Thinking about Osama

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
I'm about to get myself in real trouble.

Osama bin Laden is the man we all love to hate and Lord knows, he deserves it. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on our nation unleashed immeasurable suffering and loss for thousands of American families. Further, the political and economic consequences of his diabolical design continue to define our world in costly and terrible ways.

Still, when I see those video clips of that pathetic, graying old man hunched in front of his 14" color TV set with a remote in his hand--as though he still controlled the fate of men and of nations--I find something strange, ugly, and repellent welling up within me: pity. I can't help but feel pity that some mother's son turned into such a spectacle of shame, hatred, impotence, and utter isolation, which to me is a pretty good working definition of "hell."

Jesus likened hell to the garbage dump outside Jerusalem (Greek Gehenna) where the refuse never stopped burning and the worms feasted 24/7 (Mark 9:43-48). Quite apart from metaphysical speculation about the life to come, Osama's compound sounds like hell in the here and now: brooding hate, desperate for a target, but mostly cut off from its minions; pornography stashed under the bed rather than risking intimacy with a real person; the trash strewn premises of a "million dollar compound" that in truth, hardly qualifies as a low rent hotel; living in morbid fear of the resolute justice that sooner or later will come storming through your door.

To me, those grainy images of bin Laden in his final days are an ugly portrait of evil turned in on itself. The video clips of that stooped, shrunken shell of a man provide a revealing picture of a life completely divorced from God's love and truth: such a person loses touch with both reality and the divine. Perhaps that's what Jesus means when he speaks of "blaspheming the Holy Spirit" (Mark 3:28-29). To blaspheme the Holy Spirit is to lock oneself up so tightly in the bell jar of one's own evil machinations, even God is at a loss to penetrate such hostile, mad defenses.

But none of that changes the fact that one of God's most prodigal of sons wandered so far off the reservation, he never found his way home. And for God, at least--the loving Abba of Jesus' teaching--that must be a very costly loss. Ask any parent of a child who has gone terribly wrong: the grief-stricken mother or father never quits hurting over the loss of what might have been.

So go ahead and fire off the flaming emails. Maybe I deserve them. But I can't help but feel a surprising sadness over the tragedy of a life gone so terribly wrong that in turn, heaped such tragedy and suffering on the world. Surely, the Devil must be proud.