Today marks the fifth anniversary of the attacks in the US on the World Trade Centre.  It happened late in the evening our time and, because we often watch DVDs in lieu of actual TV, I didn’t find out about what had happened until the next morning.  The news came in snippets at the cafe where I bought my latte on the way to work, and as I rushed into work to find out more information on the net.

It feels very odd to remember an event like this in the way of commemorating it.  For me, the message of the September 11 attacks is a scary one.  For all of the recriminations afterwards, I have always felt that it demonstrated something powerful about the nature of terrorism.  If there are people who are so determined to cause terror that they would hijack planes for the purpose of crashing those planes into buildings, then they are pretty hard to deter.  This was something that was unimaginable at the time.  I remember thinking that it made a peverse kind of sense that warnings of this kind of event were not taken as seriously as they should have been.  Because the mind tends to dismiss the likelihood of such barbarism.

Even now I am convinced that the one thing that we can say about the “modern” terrorist threat, is that they have an unequalled determination to create terror.  And that sooner or later that determination will succeed in creating terror.  The UK police forces might have foiled an attempt to explode multiple planes with liquid explosives, but they could not foil four guys walking into train stations with backpacks on their backs.

In the wake of September 11, some of the US response rubbed me the wrong way.  There is something inherently naive about being shocked that the same terror which happens in other parts of the world could visit you where you live.  But at the same time I expect that sometime in the next five or ten years, barring a change in the world political order, we will see a terrorist attack on Australian soil.  And our response will be equally naive, equally bewildered and equally incoherent in response.

For now it sometimes seems futile to pray for peace, because it seems clear that peace will never return in the same way that we might have imagined it would.  And when we look at the way of the world, we see a world which is profoundly broken and where the powers and principalities have twisted creation to their own ends.  And I consider how futile it sounds for me to talk about bringing forth the reign of God into such a place.  Yet I wonder whether it is only now that we begin to truly appreciate how audacious and monumental our task really is.

At my kaleo group the other day I spoke of a scene from the Last Temptation of Christ which always affected me powerfully, though it is a simple scene.  It pictures Jesus preaching in Nazareth using the words of the gospels.  The crowd is heckling him and as I watch that scene, I agree with the crowd.  He does sound like a looney person.  These simple words which I read in the pages of scripture and which seem so familiar to me are actually ridiculous.  They are shocking and provocative and doomed.  And that is what we have pledged to follow and repeat and incarnate.

I wonder if the pain and brokenness in the world will help remind us that our task is not a genteel middle class pursuit.  That Jesus’ words are not just those phrases which have become worn and comfortable from repetition.  We march into the blackness and seek to shine a light.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 10:25 am by dan and is filed under World Affairs, challenges for the church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.