Sermon - Brookes Christian Resources - Updated

What are we as Christians to make of Israel?   What are we to make of Palestine or the Gaza Strip?   These are questions that trouble many Christians.   Today our response to those questions will no doubt be deeply influenced by the horrific events of the last twenty months and the continuing turmoil.  However, there are also longer-term issues that cannot be ignored.    Before I come to that here are four brief glimpses into this situation.

1.       One of the books that has shaped my thinking about Israel and Palestine is the book Blood Brothers written by Elias Chacour.   Chacour is a Christian, who grew up in a village in Israel…when it was Palestine.   That village was not only Christian but due to its understanding of the Christian faith it was also committed to pacifism.  Those villagers were no threat to anyone.   But when the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948 that made no difference.   Because the village occupants were not Jews the village was  taken over and the people expelled from their homes.    In spite of this, Elias, who became a Christian minister, has continued to work for peace and reconciliation.  Years later he was awarded the World Methodist Peace prize.

2.       Jimmy Carter, the past President of the USA, who turned 100 on   October 1^st, and has since died, had throughout his life been a man strongly committed to peace and reconciliation.  Jimmy Carter was a deeply committed Christian not a person who adopted Christianity simply for reasons of political expediency…as some have.   During his time as the President of the USA he worked at bringing a peaceful solution to the problems of the middle east, especially Israel and Palestine.   In his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid he tells of his despair at the hard line so often taken by Israel’s political leaders…something we are seeing again right now.   He said, I quote, “the bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle east only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace …by accepting its legal borders.”    Addressing the other side Carter said  “All Arab neighbours must pledge to honour Israel’s right to live in peace”.    Sadly, since his Presidency the situation, in spite of efforts by Bill Clinton and others, has deteriorated further.

3.       Some fundamentalist Christians, in particular Christian Zionists, with an eye on the book of Revelation, far from despairing about   the current situation see it as a sign of the end times.   Along with their uncritical support for Israel they read the situation as leading up to what in their understanding is the prophesied battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ at the end of the age.  The are probably doing that right now!  They don’t want peace initiatives, or a two-state solution, instead they support the expansion of Jewish settlements, and the takeover of all land that has a connection with historic Israel.    They support moves that they see as precipitating events which appear to fulfil their literal reading of the book of Revelation.   They oppose the Roadmap for Peace.   You may think this is a fringe movement but in the US I understand they have access to some leaders in the Republican Party.

4.       Meanwhile, the Palestinians, many being the descendants of those evicted from their homes and villages in 1948, see their hope of a two-state solution, being whittled away over the decades as Israel has expanded into the Westbank.  And now the  Gaza strip has become in the words of some “the world’s largest open-air prison.”  That comment being based on the fact that Israel controls air and sea access to Gaza, and along with Egypt, also controls road access.  The media reports that 1,139 people were killed by the initial Hamas raid into Israel and 251 taken hostage, and more Israeli’s have died since, while over 50,000 people including many women and children have died in Gaza as a result of the retaliatory airstrikes by Israel.   And now Lebanon is a target as well as Gaza.

This is absolutely tragic for both communities – and it is happening in the very land that is the cradle of our faith and amongst the very people who trace their roots back to Abraham whether they are Jewish, Islamic or Christian.   It calls for us to keep praying for a solution, it challenges the US and the United Nations and all with power and influence to do everything in their power to broker peace and to provide whatever humanitarian aid might be needed.

But now let us jump back 20 centuries.  Things were not great then either.  Israel was occupied territory.   The Romans were in charge.  A Roman governor had oversight. Taxes were being paid to Rome.   The emperors face, as Jesus himself reminds us, was on their coins.   Roman garrisons were established in their major cities and Roman legions patrolled their streets.   There was what was known as pax Romana but it was a peace that was shattered from time to time.     

This is New Testament Israel, the land that is the cradle of our faith.   Its people are the Jewish people, the people whose blood flowed through Jesus’ veins.  It was Jewish people, Mary and Joseph, who parented and nurtured the infant Jesus.   They were the ones who presented him at the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and later took him there as a 12-year-old with interesting consequences.  The Jewish people are the people in whose synagogues Jesus learnt his scriptures and his faith.   One of the great insights that has come out of Biblical research in the last two or three decades is the reminder that Jesus was first and foremost a Jew.   He wasn’t a white Anglo Saxon, or an Irish or Scottish Celt, or a Tongan, Samoan or Maori.   He was a Jew.   He grew up in Israel the cradle of our faith.

And that cradle influenced Jesus in other ways too.   The heroes that early influenced Jesus’ life were not Alexander the Great, or Julius Ceasar, or Plato or Aristotle, instead they were Abraham and Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ruth and Esther, and David and Solomon.   These saints of old, flawed saints like the rest of us, provided the wisdom that Jesus drew on.  We know this because the gospels tell us that Jesus mentioned some of them.  In Matthew ch:6 for example Jesus tells us to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”     And in John 3: 14 Jesus is recorded saying “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life”.   Moses and Solomon.   Then in Matthew 12: 4  Jesus says to his disciples “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry?   He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence” an act which was deemed unlawful by the religious authorities.   Moses, Solomon, and David.   These were the voices to which Jesus listened, they too are part of that cradle of our faith.

But there is more.   Every disciple Jesus chose was a Jew.  The first apostles who went out and proclaimed the good news of Jesus to the wider world were Jewish – and at least one, Saul who became Paul, tells us that he was not only a Jew he was a Pharisee.   A member of a Jewish sect that was often in conflict with Jesus.   Of course, these disciples and apostles were now Christian and that meant they had to rethink aspects of their Jewish heritage.   We see Paul doing just that in some of his letters.   And in the Acts of the Apostles we see the apostles gathering in Jerusalem to debate some of the issues – such as whether the Jewish rite of circumcision needed to apply to Gentiles who became Christian or not.   Our faith is cradled in their debates, their deliberations, their interpretations.  The New Testament as we have it is their work, their record, of the Christ event and what it can mean for us and for the world.   

And there is yet more.   One of the things that theologians and NT scholars have debated over the years is what is called typology. What is that you may ask?   It is the way in which elements of the Jewish, Hebrew, faith journey fore-shadow the gospel story.   So, for instance, we read of Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness – mirroring the forty years that the children of Israel spent in their wilderness from the time they escaped from Egypt to their arrival at the promised land.   And just as they were tempted during those forty years so too Jesus is tempted in his forty days.    Another example is seen in the story of Moses.   Moses at Mt Sinai is the one who delivers the Ten Commandments to his people.   He is the great law giver of the Hebrew scriptures.   In the gospels Jesus is the new Moses.   In Matthew 5 Jesus too goes up a mountain and then he delivers the new law, the Beatitudes to his people.   So here we have Moses foreshadowing the ministry of Jesus.    It is clear that the gospel writers, all of them Jews, drew on their own understanding of the Hebrew faith journey in their recounting of the story of Jesus.   They cradled the story of Jesus in the story of the faith journey of the Jewish people.  They saw the similarities and they made the connections because that was their history, their faith, their world.

The land of Israel is the cradle of our faith.

The saints of Israel were the men and women who fed the mind of a youthful Jesus.   

The first disciples and early apostles were all Jews in the first instance.  They had to work through what that meant for their new found faith in Jesus Christ their Lord.    

The writers of the Gospels drew on their Jewish faith and cradled the gospel story in their heritage.    They remind us that our heritage, our culture, our family background all interact with our faith.  It falls to us to check whether we are slaves to our culture or have been set free by Christ.

But back to the beginning, back to the 21c – and the horrific conflict now taking place in Gaza, the Lebanon, and beyond.   

While it is right for us to own our huge debt as Christians to our Jewish heritage we need to be very clear that acknowledging our debt to our Jewish brother and sisters is not the same as giving unqualified support to the modern secular state of Israel.    I believe  that the current Prime Minister of Israel has a lot to answer for.   Thankfully many of his own people recognize this.   

Jesus, let me remind you, had issues with both the religious and secular authorities in his day, serious issues,  so we follow in the best of footsteps when we too question the leadership of the secular state of Israel today.   

Let us be clear that:

The law that Jesus gave us …is not the law of an eye for and eye a tooth for a tooth … not the law of rough justice.  

Instead, that law, the law Jesus gave us says:  

blessed are the peacemakers;

blessed are the merciful;

blessed are the meek …  

there is a message there both for Israel and Hamas and indeed for us as well.

It is Jesus who challenges us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek; to do unto others what you would have them do to you…there is a message  for Israel and Hamas and for us here as well.   

Jesus once shed tears over Jerusalem – today I believe he sheds those same tears for Israel and Gaza city.       

Amen.