Dr Karen Woo was a wonderful human being. Like millions of others in this country I never heard of her until yesterday's news that she had been murdered by members of the Taliban. Founder of a medical aid charity, and clearly a woman of courage, compassion and generosity, her death leaves the world a much poorer place, and takes away from the Afghan people one of their most precious and essential helps – those who offer their skill, energy, time and professionalism for the care of ordinary Afghans. In remote villages as well as targeted cities, the Afghan people are caught in the vice-jaws of ideological conflict, and their suffering is immense, hard to report, and often brutal, summary and sudden.
The justification for her killing? She was, it was claimed, "an American spy" and "preaching Christianity". The hollow cynicism of such a claim, or the blind hatred and prejudice that formulates such an obscene rationale, exposes the nature of propaganda, ideology, media-controlled news flow, and above all the way we all invest our own perceptions with overwhelming certainty that we see clearly and we see truly. But whatever the perception and perspective, and whatever the truth claims – erroneous or accurate, there is no justification whatsoever for the execution of a young doctor and her colleagues.
And those who live, whether by Christian or Muslim faith and ethics, will immediately, because instinctively, draw the same conclusion. This was an evil act. This is not the will of God according to the Scriptures of either faith tradition. There are few perceptions and perspectives more dangerous than those fueled by a religious tradition distorted into a rationale for killing those who are other – and whose otherness is itself reason for enmity, hatred, violence and death. The great tragedy of the last decade has been the hardened polarisation and then the dangerous collision of the extreme edges of two faith traditions which have so much in common, and also so much on which they differ. And the great tragedy for the Afghan people is that their country has become the place where, by proxy, ideological conflict is localised, and given a context within which military conflict can be deployed. Thus drones and smart-bombs, IED's and suicide bombs, become the grotesque exchanges and communications that constitute conversation between those who see the other as hated threat. And one of the millions of footnotes in this narrative of religious unholy war and terminal political enmity, is the very personal tragedy of a young gifted woman doctor, summarily executed by those for whom hate is a fundamental virtue – which is about as wrong as any human being can get.
I recently read a novel about St Francis of Assisi – and his role as peacemaker between Christian crusaders and the Islamic peoples. And while there is tragic irony in the popularity of his prayer 'Lord make me an instrument of thy peace…." in a decade of such violent non-peace, that prayer should, along with the Lord's Prayer, be part of the daily liturgy of responsible Christians. I remain convinced, by Scripture and by the call of the Living Christ to the Church which is his body in the world, that the ministry of reconciliation, the mission of peacemaking, the discipleship of those who follow the Prince of Peace, is not to march triumphantly under a cross, but to stagger under the weight of the cross of a world's suffering as those who follow after Christ crucified, discovering, ever more profoundly, the meaning of the cross as the defining intersection of Divine Love and human sin, and that cross as the second-last word from God the peacemaker. Because the final word of the Christian gospel is "Christ is Risen!", and it is the Living Christ who carries on that same redemptive conciliation in our hate-shattered world, and through the ministry of his Body, the Church.
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