4-6-26<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bu<\/em>t 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. <\/em>2 Peter 3:8<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n My framing of the question about condensed time is inspired by meditating on Holy Week\u2026 and from today\u2019s headlines as well. The events \u2013 I should say the very fact \u2013 of Jesus\u2019s 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. \u201cHe changeth not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a \u201cmicro\u201d sense, to borrow from contemporary parlance, this week I am struck by the similarities between the few years encompassing the weeks of Jesus\u2019s birth and Jesus\u2019s death. Famously, Mary and Joseph found \u201cno room in the inns\u201d and Jesus was born in a humble stable \u2013 a gentle but striking representation of the Divine affinity with humanity; no respecter of persons, the Lord is accessible to all. 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 \u2013 one has to be in the era of biased media \u2013 and the situation seems to be clear that a genocidal Israeli government, openly declaring a crusade for a \u201cGreater Zion\u201d 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 70,000 slaughtered in response to the October 7 slaughter of 1200 \u2013 is one pretext for the war that has drawn the mighty United States into the vortex that pulls others into the bloodbath as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2026 even, or specifically, during Holy Week. Israeli authorities blocked access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to three clergymen \u2013 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. \u201cSecurity concerns,\u201d yet the priests were willing to risk falling shrapnel or whatever the police \u201cprotected\u201d them from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cstray bomb\u201d to somehow find its way to the Dome of Rock, so Israel may conveniently build its \u201cThird Temple\u201d in its place. (Christians \u2013 like the American so-called Christian Zionists mentioned above \u2013 have forgotten that Jesus declared Himself to be the Temple of prophecy, the fulfilled Seed of Abraham, not a new building).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the meantime, returning to the nearby \u201cyesterday\u201d 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? \u2013 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 \u201cunfortunate over-reach.\u201d Neither has President Trump condemned the bans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecco Homo<\/em> \u2013 \u201cBehold the man,\u201d Pontius Pilate said in a futile attempt to change the minds of the Jewish mob as Jesus\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s faiths. In the City of Peace. The region, however, has always endured anything but peace, and we know that \u201cwars and rumors of wars\u201d will beset us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n