The Friday world of the Middle East at Easter

Violence begets violence in a zero sum world.

Todd Deatherage

Todd is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine.

A family look at the concrete shell and remains of a bombed building.

Christian Aid.

What do the events of Holy Week and Easter---these seminal events in Christianity-- have to say in a time of slaughter and now starvation in the Middle East? The closer we get to Easter Sunday, the most sacred day in Christianity, the more I’ve wrestled with that question.

I’m neither Palestinian nor Israeli, and so my connection to the historic tragedy continuing to unfold is not as visceral or as obvious as some. But as an American and a Christian, I’m deeply bound up in all of this. The realization of my own implication led me back in 2009 to co-found a nonprofit whose mission is to help Americans better understand the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the American role in it, and to learn about the difficult work of honest peacemaking. These past five months are a nightmare I can’t wake up from, and of course they’re more than a nightmare for the people in the south of Israel and the West Bank, and they’re an absolute hell on earth for the people in Gaza today.

For more than 20 years I’ve lived in a set of deep relationships with both Palestinians and Israelis. The horror and barbarity of the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the horror and devastation of the slaughter and starvation taking place unabated in Gaza even this Holy Week have left me begging God to intervene and begging our leaders to do whatever we can to stop the madness.

Sometimes there’s a lot more of the darkness of Thursday and Friday than the joy and light of Easter Sunday morning.

In most of the 65 trips I’ve led to the Holy Land over the years, after we’ve had our heart broken by the stories we’ve heard and the experiences we’ve shared with people on all sides, we visit the place on the Mount of Olives looking at the Old City of Jerusalem where Jesus stopped, looked at the city, and wept. It is here, just as he entered what we call his Passion Week, that he said “Jerusalem, Jerusalem if only you’d known the things that make for peace.” If only you’d known. If only we’d known. If only we knew.

I need this story to be in the Bible. Many times I’ve had to fall back on Jesus weeping for the mess we’ve made of our lives, the way we allow our fears and our hatreds or our indifference to guide how we treat our neighbors, how often we use violence and power to deny the way they too bear the image of God.

This is one of those times. The worst of those times in all the years I’ve been involved in Israel and Palestine. I’ve found myself weeping privately, in conversations, and sometimes in public places. And I’ve spent so much time asking God to intervene. To comfort the terrorized and afraid, to feed the starving, to silence the guns of war, to rescue and deliver those who are dying.

And the answer I keep getting has felt like silence. Deafening silence.

At times like this, the Christian life feels like a Thursday night in a garden when your friends can't’ stay awake to help you and even God is not answering your prayer. Or it feels like a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem when all hope has died and you can’t imagine how the world will ever be better. Sometimes there’s a lot more of the darkness of Thursday and Friday than the joy and light of Easter Sunday morning.

The work of justice and mercy make for peace. Revenge and violence do not.

But Lent and Holy Week have given me another answer, beyond God’s silence--the reminder that the people in Israel and In Gaza, even those this very night who are displaced and starving, are not alone. God is with them. And he weeps for them. And he weeps for us. If only we knew the things that make for peace. If only we knew how to love God and to love our neighbor and to love our enemies. If only we knew the limits of violence to achieve good ends. If only we knew the connection between peace and justice.

And the fullness of this Holy Week also brings me to this reminder that if God does not seem active maybe it’s because we are not listening to his call. My friend Bill Haley says this:

“The actual invitation of the Christian faith is not just to believe in Jesus or be like Jesus or tell others about Jesus (as right as these thing are), but actually to be the presence of Jesus in the world, our hands his hands, our feet his feet, our heart his heart, our bodies his very body... By this does the reality of the risen, living Jesus continue to be displayed, visibly and tangibly, in and around the world (and yours and mine), day after day.”

To do this we first seek to know the things that make for peace (and equally important is to know the things that don’t make for peace). The work of justice and mercy make for peace. Revenge and violence do not. The embrace of our mutuality and interconnectedness make for peace. Tribalism and dehumanization of our neighbors do not. Justice and respect make for peace. Systems of domination and ideologies of hatred do not. Respect for the sacredness of life and the inherent dignity of all as made in the image of God make for peace. Brutality, murder, and starvation do not. Acts of love and service make for peace. Fear and self-centeredness do not.

The Friday world is zero sum. Justice and peace are separate things. Some lives are more important than others.

In a Good Friday world, to live as if these “things that make for peace” are actually true is a costly endeavor. Jesus paid with his life. Others like Martin Luther King have also. For most of us, it may just be the way our reputation suffers, or how certain relationships are strained. There may be some economic cost or sacrifice of our time and attention required. But if it says anything, Holy Week teaches us that incarnational living is costly. Reconciliation comes at a price. The crucifixion wasn’t just something that happened to Jesus on the way to resurrection. It is central to it.

And yet, believers in Jesus know that Holy Week and the shame, humiliation, brutality and injustice of the crucifixion were not the last word. To borrow from the legendary Black preacher S.M. Lockridge, we live in a Friday world, but we know that Sunday’s coming.

In a world of Fridays, violence begets violence. The Friday world is zero sum. Justice and peace are separate things. Some lives are more important than others. There is minimal cost to looking away from people who are hungry and imprisoned. Religion is used to baptize injustice. We live in a Friday world. But we are Sunday people. And we are called to live as best we can as reminders that in a Sunday world we are responsible for what we know, responsible to each other, and responsible before God. To quote Dr. King again, in a Sunday world, "darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Sunday people are Easter people. And Easter people have a mandate to live as peacemakers in a world riven by conflict. To be purveyors of light and hope in a time of devastation and despair. Frederick Douglass said “I prayed for freedom for 20 years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” As we pray for peace, and we have to be people who pray for peace, let us also be agents of God’s peace. Let us be those incarnational Easter people who pray for peace with our legs. Let us do the urgent work for a lasting ceasefire, for a release of all hostages, and for food for hungry people. And when the guns are silenced and the hungry are at last being fed and the wounded and traumatized are given space to heal, then the greater work begins. Let us learn the lessons of how we got here and let us commit ourselves to a different path forward, one grounded in the sacred dignity of all the people of the land, Palestinians and Israelis alike. Let us support all those who seek justice and peace and security through the path of mutual flourishing. These are the things that make for peace.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Mental Health

2 December 2024

6 min read

No, it is not your life to dispose of

What could not be said about the assisted dying debate

Steve Hellyer

Steve is the former vicar of St Matthew's Oxford.

Empty bus seats are lit in dark neon colours.

Vy Tran on Unsplash.

It is 1979. I am aged 23 and have been in great mental and emotional anguish and pain for years. I am on a pointless journey, on Greyhound busses, from the East coast of America to the West, and am presently sitting in a parked bus just outside a city in Arizona; the powerful engine idles as we wait for departure time, giving a gentle to-and-fro rocking motion to the bus. I have not eaten for days, am unspeakably tired of my life, and have made a written list of possible ways to end it.

But not on that list is one possibility I have not previously considered, but which is now before me. As I look out to my right, up into the Arizona desert hills, I realise that here is an option which perfectly fits with my desire, not so much to do away violently with myself, as simply to drift into a passive oblivion; I realise that I could simply rise from my seat right now, get off the bus, stumble off into the desert hills, lie down, and wait to die. I need not shoot or poison myself after all. I know I can do this, and fairly easily; to die will take time, but no matter. No-one knows where I am, no-one will know I am missing, no-one will come looking for me, and probably no-one will find me. It is suddenly an immensely attractive prospect, and I am seconds away from rising up from my seat...

There is one thing, one thing only, that makes me hesitate; it is what other people would call ‘a religious belief’, but to me it is simply a truth.

It is this; I am absolutely sure that there is a God. And suddenly there is something grimly, darkly humorous even, in what I thus believe will follow my death; I will find myself, not in peaceful oblivion, but in the presence of God. I will, as they say, ‘meet my Maker’. And what then will I say to God? I will say: “Apologies: I could not go on, there was no other way out for me”. But what, I reason, if God were then to say: “You are wrong. There was a way forward. Look: you could have stayed on the bus, and had you done so, let me show you how your earthly future would have panned out…” And I will listen, and I will watch, as the film rolls on, showing me an alternative future. But of course, by then it would be too late…

And suddenly, sitting on that bus, in a moment of cold clarity, I realise, with a kind of desolate logic, how I am caught. In a very real sense, my belief in God my Creator means that I am not in fact ‘free’ to dispose of myself; more, that what I refer to so glibly as ‘myself’ is not in fact MY self. The bus ticket in my pocket may be ‘my’ ticket, my rucksack ‘my’ rucksack, but my life is not after all my possession, mine to dispose of; it is a loan, a gift, from a Giver, to Whom I am responsible, answerable…

I remain in my seat. The bus continues its gentle rocking motion a while longer. The driver gives his familiar 1970s Greyhound driver’s recitation, the various admonitions and prohibitions I have heard so many times as I have crossed America, I could give the speech myself (ending with the words ‘and no marijuana’, which always raises a smile) – and the bus pulls out onto the freeway. I look back over my shoulder at the desert hills as they recede, and feel I am leaving more than the desert hills behind; I am still in deep pain, but know I have left a possibility behind me, for good. Months later I will reflect on this moment and realise with a smile that the name of the city where I had put death behind me by not rising was Phoenix.

And so my journey has continued – on, in due time, to a return to England, to a measure of healing, to getting ordained as an Anglican priest, to thirty-four years of Church ministry, to marriage to a very remarkable woman, to fatherhood of two children - and, at some future moment, to my own death: all in God’s time.

How shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual.

The word ‘God’ was probably used very little, if at all, in the MPs debate on assisted suicide - and this debate has really been about assisted suicide, not ‘assisted dying’, given that people will be given drugs to self-administer. Even the Christian MPs who spoke, did not mention God, as they knew what could be said, and what could not, in order for them to be heard at all. The public arguments for, and against, the legalisation of assisted suicide have almost without exception had to be premised on one agreed assumption, apparently the only one now permissible in a post-Christian, liberal humanist, agnostic/atheist society: the assumption that my life is mine. The arguments used for assisted suicide resolve down to: “It is my life: I should be allowed to decide when to end it”. Most of the arguments used against resolve down to: “Yes, of course, granted, agreed, it is your life: but there may be unintended consequences for others in allowing you to end it, others may feel obliged to end their lives”, etc. At no point could anyone say, as I so passionately would claim: “No, it is not your life to dispose of”; there is now, it seems, no public place for the apostle Paul’s blunt statement in his letter to the Church in Corinth: ‘You are not your own.’

Yet this is now one of the most fundamental beliefs of ‘my’ life: and I have found it to be totally liberating and beautiful. I think of those glorious sculptures on the outer walls of Chartres Cathedral, including the representation of the creation of Adam, presented as emerging from the very mind of God. I think of the glory of man and woman made in God’s image as stewards of creation. I think of the extraordinary wonder of the Incarnation, of God embodied in Christ. I think of the sufferings of Christ on the cross; and I think, yes, of course I think, of the sufferings of my fellow men and women and children, and of my own sufferings, and of the call to me to shoulder the burden, both of living, and of dying, in God’s time.

And, alas, I think I also see something of how shrivelled, how wizened in comparison, how shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual – “my life, my rights, my body, my choice” - in the dominant contemporary Western mindset, eating away steadily like a corrosive acid any wider conception of community and the social institutions that enshrine it, and any sense of a deeper accountability to God.

Where will the current assisted suicide decision ultimately lead? What is the destination? It is difficult to predict, but the signs from other countries who have gone down this road are not good.

But what do I know? Do I have answers to all the questions around assisted suicide? I confess I do not. But one thing has become clearer to me: I am on a very different journey from the one my nation is travelling now.