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EDITORIAL

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It is unfortunate that the rescue of three Christian Peacemaker Teams activists on March 23 was accompanied not only by expressions of relief and thanksgiving but also by shouts of outrage. To accuse the former hostages — held under threat of death for nearly four months after being kidnapped in Baghdad on Nov. 26 — of not being grateful to the military forces that rescued them reveals a perplexing prejudice. This prejudice implies that peace is ultimately assured only through violence and that violence must be “redeemed” with more pain and destruction.

Nothing could be more foreign to the nonviolent way of Christ that CPT embodies in its work. Because Tom Fox, James Loney, Norman Kember and Harmeet Singh Sooden chose to walk, unprotected, with the people of Iraq, and to show a witness of Christlike compassion to everyone they encountered, these four activists were most assuredly doing the work of God when they were seized at gunpoint late last year. This work was affirmed in blood by the murder of Fox, who was found shot to death on March 9 — a sacrifice to the bitter chaos that this war has inflicted on the Iraqi people.

Yet to some — who presumably disagree with CPT’s tactics or its nonviolent witness to American aggression — CPT is recklessly endangering not only its own people but the military forces who were called on to rescue them.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the sacrificial discipleship that CPT espouses, and that Christ called his disciples to embody as peacemakers — putting their own safety last and relying on the goodness and protection of God for survival. That the captives did not immediately praise the military after their sudden and dramatic rescue reminds us that these three men drew their strength not from the force of arms but from the power of God. That their rescue could be effected without even a single shot being fired is yet another testimony to God’s power, and a compelling witness to the hand of providence on the events of that day.

Certainly, Loney, Kember and Sooden were grateful for the risk the soldiers took to free them. But there was a greater power at work as well, a power that Loney described as being like a hand reaching out to snatch them from danger.

“A great hand of solidarity reached out for us, a hand that included the hands of the Palestinian children holding pictures of us, and the hands of the British soldier who cut our chains with a bolt cutter,” Loney said on his arrival back home in Toronto on March 26. “That great hand was able to deliver three of us from the shadow of death. I am grateful in a way that can never be adequately expressed in words.”

God used those U.S. and British soldiers that day to do his work. That no one was hurt in the process is a testament to this, too. But God also used the captive witness of Loney, Kember and Sooden — and the bitter witness of Fox’s death — as well as the daily suffering of all the other innocents kidnapped or killed every day in Iraq, to show the world the futility of violence and to draw more souls to lives of peace.

It was God’s providence that led the soldiers to where Loney, Kember and Sooden were bound and waiting as dawn broke on March 23. It was God who sent the strength into the soldier’s arms to cut the chains that held them. It was God who kept all others away so that no one would be hurt.

For this, all gratitude is due, and gratefully offered by all who long for the day when the people of Iraq will fully know lives untouched by chaos and danger. That day of peace is what Tom Fox died for and what his colleagues worked so diligently to see become reality. — Robert Rhodes