How can we pray for Manchester?
How, indeed? More lives have been wrecked by yet another terrorist attack. As things stand, it appears to have been a suicide bombing. Someone thought so little of his own life and the lives of his victims that he saw them as disposable.
They were not.
The late Terry Pratchett defined sin as 'treating people as things'. It's a definition that is made for an event like this. The bomber and those who trained, commissioned and brainwashed him saw the human lives they would take as no more valuable than the glass and bricks that would be pulverised by the explosion. The life-long grief of parents and the life-changing injuries of the wounded were nothing at all to them. The victims were targets, tactical objectives in a greater war.
The truth is that there isn't just one way of responding to this. Yes, we can say – assuming, as seems likely, that this was an Islamist attack – that the cause these people fight for is corrupt and wicked, and it is. We can say that their strategy – creating terror, keeping populations permanently on edge, attempting to drive a wedge between communities – is stupid and misguided, and it is (do they seriously expect it to produce a Caliphate in Britain?). And we can attempt to do what churches always do – to bind up the broken-hearted, to heal the wounds, to walk alongside people in their heartbreak.
But it's at times like this that Jesus' words on the cross take on a particular resonance. When he said, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,' there was an unspoken assumption behind his words: if they had known what they did, they would not have done it.
This is what we may assume for the Manchester bomber and those who helped him. They treated people as things, and didn't know what they were doing. The Psalms give us words to express the wonderful preciousness of human beings. They are 'little lower than the angels', 'crowned with glory and honour' (8:5). God 'created my inmost being', 'knit me together in my mother's womb'; 'I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made' (139:13-14). Every human being is made in God's image and is one of God's children. 'Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?' (Malachi 2:10).
The victims at the Manchester Arena were not disposable, symbols of Western decadence or targets for revenge against Western aggression; they were people. The victims of bombings in Iraq and Kabul are people, too; and so are the victims of knife crime in London. And at every death, God is affronted: he has created a being of infinite worth, and someone has discarded it as worthless.
So how should we pray, after Manchester? Yes, we should argue against a wicked ideology, we should bind up the wounds and try to find words of hope and comfort. But most of all we should pray that God will open the eyes of those responsible to see the value of what they are destroying. Sin, for the bomber and those who sent him, began when they treated people as things. It ended in murder.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
