They pass by and look the other way. The Good Samaritan script recast as a dystopia of white Christian disregard for the indigenous Church in Palestine. Their presence is an inconvenient reality that muddies a narrative of Western Judeo-Christian ‘values’ locked in mortal combat within a surrounding sea of Islamic ‘Terror.’
Best if Palestinian (and Lebanese) Christians should vacate the arena. Just disappear. Simplify matters. Certainly, they’re being encouraged to. The almost daily attacks on the Christian presence in and around Jerusalem surely aim to erase their expression on the site of Christ’s final confrontation with Second Temple Judaism and the Roman Empire.
It seems that an historic Religio-Ethnic Purity System has been cut and pasted onto a modern Ethno-Nationalist secular state. And further endorsed by a decayed ‘Christian’ theology bowed prostrate before the addictive altar of ‘necessary’ violence. Always requiring exponentially ‘more’.
Shed blood and scapegoating. René Girard had something to say about this. As does the one who commanded Peter to sheath his sword.
But tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of (mostly) Evangelical Christians deny this contradiction. At best, a few might accept it as a regrettable price to be paid by some predestined, unfortunate others – in the doomsday chain of events leading to an Armageddon slaughter that will somehow facilitate the return of the ‘Prince of Peace’. Now apparently willing to wade through rivers of blood, having binned his Beatitudes. A 21st Century Schizoid Saviour, who, as the curtain for the supporting feature begins to rise, demands fealty to a supposedly (chosen) ‘forever war’ State.
Dispensing with the notion of the nature of the Divine as ‘Light – in whom there is no darkness’, and as ‘Love.’ Emanating from the face and freighted with the words of an unlicensed Galilean Rabbi wandering through a backwater province of an Empire, constantly shape-shifting through time. Rebranding the front of house whilst, backstage, it’s business as usual, as normal service continues unabated.
Whilst the ‘Christian’ timeline terrorists ever wield their evidence for the prosecution, an Apocalyptic Canon-completing book, ignorant that all within is sophisticated symbol and imagery. Encouraging the faithful to live as Christ-imitating dissidents under Empire occupation. And that there will, one day, be a reckoning. Something our Church Fathers and Mothers always knew, long before our latest regression into Blood and Soil.
So, remember the ‘Living Stones’, as the vice tightens in Beit Sahour and Gaza, in the Galilee and Taybeh, in Nazareth, and Bethlehem. Where the story began. Places where words and deeds dropped deep into the earth. Like depth charges resonating still. And always will.
Roy Uprichard is a retired teacher who has published three ‘Camino type’ memoirs:
- On (and off) The Portuguese Way. Celtic Connections – Galicia, Ireland and Everywhere.(2021)
- Stone and Water – Walking the Variante route of the Camino Portugues.(2018)
- Restless Hearts – Walking the Camino de Santiago. (2016)
You can view his profile on Amazon.
He is also a member of Christians4Palestine.
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