Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, September 18 2016
Jeremiah 8.18-9.2; 1 Timothy 2.1-7; Luke 16.1-13
Hopeman Church, Moray, Scotland
God wants everyone to be saved. There is so much going on in scripture and so much happening in our world today that often we can miss the wood for the trees. But First Timothy comes straight out and says it: God wants everyone to be saved – you and me, and the woman down the road we don’t talk to.
In Elgin High Church on Friday night, we were praying the prayer of a Palestinian Christian:
Pray not for Arab or Jew,
for Palestinian or Israeli,
but pray rather for yourselves,
that you might not divide them in your prayers
but keep them both together in your hearts.
Why are we to keep them together in our hearts?
Because God does. God keeps together two groups of people that are doing their best to put themselves asunder, two groups that have been at loggerheads for years. God wants everyone to be saved.
This, surely, is a God worth serving.
But much of the time we humans want to eat our cake and have it. Jesus of Nazareth tells us that we cannot serve two masters, but much of the time we want to try.
We may want to worship the one true God, but we also want to worship idols of our own devising.
These false gods are the same as they always have been: the idols of money, sex, and power, and bad religion.
*
For Jews and Muslims, the centre of Jerusalem is a hill in the Old City. Jews call it the Temple Mount, the site of the second temple, burnt by the Romans in the year 70, of which all that remains today is the western wall. Muslims call it the Haram Al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary, the site of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the second holiest place in Islam.
For Christians, the centre of Jerusalem lies elsewhere, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – or for some brave Protestant souls, in the Garden Tomb.
For us, the centre of Jerusalem is where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and buried but raised from death on Easter Day.
God sends his only beloved Son to show us his love and save us from our sins, but we, being stupid sinners, kill him.
We cannot serve God and crucify the Son of God, but all across the world, we crucify him daily.
*
Yaakov Ariel is a native of Jerusalem, a Jew in the Reform tradition who teaches religious studies in North Carolina in the United States.
In conversation in the Scots Guesthouse shortly after I arrived two years ago, he gave me a beguiling image. “In 1949,” he said, “the world put Israel on trial and found it not guilty. In 1967, Israel said, ‘Try me again.’”
1949 is when the United Nations admitted Israel to membership after the war of independence. 1967 is in the six days war, when Israel took all the bits of Mandate Palestine it hadn’t conquered in 1947-48.
Today, more and more people are inclined not only to say “Guilty” about 1967 but also to reopen the previous case.
For the Arabs of Palestine, the war of 1947-48 was not a war of independence. It was a catastrophe – what in Arabic they call the Nakba – that resulted in the expulsion from their homes and lands of over 700,000 Palestinians. Arguably, this was the desired result, because they and their children and their children’s children have never been allowed to return.
Today, when people around the world look at how the state of Israel behaves, they are inclined to question not just what Israel did in 1967 and has done since, but what Israel did in creating itself 20 years earlier. The Nakba, they say, wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t something that just happened in passing. It was essential to the creation of a Jewish state. It was Israel’s original sin.
Next year – 2017 – marks the 50th anniversary of the occupation and the 70th anniversary of when Britain finally admitted that it was incapable of squaring the circle of incompatible promises it had made to Arabs and Jews.
It also marks the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain said that it viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
And it marks the 120th anniversary of the first Zionist congress in Basel, Switzerland, which launched the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine.
The congress was convened by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist and playwright. A year earlier Herzl published The Jewish State, in which he presented a simple but seductive argument. Christian Europe, he said, would always hate the Jews. Therefore Jews had no choice but to create a state of their own. In late 19th-century Austria, this was a plausible argument. In 20th-century Germany, it became even more convincing.
But at the heart of Herzl’s argument was a contradiction, to which neither he nor those he persuaded paid much attention.
It didn’t matter where the Jews of Europe went to set up their Jewish state, they would always face a problem: the problem of the people already living on the land.
Israel Zangwill popularized the slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land”, but of course this wasn’t true. In Palestine, there were rather a lot of people. But for 19th-century Europeans these people didn’t matter.
For David Ben-Gurion and those who established the state of Israel half a century later, they didn’t matter either, any more than they matter to those who govern Israel today.
*
Here, we need to be careful.
Earlier in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks us “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own?” We miss his point if we fall to arguing about who has the speck and who has the log.
As Scottish and British and European Christians, we cannot criticize the state of Israel or the Jews of Israel from any height of moral superiority.
For what I have called the original sin of the state of Israel is rooted in an even more original sin: the sin of Christian Europe.
In Shakespeare’s play, the Venetian moneylender Shylock protests: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”
But for centuries Christian Europe was unwilling to treat the Jews of Europe as human beings.
Even after Jewish emancipation spread across the continent, many Europeans were unwilling to accept their Jewish neighbours as equal citizens. Emancipation in many places created a vicious backlash in the form of modern, racist antisemitism – an antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust, the death of six million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s Germany.
Theodor Herzl invented political Zionism because of his experience as a Jew in 19th-century Europe. They will always hate us, he said. He was wrong about that, in my view, but he certainly had his reasons.
Equally, the Balfour Declaration did not create the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, but it certainly exacerbated it. Once incorporated into the British Mandate for Palestine, it guaranteed that it would all end in tears.
If we are going to be critical, then, let us go the whole way.
Let us criticize what the settler colonial state of Israel does to the Palestinians and say that this has to stop; but let us also criticize how European Christians prepared the way for the Holocaust and acknowledge that we must repent; and let us criticize how the British empire helped to create this conflict and how today post-imperial Britain contributes to perpetuating rather than ending it.
Above all, let us answer Shylock’s question with a resounding yes. Let us embrace the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine wholeheartedly as human beings, our sisters and our brothers.
*
In the lectionary, our reading from Jeremiah stops one verse short of where we stopped this morning. The extra verse helps to bring out the ambivalence with which Jeremiah viewed his people, the people he criticized so harshly and yet loved so deeply.
“I wish my head were a well of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I could cry day and night for my people. I wish I had a place to stay in the desert where I could get away from my people.”
It is clear in scripture which of these two wishes was Jeremiah’s true wish; and it should be clear which of the two should be our wish also.
In the desert of our contempt, everything dies. But from wells of water and fountains of tears comes new life, both for us and for those for whom we weep, both Jew and Arab.
Pray not for Arab or Jew,
for Palestinian or Israeli,
but pray rather for yourselves,
that you might not divide them in your prayers
but keep them both together in your hearts.
God wants everyone to be saved.
The question is, do we?
Hymns
Lord of all hopefulness (CH4 166, to Slane, 500)
It’s a world of sunshine, a world of rain (CH4 245)
We lay our broken world (CH4 721)
Love is the touch of intangible joy (CH4 115)
Bless the Lord, O saints and servants (CH4 73)
Sources
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (New York: Olive Branch, 1993)
Neville J Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1980)
Diana Muir , “A land without a people for a people without a land”, Middle East Quarterly 15.2 (Spring 2008), 55-62