October 13 2014
At the beginning of September the Rev. Páraic Réamonn became the minister of St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem. Below, he reflects on his first weeks in the Holy Land. He plans to blog regularly from Jerusalem.
In May this year, I reached retirement age. At the end of June, I stopped work in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. Two months later, I started work again.
Senile dementia? Not precisely.
I was asked to think about St Andrew’s and made the mistake of doing that; Vivien, my wife, compounded the error by thinking about it too. “I can resist anything except temptation,” said Oscar Wilde: St Andrew’s was temptation in spades. We spent two days walking and talking on the beach front in Marbella. Before we flew home, we knew I would apply.
My first week in Jerusalem was orientation; the weeks ever since, disorientation. I realized that whatever I knew about churches and communities here, I had peeled only the first layer of an onion as large as the Dome of the Rock.
But already I know this: people are hurting here.
A friend I met in Bethlehem has an important job in the American University of Beirut. “Are you working there because you can’t do the same thing here, in the territories?” I asked. “There isn’t much here,” he replied, quietly and with Palestinian understatement; but I could see the sadness in his eyes. For him, too, there was no room in the inn.
A friend in Jerusalem told me his home had been demolished not once but three times. I wondered how he coped. If a home in Scotland or Switzerland burns down, there is at least fire insurance: here there is no redress. “I smile at you,” he said, “but inside I’m crying. I smile to hide my tears. But thank God, I think I’m strong enough to stay here. I won’t let them drive me out of my land.”
Jews in this land are hurting too. My first sermon in St Andrew’s laid out what I thought ministry here means and doesn’t mean. Next morning, a friend in Jaffa called. She told me a parable: “If I say to my child, ‘I have two children, and you are the bad one,’ that doesn’t help him.”
Which, being interpreted, means this:
In recent years, like many churches around the world, the Church of Scotland has become more vocal in criticizing the state of Israel, its policies and practices, its present form. I’ve done that myself.
Even before I got here, the Jerusalem Post published an article with the endearing title, “Cleric critical of Israel slated to take over Jerusalem’s St Andrew’s church”, quoting from my speech to the general assembly in 2011. As they say in Ben Gurion airport, “Welcome to Israel.”
We need to be critical, because there is much in this land that is wrong. But we need to understand how our criticisms are heard. For many ordinary Jews, criticism of the state of Israel feels like a personal attack. When they also recall long centuries of Christian anti-Judaism in Europe and the west, the temptation is to say, “There they go again.” We need to make clear we’re not doing that – for the sake of everyone, Arab or Jew, Palestinian or Israeli, in this troubled land.
Christians say two things:
- We say our God is a biased God with a decided preference for the poor and downtrodden, the homeless, the displaced and the dispossessed, the exiles.
- We say our God is an unbiased God who cares for all of us without discrimination; Christ died for us while we were yet sinners; we love, however imperfectly, because God first loves us.
In any context, it is hard to hold these two affirmations together. In the Holy Land, it is well-nigh impossible.
But that’s my job description.