For This Cause

News enough to send more than a chill down my spine. An Italian television channel today aired footage of the beheading of the driver of an Italian journalist in Afghanistan by Taliban militants. His interpreter, a journalist, was also beheaded.

The Italian journalist was freed on March 19 after Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered the release of five Taliban prisoners under a controversial deal.

According to the theage.com.au, the RAI-1 channel beamed images of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, his driver Sayed Agha and his interpreter Ajmal Naqshbandi, kneeling blindfolded before gun-wielding militants.

Working in a suburban community paper, I live a relatively ‘sheltered’ life as a journalist. But this story evoked similar sentiments to the time I was reading Paul McGeough’s Manhattan to Baghdad as a journo student.

It brought into sharp focus issues of values, vocation and valour: what things people believe in enough to inspire courage and faith – to push out onto cutting edge frontiers, even if it means putting your life on the line for it.

The image of the three blindfolded men lined up before their gun-wielding captors made me think about Jesus and the two robbers hung up on the Cross next to Him.

When these two images stand side by side, you suddenly realise how far much of the religious world has come in romanticising the idea of Jesus and the Crucifixion. It was bloody, horrific, gruesome and unjust. And it should, like Gibson’s Passion of the Christ managed, to make you cringe and turn away from a brutality that is simply too much to bear.

A Man who lived like nothing else mattered except for One Cause, that took Him to places where the flesh didn’t necessarily want to go. A Man who chose to live by the Spirit, who loved and knew what this world was created for, and what people were made for – so much so that even death itself would not hold him back from accomplishing the work of restoring this world to right.