Eight passports at one airport

One · What happened

The list the aviation authority released

Saturday’s missile strike left twelve dead and 309 wounded, some of them critically, Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation said, as Al Jazeera reported. The authority’s list ran four Saudis, two Bangladeshis, and then one each from the United States, Jordan, Syria, Sudan, Egypt and the Palestinian territories. Operations at King Khalid International Airport were suspended during the damage assessment. Al Jazeera called the strike the deadliest on the kingdom in more than a decade. Saudi authorities said that attacks earlier in the week on the airports at Abha and Riyadh had killed three civilians and wounded thirty-six.

A UN-brokered ceasefire in Yemen, largely in place since 2022, has collapsed, Al Jazeera reported. Its reporter in Sanaa said the Houthis had signaled that King Khalid and other Saudi airports would be their main targets. Their spokesman Yahya Saree said the group had carried out multiple operations against the airport and warned, “Take our warnings seriously, and Saudi Arabia bears responsibility for any failed interceptions.” The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis, through its spokesman Major General Turki al-Malki, called Saturday’s attack “a full-fledged war crime.” He said the coalition would “respond decisively to this terrorist attack.”

On Sunday evening the Houthis claimed a new attack on the same airport. The coalition said an “unidentified projectile” hit a passenger terminal and started a fire. Saudi air defenses, it said, intercepted a missile. The civil aviation authority said only that the attack “resulted in injuries.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the attacks must stop now and confirmed that an American was among the dead. President Trump called the attack “terrible” and said the United States was considering joining the war against the Houthis. Whether America should enter that war is a decision for the men who answer for it, and a reader’s heart has other work to do this morning.

Two · What it is doing

Which of the twelve you feel

A man reading the authority’s list over coffee finds his eye stopping on one line. A reader who has flown through Riyadh, or who has an American cousin working in the Gulf, weighs the line with the American on it most heavily. Another reader reaches the two Bangladeshis first, and another reaches the four Saudis. Each of them holds a view of the war that sorted the dead in advance. The list gives each of the twelve a nationality and nothing more, so the heart fills in the rest from what it already believed about the war. Somebody who would never say that one death counts for more than another has just done it within the time it takes to read a line.

A second reader skips the list and goes to the vows. The coalition promised a decisive response. The Houthi spokesman warned of more attacks, and the American president said he was considering joining the war against the Houthis. That reader wants the account paid in a size he can feel. He catches himself hoping the next headline is a retaliation, or hoping it is not, with more heat than he spent on the twelve. Anger of this sort calls itself concern for the dead. The dead sit in no war council, and nothing they could say would change the vote.

Riyadh’s schools were ordered to teach from home for a week, Al Jazeera reported. Several airlines suspended service to Saudi destinations after the strikes, according to the same report. A reader in Ohio feels none of it. He closes the phone, and the twelve shrink to a figure he once saw. The third thing the story does inside him is the quietest, a relief that the airport belonged to somebody else. From where he sits the relief does not look like a sin.

Three · Where the ground is

What Jonah wanted done to Nineveh

Jonah, a prophet from Israel, walked into Nineveh crying that the city would be overthrown in forty days, and the people repented from the king down. God relented from the disaster he had promised (Jonah 3:4–10). Jonah took no joy in it. He prayed that this was why he had run toward Tarshish in the first place, “for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster” (Jonah 4:2). Jonah had wanted the verdict enforced against the city. The mercy that spared it left him furious.

“Do you do well to be angry?” the LORD asked him. Jonah sat down east of the city to see what would happen to it. God grew a plant over him for shade, then sent a worm to kill it, and Jonah was angry enough to die over the plant (Jonah 4:4–9). The book closes with God’s last question, “Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” and no reply from Jonah is written down (Jonah 4:11). Jonah wanted the city to get what was coming. God finished the book by counting its people.

Eight passports, one Maker

Paul told the philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens that God “made from one man every nation of mankind” (Acts 17:26). The Saturday list sorts the dead by nation. Paul’s sentence gives the Saudi and the American the same beginning. Peter reached the same conclusion in the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, when he said that God “shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34). A God who shows no partiality has the name of every person killed at the terminal and of every one of the 309 in the hospital beds.

Jesus spoke to a crowd that had gathered by the thousands. “Not one of them is forgotten before God,” he said of five sparrows sold for two pennies (Luke 12:6). The hairs of a head, he added, are all numbered, and he had told the same crowd a moment earlier not to fear those who kill the body (Luke 12:4, 7). Each of the twelve is held in that kind of attention.

What the promised answer cannot make

Jesus said to the crowds gathered around him on a hillside in Galilee, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Paul told the Romans what Christ did for his own enemies, “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10). The command reaches the reader whoever his enemy is. The anger that wants the promised answer finds no promise in Scripture that it will make anything right. A reader can hold a view on the war and still hand his anger to God before it grows into an appetite.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Five small jobs for this week take no side in Yemen’s war and ask for no view of what Washington decides.

1. 01

   Read Jonah 4 to your household tonight.

   The chapter has eleven verses and fits inside two minutes at the table. Stop after verse 4, where the LORD asks, “Do you do well to be angry?” Give each person a turn to answer for himself before you read on. The book itself closes on a question God puts to Jonah, with no answer recorded (Jonah 4:11).

2. 02

   Find the eight countries on a map.

   Take the authority’s list of the dead, and put a finger on each of the eight countries, with a child beside you if there is one in the house. In Athens, Paul said that God made every nation from one man (Acts 17:26). A finger on the map keeps that sentence from floating.

3. 03

   Ask God to heal the 309 in the hospital beds.

   Pray each morning for the wounded in Riyadh and the families sitting beside them. Some of the wounded are in critical condition. Start from the psalmist’s line that God is “a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). Keep the prayer to the people in the beds, with the war left out of it.

4. 04

   Call anyone you know who is booked through the Gulf.

   According to Al Jazeera, the U.S. mission in Saudi Arabia strongly recommends that Americans avoid the Riyadh airport and the surrounding area. Canada’s embassy told its citizens to avoid all travel to the airport. Check this week with any cousin or church member whose itinerary runs through a Saudi airport. Ask what the airline has told them. Paul told the Galatians to carry each other’s loads (Galatians 6:2), and a call is one small way to do it.

5. 05

   Tell one person whose line on the list reached you first.

   Ask yourself which line of the list your eye found first. Tell your pastor or a friend you trust. Jonah’s anger ran on a ranking like yours, and God had to ask him about it before it came out. James wrote that confessing sins to one another and praying for one another leads to healing (James 5:16).