Trigger warning: This essay includes graphic descriptions of violence.
Here is how the bomb dropped by the United States on Iran’s Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school killed the girls inside.
Many children died immediately, their bodies crushed beyond recognition by the debris of the concrete building. The lungs and brains of children near the blast site ruptured from the force of pressure waves, causing blood to seep into their body cavities without a wound.
Those who were not suffocated beneath the rubble or killed by the slow bleeding of their organs, those who were rescued by desperate parents and volunteers, are likely to experience crush syndrome. That’s when toxins stored in tissue eventually cause heart and kidney failure, leading to a slow and agonizing death.
In the blast, ordinary objects became weapons. Chairs and desks, toys and markers ripped through torsos, eyes, teeth and legs and chests. The children who survive injuries from objects tearing through their organs will likely die of blood loss, complications and infection in hospitals that are also under attack.
The bombing of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school was part of the larger military action by the United States against Iran. While it was originally unclear who was responsible for the strike, an ongoing investigation determined that the United States was at fault; it used outdated data in determining a target. An inevitable chain of events unfolded across the region, leaving mass casualties in its wake. Iranian retaliation has caused casualties on U.S. bases; Israel’s counterattacks in Lebanon have shattered the lives of ordinary people.
Soon, the dead will be folded into the neutral language of strategy and deterrence. The severed limbs and pools of blood will be described as “collateral damage,” a tragic but necessary cost of war.
In times of war — in times like this — the prayer of the church is realized in the final petition that Jesus teaches his disciples: “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13 NCINT). Jesus’ prayer recalls his 40 days in the wilderness, where he is met by the devil, the deceiver.
When we are asked to justify war, we, too, face Jesus’ final temptation. Looking out over a high place, the devil offers Jesus the nations. “All these I will give you,” the deceiver offers, “if you will fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9 NRSVue). All the weapons, all the courts, all the governments, all the armies, all the treasuries to reshape the world through coercion and violence.
Jesus’ final refusal solidifies for us, and for him, who he will be in this world — the one who defeats death on the cross, the one who denies the rationality of the state’s redemption.
This Lent comes on the heels of U.S. bombings across the world, in Iran, as well as Ecuador, Venezuela and Nigeria. Jesus knows that the same evil one who tempted him with world-shaping power will continue to lure us toward redemptive violence. The Lord’s Prayer alerts us to the moral and spiritual temptation of war, a temptation so great we cannot extricate ourselves from its horrifying illusion. Instead, we must be delivered.
The temptation toward war follows a familiar pattern. It begins with fear and the promise of security. It continues with appeals to necessity and responsibility. Soon, it becomes a cascade of negotiations for the greater good: regrettable violence justified in the name of a just future. We are lured toward the logic of intervention and regime change, toward compliance with the state’s urgency, toward the global pragmatism that insists violence is the only realistic option.
Christians who reject war are often dismissed as naive. In the Mennonite church where I worship, pacifism recognizes the reality of violence but refuses to accept its moral logic. We oppose war in all its guises because war disfigures our relationships to human and non-human creatures alike.
We cannot live within the pragmatism of war because the center of our hope is claimed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have no other hope.
I first came to this conviction during the United States’ ever-expanding “war on terror.” Former President George W. Bush’s calamitous project led to the deaths of between 4.5 and 4.7 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. Some died in bombings. Millions more died in the aftermath, as economic collapse paved the way for malnutrition, the destruction of health care systems, trauma, violence and environmental contamination.
Many of the children killed by war do not die in explosions. They die slowly in the years that follow.
Here is how a child dies of wasting. She begins to lose weight within a day of a caloric shortage, because growing children require more calories than do adults. To make up for the lack of food, her body burns the sugar stored in her liver. As those reserves disappear, her body begins to consume its own muscle tissue. She becomes lethargic. Her growth slows, then stops.
Her heart rate decreases. Her body temperature becomes unstable. Her blood pressure drops. At this stage she becomes far more vulnerable to infection, and the likelihood of death from sepsis, pneumonia or endemic disease increases dramatically.
If illness does not take her first, her body continues to fail. She becomes shaky and struggles to breathe. She begins to cry. If her caretaker is still alive, she draws closer to them as her body slows. Eventually,
This, too, is how modern wars kill children.
When we pray “deliver us from evil,” we are not asking to be spared abstract wickedness. We are asking to be delivered from the violence that crushes children beneath concrete and starves their bodies long after the bombs have fallen. We pray because the temptation to call such violence necessary — to accept it as the price of peace — is powerful enough to deceive even those who believe themselves righteous.
As bombs rain down, as we are drawn, as ever, into the illusion of redemptive violence, Lord deliver us from the evil one.
