Suffer the Children

Treatment of children comes as close to a universal human measurement of humane civilisation as any test we might try to devise. Nazi concentration camp guards bayoneted Jewish children into the gas chambers, even as the little ones clung to their military coats expecting protection, not murder, from adult human beings. Public outcry is at its greatest when young children are abused and murdered, witness the recent horrors of Victoria Climbie, Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. Likewise doubts about the goodness of the cosmos and a moral order have often involved meditation about cruelty meted out to children. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov famously ‘hands back his ticket’ to God in protest against evil because of the cruelty of a Russian nobleman setting his pack of hounds on a young peasant boy. How could a good God allow this to happen, or even allow a world in which free will could be so misused?

Archbishop Rowan Williams lamented the cultural erosion of childhood and childlikeness in his book Lost Icons, and we feel something similar now as we stare astonished at pictures of children being shot at and blown up as they fled for safety. The crime reveals the depths of human sin in unprecented fashion: we can find no excuse whatsoever for such savagery. One young boy held hostage, starving and parched with thirst, plucked up courage and asked his captor for a drink – only to receive a bayonet in his stomach. Evil can have few more powerful and sickening icons than this, in fact we are compelled to ponder the meaning of the demonic and brutal hostility to the will of God.

Matthew’s Gospel tells us of Jesus teaching about the kingdom and the kindly fatherhood of God in such homely and natural questions as: ‘what man of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?’ (Matthew 7:9) The child naturally trusts parents to provide food and clothing, with never a second thought. God has revealed himself as Christlike, as the heavenly father who loves and cares. God cannot conceivably be pleased with the Beslan chamber of horrors, rather we need God to be deeply offended at such wickedness visited on trusting and defenceless children. The kingdom of God is reflected by the kingdom of Jesus, not that of the power-mad Herod. And indeed we are very glad to hear that Abdel Rahman al-Rasheed, a leading Arab editor, wishes to claim such a view as the truly Islamic doctrine of God. He speaks in his article of the mosque in earlier times as representing a haven for peace and Islam a voice for reconciliation and benevolence. His kind of Islam is desperately important to foster and befriend, his views need support from Christians. Islam needs to reject the military strand of its history and affirm only that strand stemming from Mahommed as a preacher not a warlord. Muslims claim to respect Jesus, can we together point to him as a prince of peace, conquering the way of violent strife?

The Church of England Newspaper Editorial

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