I had left off last time with the definition of God as love – not that He has love but that He is love.  We think of love as some nice, warm feeling but we will soon see that, when it comes to God, this is hardly what is meant by love.  Let’s take a look at an incident that happened in the twentieth century.

August 9, 1945 a B-29 bomber was flying toward its primary target in Japan, Kokura.  The pilot flew three times over the city but it was covered with clouds and the pilot decided to go to their secondary target, Nagasaki.  There was not very much concern as the solitary plane flew over Nagasaki.  The plane was suffering from a blockage in one of the fuel lines and the pilot had to unload the bomb at a site 2 kilometers away from the planned point of attack.  Because there was only one plane, the civilians below were not preparing themselves to what was about to happen at 11:02 AM over Nagasaki.  The bomb landed close to the Urakami Cathedral in which Christian believers had gathered.  The plutonium 239 bomb generated a temperature of several million degrees Celsius at the point of explosion – enough to change the bodies of people into elemental carbon – and this extreme heat generated winds travelling at more than one mile a second, enough to dismember the bodies of victims. The Cathedral was utterly destroyed from the blast, and the heat caused a fire to erupt.  In a matter of minutes, seventy thousand people were dead, among them, eight thousand Christians.

In 1571 the persecution of Christians began in earnest.  To emphasize the fact that they were enemies of the state, 26 Christians were arrested in Kyoto and force marched to Nagasaki in terrible conditions of cold.  The dictator of Nagasaki, Hideyoshi, decided it would be good to use these twenty six as examples for others so that they would turn away from Christianity.  To this end, he ordered the executions to be slow and public. Twenty six crosses were prepared and the Christians were fastened to them to suffer slowly and painfully.  But what happened was something that the executioner, Terazawa had not expected – they started to sing praises to God.  St. Paul Miki, one of the crucified spoke up to encourage those around him, ending with psalm 31 –Lord, into your hands, I commend my spirit.  Terazawa saw that the situation was escaping his control and ordered the Samurai to kill the twenty Christians.

Wasn’t it enough that these innocents suffered a horrible and painful death?  Did circumstances have to be such that this was to be compounded by having the second atomic bomb fall on the city in Japan with the highest Christian population?  Is this what God’s love means for his chosen people? One is reminded of the words of one of the women saints of France – God, if you treated your friends better, maybe you would have more of them?  What are we to make of this?

And yet, we can learn something valuable from this incident.  What love is, in a deep sense, is the allowance of freedom.  Without freedom, there can be no love. God loves His creation and because of this love, He confers freedom both on man and on creation as a whole.  Why this terrible tragedy occurred at all arises from this freedom that creation has.  It was free men who synthesized plutonium which does not occur in nature, and used the properties of this plutonium to cause the terrible destruction that was brought onto Nagasaki. This element, ironically named after the god of the underworld. Pluto, was used in the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki. The weather conditions which arose guiding the bomber to Nagasaki are also a result of the ‘freedom’ that nature has and it was the coming together of circumstances that brought disaster to the people of Nagasaki.  It was not the will of God nor was it the intention of God to punish the Christians of Nagasaki. What is of paramount importance is to try to discern the significance of this event.

 A service was held by the Christians of the city and one of the speakers at this service was himself a survivor of the atomic explosion.  He worked at the university of Nagasaki as a radiologist and saw his house totally demolished by the explosion.  It was his terrible duty to go to his house to collect the charred bones of his wife Midori.  It was he, who was called on to speak about the ‘meaning’ of this terrible act carried out against Nagasaki. Here is what he said:

‘On the morning of August 9, a meeting of the Supreme Council of War was in session to determine whether Japan would surrender or would continue to wage war.

And just then, at 11:02 A.M. an atom bomb exploded over our suburb.  In an instant eight thousand Christians were called to God, and in a few hours flames turned to ash this venerable Far Eastern holy place.

At midnight that night, our cathedral suddenly burst into flames and was consumed.  At exactly that same time in the Imperial Palace, His Majesty the Emperor made known his sacred decision to end the war. On August 15, peace came.  And August 15 is also the great feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. It is significant, I believe, that the Urakami Cathedral was dedicated to her.  We must ask: Was this convergence of events, the end of the war and the celebration of her feast day, merely coincidental, or was it the mysterious Providence of God?

I have heard that the atom bomb was destined for another city.  Heavy clouds rendered that target impossible, and the American crew headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki.  Then a mechanical problem arose, and the bomb was dropped further north than planned and burst right above the cathedral.  It was not the American crew, I believe, who chose our suburb. God’s Providence chose Urakami and carried the bomb right above our homes.  Is there not a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a burnt offering (Japanese word hansai for the Biblical term for holocaust or whole burnt offering) on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?’

When these words were spoken, some people rose in protest against the pious words being used to dignify the atrocious suffering of Nagasaki, but the speaker continued:

‘We are inheritor’s of Adam’s sin, of Cain’s sin.  He killed his brother.  We have turned to idols and forgotten love.  Hating one another, killing one another, joyfully killing one another! At last the evil and horrific killing came to an end, but mere repentance was not enough for peace.  We had to offer a stupendous sacrifice.  Cities were leveled, but even that was not enough.  Only this hansai in Nagasaki sufficed, and at that moment God inspired the Emperor to issue the sacred proclamation that ended the war. During the war, the Christian flock offered ceaseless prayers for lasting peace.  Here was the one pure lamb that had to be sacrificed as hansai on His altar so that many millions of lives might be saved.’

As it is written, the people without a vision perish and that is what was being offered to the people of Nagasaki and through them, to all of us – a vision, a meaning in the seemingly hopeless situation of the catastrophe brought on by the nuclear explosion.  This meaning comes through clearly in contrasting the reaction to the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.    At its commemoration of the victims of the atomic bomb Hiroshima is bitter, noisy, highly political and anti-America.  Its symbol would be a clenched fist raised in anger.  Nagasaki is sad, quiet, reflective, and above all, prayerful.  And this reflects the theological background of the two cities where Nagasaki has seen meaning and purpose in its suffering.  It has seen God’s love expressed even in the freedom of man and nature and it has come to terms and inherited peace in this realization.

There are many tragedies that haunt mankind – the Holodomor  (artificial famine in Ukraine in the 1930’s)) the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were labelled for extermination, and others.  These will remain anomalous puzzles which can only be resolved through prayer and turning to God.  It is prayer and a turning to God that offers a possible answer to that perennial question – how can all this be if God is omnipotent and loving.  And the paradoxical answer that comes back is that this can be so because God is loving and in this love we see exhibited the terrible gift that we misuse – our freedom.  In our awful (in the full sense of full of awe)  tragedies, we need prophetic voices to be raised who will remind us of the purpose that always exists in the universe and never fades away although it may be obscured and give us the illusion of a creation that has run amok. 

I will continue in the next letter, but for now….

Sincerely,

Bar-Abbas