Wow! Mr. Jones certainly “pulled a stunt” that earned him worldwide fame! Not that this sort of fame is anything that the average person would long for. But certainly the sales of his offensive book and T-shirt must have sky-rocketed over the past few weeks. Jones managed cunningly to create a very difficult dilemma for leaders everywhere: to react or not to react. If you react to an isolated case of insanity, you may be encouraging the behavior, both of that person and of future attention-craving individuals. But if you ignore it, you might be perceived as careless, or worse, condoning. That is why, we may assume, many Christian leaders remained silent for a long time, even though they strongly disapproved of the impending act. That is also why, one may assume, President Obama held off until the eleventh hour before addressing the issue, even though the plan was known since at least last July. In the end, though, Jones got all the attention he hoped for, and perhaps even more: “We feel we have accomplished our goal. We are very very happy with the outcome”, the New York Times reports Jones as saying at a press conference where he announced the cancellation of his project.
Many arguments were leveled by way of expressing disapproval of Mr. Jones’ action. Some said it would put US armed forces at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others argued that it would become breeding grounds for the recruitment of violent Muslim extremists. It will place the lives of Americans at risk in the US. It will cost tens of thousands of dollars to ensure the safety of Mr. Jones and his little congregation in Florida. It will provoke the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands. The lives of Americans and other Westerners living in the Muslim world will be placed at risk. You wouldn’t want a Muslim burning a heap of Bibles, would you? Mercifully, it was also pointed out that burning the holy book of any religious group is not proper civil behavior, especially for someone claiming to be a Christian, let alone a Christian pastor. Christians condemning the impending act insisted that it was completely unaligned with Jesus’ teaching on loving one’s neighbor, or even one’s “enemy”. Many observed what a serious blow this act would deal to Christian-Muslim relations and peace-making, and were already contemplating the disastrous consequences on humanity for decades to come.
One man, the gun-wearing pastor of a 50-member congregation somewhere in Florida, managed to hold the world hostage for several weeks. And in the end, a deal was brokered with him, one that negotiators would probably refuse to reach with a hostage-holding terrorist: “You call off your hideous plan and you get the chance to meet with Imam Feisal of Manhattan to talk him out of building an Islamic center a few blocks from Ground Zero”. There are certainly lessons to be learnt for Christian extremists in that one!
But the main lesson to be drawn from this whole saga may have parallels with the one Jesus intended from his famous Good Samaritan parable. He told a story, whose hero was a man belonging to a marginalized and despised group in his days, the Samaritans, victims of extensive social abuse by many in Jesus’ audience. The Samaritan should have been the victim beaten by robbers in the story, and a righteous Jew should have been his rescuer, thus becoming a model for generations to come. But instead, the victim of robbers in Jesus’ story was a Jew, the robbers were probably young thugs belonging to the same social group, and the only person that was willing to stoop down and help him was a Samaritan, the conventional enemy. How refreshing!
Like me, thousands of Christians in America and around the world, felt beaten, wounded and deeply hurt at the blatant violence that Terry Jones was committing against Islam’s most sacred symbol, and through this heinous act to the core of Jesus’ teaching on love. Thousands of us were reeling with our Muslim friends and neighbors because of the effect this act would have on their sentiments, and because of the way it would play into the hands of Islam’s own “Terry Jones’s”, otherwise known as Muslim violent extremists, or simply terrorists. At the eleventh hour, Christians of the world were rescued by faithful Muslims like Imam Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida, by the reported peace initiative planned by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and by countless other Qur’an-abiding Muslims that were gearing up to take part in peace-affirming activities with their Christian and Jewish neighbors both in Florida and elsewhere around the US on September 11.
In the end of the day, here’s the main lesson the world should take away from the Terry Jones saga: One lone marginal extremist can take hostage the entire social group to which he is officially affiliated, and with it the whole world and the foreseeable future of Christian-Muslim relations. If this mindless act had been carried out, Jones would have become in millions of Muslim minds the symbolic representative of over 2 billion Christians worldwide. Does that sound familiar on the ninth anniversary of the commemoration of 9/11? As communities of faith, all of us have the responsibility, through balanced and civil teaching, to tame our Terry Jones’s long before they come up with their devilish “burn-a-Qur’an” ideas. But also, as communities of faith, all of us have the responsibility not to hold the other community responsible for the heinous act of their own isolated Terry Jones’s. Thank you, Muslim brothers and sisters in America, for being willing to reach out patiently and until the end, to our Terry Jones!