in his celebrated memoir of Auschwitz, tells of the hanging of a little boy upon whom the lot fell to be one symbolically punished for some violation of the camp rules by inmates unknown. He was too light for his neck to break. He wasn't even heavy enough to choke to death quickly. He died slowly and horribly, and someone in the crowd of inmates forced to witness the abomination cried out, "Where is God?"
Someone else said, "He is up there on the scaffold, hanging at the end of a German rope."
It was an expression of despair. It was an accusation of God, a declaration of something very like a complete loss of faith. How could a just God permit such a thing? Yet how does one accuse God? The answer came to them: how else to accuse God than to repeat the Shema- Judaism's most basic declaration of faith- in such a place as Auschwitz, in the midst of all the horror from which He continued to fail to shield them?
"Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ecḥad!" "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God alone is Lord!"
Without being at all disrespectful of the anguish out of which it arose or unmindful that tragedy and human evil continues to raise it- as it was raised anew on September 11, 2001- for the Christian the statement that God was hanging at the end of that rope would be an affirmation of faith, not a denial of it. Those words do not answer the question of why God permits evil; the classic Christian answer that to do that he would have to deprive human beings of their freedom is all we have. But they do affirm the truth that lies at the very heart and core of our faith.
Where was God on 9/11? Being burned by flaming aviation fuel. Leaping from a dizzying height to his death, maddened by fear and despair. Crushed by falling girders, and choking on the toxic dust and fumes.
He was where the cross tells us that we can find Him: suffering our pain, sharing our grief, weeping our tears, consumed by impotent rage- almighty though He is- and, though immortal and eternal- having taken mortality and finitude upon Himself, even dying our death. He was overcoming evil by becoming its victim, bringing love and self-sacrifice out of hatred and malice, heroism out of cowardice, resolve out of passivity, and for one brief, dazzling moment that today seems like a dream so distant that we might have imagined it, making a divided nation of people at each other's throats one as it has never been one in my lifetime, before or since.
Do you remember the flags displayed on every house, the ribbons in the lapels, the sudden evaporation of partisan divisions and all the differences which separated and set us apart one from another, and brought us together- yes, in grief- but also in love for one another, in resolve, and in an all-too-short moment of lucidity in which our eyes were so firmly fixed on the things we have in common that we forgot the comparatively trivial things which separate us?
Do you remember the citizens of that solidly Democratic city of New York, most of whom throughout a bitter political campaign and an even more bitter aftermath only months before had denounced George W. Bush as nearly the essence of evil and even questioned his right to the office he held lining the streets and cheering themselves hoarse for our President, come to the place where the Twin Towers had stood to encourage us and to call us together in hope and in resolve?
I hate it when all those candy companies come out with those horrible, almost blasphemous milk chocolate crosses every Easter. Talk about people being unclear on the concept! Crosses hurt. More than that, they kill. They speak of sorrow, of pain, of loss, of victimhood, of injustice, of tragedy. And it is because of that- and only because of that- that we wear them around our necks, and put them on our steeples, and place them on our altars, and mark our graves with them. It's only because of that that they can give us comfort when we need it the most.
They remind us that while we don't have all the answers, and are not able to give more than a brief and not-very-helpful answer to the question of why God permits evil to have its day, it is in exactly the moment when we need Him the most that God is with us, feeling our pain, crying our tears, and sharing our sorrow- and, in the process, turning the tables on evil and bringing good.
The cross speaks of pain, but a pain God shares with us- and promises us that there will be an Easter.
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