Apr 2, 2026
Still No Room In the Inn.
4-6-26
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. 2 Peter 3:8
My version of this basic truth is in a child-rearing context, that the days drag on, yet the years seem to whiz by. An anomaly. And for God, infinitely wiser and more just than any of His mortals, I wonder how He must be amused (or perplexed) that we seldom apply His perspective. He hears intense debates about whether His universe is 6000 or billions of years old; He must grieve that humankind has always speculated about life on other planets, but is so casual about killing lives on the earth He made for us.
Yet we go on our way. Have we learned bitter lessons? Have we learned from mistakes and horrible sins? Have we learned anything from the precepts of God that He has offered freely so we may be spared of consequences?
My framing of the question about condensed time is inspired by meditating on Holy Week… and from today’s headlines as well. The events – I should say the very fact – of Jesus’s earthly life is as fresh and relevant today as when the Incarnate Lord walked among mankind. And, of course, He lives today in our hearts and through the Holy Spirit. It is further the case that the truths He shared are not relics of other times and other cultures! It is, parenthetically, the reason in King James translations many of the verbs are italicized to read in the present tense: everything about the Savior is the same yesterday, today, and forever. “He changeth not.”
In a “micro” sense, to borrow from contemporary parlance, this week I am struck by the similarities between the few years encompassing the weeks of Jesus’s birth and Jesus’s death. Famously, Mary and Joseph found “no room in the inns” and Jesus was born in a humble stable – a gentle but striking representation of the Divine affinity with humanity; no respecter of persons, the Lord is accessible to all.
What are we confronting two millennia later? A raging bloodbath in the Middle East, including upon the very sand where Jesus walked. The footprints of Abraham, too, father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Mohammad walked on those sands. And so many figures central to the world’s faiths. In the City of Peace. The region, however, has always endured anything but peace, and we know that “wars and rumors of wars” will beset us.
But these very days are very different. News reports are published and denied; press releases obscure facts; policies change when leaders are embarrassed. However the thrust of the horrifying news this week is literally unprecedented. I am a voracious consumer of news from various sources around the world – one has to be in the era of biased media – and the situation seems to be clear that a genocidal Israeli government, openly declaring a crusade for a “Greater Zion” that would stretch from the Mediterranean to eastern Persia (Iran) and from the Nile to Turkey, has attacked, and dragooned its client the US to join, in deadly attacks on neighbors near and far. Collaterally, it has just annexed southern Lebanon, a country with, by the way, a Christian president. (Many American Christians, who blindly support Israel’s government, are not aware that the leaders of Iraq and Syria, murdered under our interventions, were tolerant of Christianity compared to their Zionist-approved successors.)
Numerous countries around the world have accused Israel of war crimes and will arrest its leader Netanyahu if he travels to their lands. The holocaust in Gaza – 70,000 slaughtered in response to the October 7 slaughter of 1200 – is one pretext for the war that has drawn the mighty United States into the vortex that pulls others into the bloodbath as well.
Offenses to the spirit and soul can be as grievous as to the body. For the first time during its occupation of Jerusalem, or that of any power, free access to holy sites has been completely denied… even, or specifically, during Holy Week. Israeli authorities blocked access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to three clergymen – not the throng of pilgrims who traditionally gather to worship this week at the spot believed to be where Jesus was crucified and buried, but merely three priests. They were willing to comply with the edict even to broadcast their modest ceremony to the world. But they could not. “Security concerns,” yet the priests were willing to risk falling shrapnel or whatever the police “protected” them from.
Muslims were prevented with similar restrictions from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque (a familiar ban) but 50 rabbis at a time are permitted to remove slips of paper from the Wailing Wall, an annual event at the old Roman edifice. Authorities have claimed to be reconsidering these bans on Christian worship, but the pilgrims will be prevented from retracing Jesus’s Walk where He carried His cross. These pilgrims are willing to face death, as Jesus did, to exercise their faith, but Israel wants to shield them from stray bombs, it says. (I am waiting for a “stray bomb” to somehow find its way to the Dome of Rock, so Israel may conveniently build its “Third Temple” in its place. (Christians – like the American so-called Christian Zionists mentioned above – have forgotten that Jesus declared Himself to be the Temple of prophecy, the fulfilled Seed of Abraham, not a new building).
In the meantime, returning to the nearby “yesterday” of history, how can we ignore the similarities between the persecution of Christ and His followers in that first Holy Week and current events? How can we not hear the guttural demands of crowds who ignore the many evidences of fulfilled prophecies before their eyes? – any convenient Barabbas will do today. Jesus is still being persecuted by those who have not given up; the main difference today is that multitudes of those who call themselves Christians are complicit! Heads of state, even of largely secular countries, have condemned Israel, but the American Ambassador Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, has only called the closing of the Holy Sites an “unfortunate over-reach.” Neither has President Trump condemned the bans.
Ecco Homo – “Behold the man,” Pontius Pilate said in a futile attempt to change the minds of the Jewish mob as Jesus’s death was demanded. This year, can we put aside bunnies and Easter-egg hunts and imagine, through space and time, whether we too would be spitting at the Prince of Peace, or serving Him. We still have that choice.
+ + +
Recent Comments