The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas),
28 January 2024, Austwick, Clapham, Keasden
As Israel's vigil for its hostages in Gaza approaches its fifth month, a sense that time is passing while the world's attention shifts elsewhere, has deepened the anguish of their families. 'There's an aspect of, kind of, hopelessness,' said Rebecca Brindza, a volunteer supporting the hostage families. 'A lot of us feel like the world kind of stopped on October 7th,' she said. 'And I think right now, what we're seeing is that the world in many ways is moving on.’ [1]
Who will bring consolation to Israel? It is a question for today, in the tormented Middle East, the same question which faithful old Simeon had grappled with all his life, and which was becoming ever more urgent to him the closer he came to death. For God had assured Simeon that he would not see death until he had seen the One who would bring comfort to his people.
Who will bring consolation to Israel? It is a question for the ages, for the people of Israel have forever struggled. They lived under slavery in Egypt, and endured decades of exile in Babylon. Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed again and again. A diaspora people endured centuries of exile, isolated and persecuted wherever they settled. The holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, leads to today, where Israel still struggles to be accepted amongst the nations, and Jewish people everywhere still live in anxiety and fear. [2]
Who will bring consolation to Israel? Many have tried: kings and judges, those who rebuilt Jerusalem in biblical times, and their priests who taught the people that to be pure before the Lord they must separate themselves from their neighbours; the military leaders through centuries of wars against Muslims and Christians; the Zionists seeking a return to the Land from the diaspora; the diplomats and cartographers who created the present State of Israel; the Prime Ministers and Chiefs of Staff and settlers who have fought to shape, extend, and defend it to this day.
Meanwhile the righteous and devout of Israel turned to God for consolation, studying prophets like Isaiah who said, ‘Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for’. [3]
These righteous and devout ones envisioned a saviour unlike the Prime Ministers and Chiefs of Staff; they sought after One who, as Isaiah said, will ‘tend his flock like a shepherd: (who will) gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom; and gently lead the mother sheep.’ [4]
Holding the infant Jesus in his arms, sage old Simeon, with the perception drawn from a lifetime of prayer, drew his breath to give notice that this saviour of Israel would not be uniting the nation behind a flag, but was ‘destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel’. Nor would he be bringing secular triumph to the people, but would ‘be a sign that will be opposed’, by the many whose idea of ‘comfort’ he would challenge. [5]
This is a saviour before whom, in the words of Isaiah, ‘all the nations are as nothing; they are regarded by him as worthless and less than nothing’. [6] This is a Messiah who would teach that God’s future was not bound up in the fate of a nation-state, but in the kingdom of love and peace which extended from Jerusalem across the entire world, embracing even the hated Romans and Samaritans, and every other neighbour. Jesus would ‘reveal the inner thoughts of many’, [7] who would not be comforted by his judgements on them, and would react by condemning him to death.
In contrast to the high priests of Israel, elites, who forced the people to conform to their nationalistic ideology, this is One who ‘shared the same flesh and blood’ as the ordinary people, as the writer of Hebrews put it, who ‘became like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God.’ This is One who, rather than testing the people by inflicting suffering on them, was ‘he himself tested by what he suffered, (so that) he can help those who are being tested.’ [8]
Who will bring consolation to Israel? Simeon and Jesus belong to a strand of Judaism which refuses to be seduced by promises of land and power, and refuses to pursue these things through violence against neighbours; but instead finds comfort at times of suffering by taking part in acts of love towards neighbours and enemies.
The Dutch Jew, Etty Hillesum is known for her diaries and letters describing the spiritual awakening she underwent in Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp. She was later murdered at Auschwitz. In one diary entry she writes that her story could have been ‘filled with hatred and bitterness and rebellion. But rebellion born only when distress begins to affect one personally is no real rebellion, and can never bear fruit.’
I know that those who hate have good reason to do so (she wrote). But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place. And I also believe – childishly perhaps, but stubbornly – that the earth will become more habitable again only through the love that the Jew Paul described to the citizens of Corinth in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter. [9]
Etty Hillesum was convinced that ‘the absence of hatred in no way implies the absence of moral indignation’. Her decision ‘to divert her energies into kindness and fellowship, into helping those around her, seems at least as moral a choice as scrambling to survive’. [10] 'We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds’, she said. ‘I hate nobody. I am not embittered. And once the love of mankind has germinated in you, it will grow without measure.’ [11]
When 85-year-old Israeli Yocheved Lifshitz was released from Hamas’s underground cells last October, she was filmed gripping the hand of a hooded fighter, probably one of her prison guards, and saying to him 'shalom', the Hebrew word for peace. This gesture was reported as ‘a startling moment of humanity in a frighteningly divided world.’ Yocheved Lifshitz had spent years campaigning for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and taking sick Palestinians from the Gaza Strip every week to hospitals in Israel to get treatment. When in captivity, she had confronted the Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, in a Gaza tunnel and ‘asked him how he wasn’t ashamed, to do such a thing to people who for years support peace? He didn’t answer. He was quiet,’ she said. She is now challenging Benjamin Netanyahu, campaigning for the release of the remaining hostages. [12]
For reasons deep and wide the fate of Israel is entwined with the fate of us all. We are invested in it, as Christians, as part of humanity. So the questions which Simeon grappled with, are questions for us all: Why should the so-called ‘consolation of Israel’ be left to those who use force of violence? When we know that vengeful acts only bring short-lived and shallow comforts, if any at all? When will the world recover the tradition of The Good Shepherd, the Suffering Servant, the One who shows how comfort comes when we carry out acts of self-giving love towards our neighbours and our enemies?
Notes
[1] James Mackenzie, For Israel's hostage families, despondency sets in as world attention shifts. Reuters, 7 January 2024.
[2] Wikipedia: History of Israel.
[3] Isaiah 40.1-2.
[4] Isaiah 40.11.
[5] Luke 2.34-35.
[6] Isaiah 40.17.
[7] Luke 2.34-35.
[8] Hebrews 2.14-18.
[9] Etty Hillesum, Letters from Westerbork, p.35–36 (diary entry for Saturday, December 26, 1942). Extracted in Enemy Lovers: Five historical figures respond to real enemies. Plough Quarterly 37, 15 November 2023.
[10] Emma Garnum, Feminize Your Canon: Etty Hillesum. Paris Review, 4 April 2019.
[11] Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork.
[12] Freed Israeli grandmother is a peace activist who helped sick Gazans, grandson says. Reuters, 24 October 2023; The Guardian view on the power of forgiveness: a freed hostage’s gesture should not be forgotten. Guardian Editorial, 24 October 2023; Amy Spiro, Freed hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, says she met Sinwar in Gaza, asked him why he wasn’t ashamed of himself. Times of Israel, 29 November 2023.
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