It takes only a second to ingest an image like that; but once you’ve seen it, it’ll always be there, burnt onto the hard drive of your brain, an undeletable file that can open up on the screen of your mind when you’re least expecting it. Close your eyes and you can probably see it now.
But is it always a bad thing to see something you wish you hadn’t? The apostle Paul coached the Philippians to concentrate on ‘whatever is pure, whatever is lovely…’ – but if you did that exclusively, could you ever look at a newspaper again? Previously, Jesus had said that it’s not what goes into you that makes you unclean, but what comes out.
By putting images of Saddam’s final moments on the front pages and the TV news, most editors gave us little choice but to see the grisly sight. But perhaps not everyone who went back for a second look – or, indeed, who opted to watch the mobile-phone footage of his death on the internet – was simply indulging in shameful, pornographic lust, as some commentators have argued.
There’s a fine line sometimes between voyeurism and healthy curiosity. And it’s possible that the depiction of the awful death of one man at the hands of another at least serves to remind us of the brutal reality of human conflict. It’s something we can’t appreciate fully from a safe distance, of course; but, if nothing else, the savagery of the images should help to put us off more than just our breakfasts.
Christians, too, replay the final moments of an executed man to a world that doesn’t want to look, through our equivalent of the grainy mobile-phone download: our hymns and readings, statues and stained-glass windows. Of course, any comparison with Saddam ends there. One man deserved death, the other did not. Yet in the context of the recent pictures it’s even more sobering to think that Jesus Christ died as a criminal, taunted mercilessly by his enemies as he was finally nailed.
Sometimes you shouldn’t just look away.
Brian Draper
Reproduced with permission: © The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
