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Easter

Middle East

Resurrection

War & peace

29 March 2024

7 min read

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.

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Work

10 September 2025

4 min read

Can KPIs really measure what matters?

Distilling down worth risks losing something sacred

Rick Hansen

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

Which box this year?

Yogi Atmo on Unsplash

I remember recently when I was reduced to a data point. I became an inconvenient name on a spreadsheet.

"Your services are no longer needed. We have to let you go," he stated with feigned empathy. Just like that, years of my work and contributions - hours, days, weeks, months - ceased to matter. I didn't matter. "HR will contact you shortly to explain the final details. Again, I am truly sorry."

The Zoom meeting ended, the camera went blank. I sat in my home office, staring at the blank screen of the company-issued laptop. The only sounds were the disheveled thoughts scrambling in my head and the gentle hum of the fan circulating cool air from the ceiling above. All went quiet. Just like that I was reduced to a KPI - a key performance indicator.

Having spent years in the business world, I'm well-acquainted with its dynamics, including hiring and firing. I recognize ambition and its relentless pursuit of progress. Still, it felt like a personal blow, like a scene on Instagram or YouTube you replay endlessly on loop, trying to comprehend, trying to make sense of it all.

As your value is quantified and found wanting, a sacred inner part of you perishes. In that moment, it’s hard to feel the wonder and mystery of your creation. You don’t feel what for centuries has been called the imago Dei - that we humans are made in God’s image. Instead, you think about how you were just told “we don’t need you.” You think about paying your bills? How will this impact your career? Where will you find your next job?

As a leader, I understand metrics are crucial for business. However, this pervasive culture of metrics has warped our perception of worth. Instead of marveling at the wonder of being made in the image of God, we have become trained to value only what can be counted. We’ve become both deaf and blind to the unquantifiable beauty of human existence.

We’ve prioritized metrics over people. We’ve created a world where efficiency presides over meaning and productivity overshadows purpose. Ironically, this has crippled entire organizations, not optimized them. Critical components like morale, engagement, and productivity are at an all time low. Just check the numbers. (See what I did there)

We have built a ruthless culture defined by a dehumanizing machinery of metrics. People have become problems to be optimized rather than mysteries to be revered.

If we let our job define us and if as leaders we let it define our mystery and those we lead, we succumb to a cancerous, spiritual violence. To treat a person as a set of outputs is to willinging deny our capacity to reflect a divine truth.

Does it have to be this way?

William Blake's poem, "The Divine Image," eloquently conveys a core theological principle: humanity mirrors the divine, embodying God's very image. We are an irreducible, immeasurable value.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love

Is God, our father dear

And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love

Is Man, his child and his care.

Are we imago Dei? Are we the very image of God the first chapter in Genesis speaks of?

Is this true? Are we always irreducible, immeasurable? Or is this just a conversation to have in a broader discussion when contemplating humanity’s place in the cosmos?

What about the workplace? What about when human worth is distilled into key performance indicators that then become the only thing measured, the only things that defines a person’s worth? What happens when our irreducible human value, this imago Dei is distilled to mere data points on business dashboards? To KPIs.

On one hand, nothing happens; we are still a complex mystery of God’s creation. We are still immeasurable, irreducible. We are imago Dei. On the other hand, something does happen to the person. Something sacred is expunged. Our infinite complexity like emotions, dreams, quirks, ideas, feelings, and virtues are reduced and transcribed into metrics and evaluated against random data sets. Perhaps this is where the shallow quip originates? “It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

I mean I get it. In the business world, we are a metrics driven culture, quantifiable data points are seemingly the only identifier of worth. It drives the business, right?

We read in our company handbooks that, “our people make the difference.” In reality, we all know that data is the true currency. It is here, I argue, that the soul gets buried beneath spreadsheets and the image of the divine is lost within a myriad of data sets.

We must raise a quiet but profound rebellion.

Our spirit of God’s very image that thrives in a mutual wonder and shared humanity cannot be replaced by a zero-sum race for higher scores.

Ask someone at work “How are you doing?”, actually listen to them and engage, and only then ask, “How are you doing with your targets?” Metrics are important, but the person behind them is essential.

When we become our job or when we think those we work with are defined only by how well they do their job, we are all vulnerable to this sacred loss. Our goal is not our job. Our purpose is not how and if we hit our metrics. Instead, our sole aim should be to seek how to better understand this mystery of this life - this imago Dei - that we have been given and how to share it with others.

This reminds me of the saying, "Not everything worthwhile can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is worthwhile."

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