Two Towers, Three Crosses

Once two towers soared over New York City, examples of architectural acumen and commercial power, they became the focal point for the city that never sleeps. Filled daily with those who worked to produce profit for their companies, they epitomized the maddened throng pushing to do more, to get more, and to achieve more than their competitors.

One man focused his attention on a country far away, a place that he’d learned to hate for all that he perceived it stood for. What better place to target his wrath than symbols of what he thought of as greed, military and political power than the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House? His evil genius conceived of a plan using airliners as guided bombs to attack these symbols and through subterfuge and carelessness on the part of the people so targeted, he nearly succeeded in his plans. A group of passengers on the third airliner fought back, resulting in their deaths in a field in Pennsylvania, never reaching their target of the White House.

Three crosses once were raised over a hillside just outside the gate of a city in a subjugated land; three condemned men executed together in a manner that seems the epitome of suffering and shame. Two of the men were convicted criminals, those who had sought to overthrow the reigning authority through the use of force and, having been captured, were to be killed for their crimes against the government.

One man however, was there as the result of a plan and purpose beyond the understanding of those carrying out the execution, those who had commanded the execution to take place, as well as those who had suborned the local authority to have this man killed. One cross, the real focus on that day, carried a faultless man who was more than a man for those who had eyes and hearts to see. The plan for his being on that hillside had been laid down before his birth, before even the world came into existence; this man was to pay a price beyond understanding for crimes he’d never commit for all people for all time. From Adam to the last soul living on this sad place called Earth, for every despicable, horrific crime ever done, and for any and every thought word or deed spoken or done against the one Authority from which all authority derives; all of this one man held in his heart as he was nailed to that cross, suffered and bled, more alone than any other person in all of history as even His Father turned away in repugnance from the Son carrying all the evil of all time as the propitiation for that evil, not to cover it but to cleanse it from the hearts of mankind.

Three crosses, one really, the antithesis of what happened in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania; God’s answer to all evil of all time and the only answer possible when we are confronted with the next such dastardly deed to occur. That cross and the person upon it provides a counterpoint to the two towers fall; more than a counterpoint really, a triumphant, exultant cry that echoed from that hillside that day, “It is finished!”