I confess that when a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to an article about a Bible that was found fused to a piece of steel in the wreckage from the collapsed Twin Towers after 9/11, I hesitated to click, and expected it to be the kind of thing that disturbs me rather than encourages me to believe – perhaps something like “thousands of people died, but look at this Bible which survived.”
But that wasn’t the point at all. As it happens, the Bible page was still legible, and the passage that was there and had survived was Jesus’ teaching about retaliation in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
I don’t think of it as a sign or in supernatural terms. But there is nevertheless something poignant about Jesus’ words about not repaying evil for evil surviving this attack, as a reminder to the many in the attacked country who at least claim to be his followers.
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