Father, why am I so sad by what I read?
I am not Palestinian or Israeli. I wonder why the war in Ukraine doesn’t bother me in the way this war does. Nor the other 40-odd conflicts that are occurring around the world.
I think it has something to do with those maps of Palestine that were in the back of my childhood Bibles. It has something to do with knowing stories from the Tanach (Christian: Old Testament) better than any other stories.
How could I not feel some identification with the tribe of Judah and the land? The place names, Jerusalem, Jericho, Nazareth, Capernaum, and Galilee come as quickly as London, Paris, and Milan. Jerusalem comes somewhere between Belfast and Dublin. And of course, you the God who is my father I know through Isho ( English: Jesus) a Jew. So why wouldn’t I be concerned about what happens there?
It is the land that you chose for Isho to be born. I tend to think you had high hopes for the place. Maybe it is exactly for that reason Isho showed up. A land under occupation and a people struggling for hope.
But what you showed is regardless of who is occupying the spirit can live free.
Free really when bombs are raining down, free really when people are harassed and frightened?
Somewhere along the way, I saw that freedom is in the spirit just as the nation to which I belong is invisible. It is a radical message one that is fully tested by the death of the body. Will the spirit live on, will the spirit remain free? Somewhere within me, I hear “Yes.”
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