Article (shortened version of sermon)
Reflections
The Cradle of our Faith
What are we as Christians to make of Israel? What are we to make of Palestine or the Gaza Strip? These are questions that trouble many Christians. Our response to those questions will no doubt be deeply influenced by the horrific events of the last two years or so and the continuing turmoil. However, there are also longer-term issues that cannot be ignored. Before we come to that, here are four brief glimpses into this situation:
First, one of the books that has shaped my thinking about Israel and Palestine is the book Blood Brothers written by Elias Chacour. Chacour, who is 86 now, is a Christian, who grew up in a village in Israel, when it was Palestine. His village was not only Christian but due to its understanding of the Christian faith it was also committed to pacifism. Consequently, those villagers were no threat to anyone. But when the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948 that made no difference. Because the village occupants were not Jews the village was taken over and the people expelled from their homes. In spite of this, Elias, who became a Christian minister, has continued to work for peace and reconciliation. Years later he was awarded the World Methodist Peace prize.
Secondly, Jimmy Carter, the past President of the USA, who turned 100 on October 1st 2024, and has since died, was a man strongly committed to peace and reconciliation. Carter was a deeply committed Christian. During his time as the President, he worked at bringing a peaceful solution to the problems of the Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine. In his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid he tells of his despair at the hard line so often taken by Israel’s political leaders, something that is happening again right now. Carter said, “the bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace … by accepting its legal borders.” Addressing the other side Carter said: “All Arab neighbours must pledge to honour Israel’s right to live in peace”. Sadly, since his Presidency, the situation has deteriorated further.
Thirdly, some fundamentalist Christians, in particular Christian Zionists, with an eye on the book of Revelation, far from despairing about the current situation see it as a sign of the end times. Along with their often uncritical support for Israel they read the situation as leading up to what in their understanding is the prophesied battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ at the end of the age. They do not support a two-state solution. Instead, they support the expansion of Jewish settlements, including the takeover of all land that has a connection with historic Israel. They oppose the Roadmap for Peace.
Finally, the Palestinians, many being descendants of those evicted from their homes and villages in 1948, see their hope of a two-state solution, being whittled away as Israel has expanded into the Westbank. At the same time, the Gaza strip, in the words of some has become “the world’s largest open-air prison.” Israel controls air and sea access into Gaza.
The media reported that 1,139 people were killed by the initial Hamas raid into Israel and 251 people were taken hostage, and more Israeli’s have died since. That is appalling and the actions of Hamas were absolutely deplorable. However, something like 70,000 people, including thousands of women and children, have died in Gaza as consequence of the retaliatory airstrikes by Israel. That is not even the rough justice of the Hebrew scriptures. Not an “eye for and eye”, it’s a thousand eyes for an eye. It’s a horror beyond description.
As Christians, we cannot ignore this. This is happening in the very land that is the cradle of our faith and amongst the very people who trace their roots back to Abraham whether they are Jewish, Islamic or Christian. It calls for us to keep praying for a solution. It challenges the US, the United Nations, and all with power and influence to do everything possible to broker peace and to provide the necessary humanitarian aid.
But now let us jump back 20 centuries. Things were not great then either. Israel was occupied territory. The Romans were in charge. A Roman governor had oversight. Taxes were being paid to Rome. The emperor’s face, as Jesus himself reminds us, was on their coins. Roman garrisons were established in the major cities and Roman legions patrolled their streets.
This was New Testament Israel, the land that is the cradle of our faith. Its people were Jewish. It was Jewish blood that flowed through Jesus’ veins. It was Jewish people, Mary and Joseph, who parented and nurtured the infant Jesus. They were the ones who presented him at the temple in Jerusalem and later took him there as a 12-year-old. It was in Jewish synagogues that Jesus learnt his scriptures. One of the great insights that has come out of Biblical research in the last four decades is the reminder that Jesus was first and foremost a Jew. Jesus was not a white Anglo Saxon, an Irish or Scottish Celt, a Tongan, Samoan or Maori. He was a Jew. He grew up in Israel the cradle of our faith.
And that cradle influenced Jesus in other ways too. The heroes that early influenced Jesus’ life were not Julius Ceasar, Plato, or Aristotle. Instead, they were Abraham and Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ruth and Esther, David, and Solomon. These saints of old, provided the wisdom that Jesus drew on. We know this because the gospels tell us that Jesus mentioned some of them. In Matthew ch:6 for example Jesus tells us to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” And in John 3: 14 Jesus is recorded saying “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…” Moses and Solomon. Then in Matthew 12: 4 Jesus says to his disciples “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence”. Moses, Solomon, and David. These were the voices to which Jesus listened. They too are part of the cradle of our faith.
But there is more. Every disciple Jesus chose was a Jew. So too were the first apostles who went out and proclaimed the good news of Jesus to the wider world. Of course, these disciples and apostles were now Christian and that meant they had to rethink aspects of their heritage. Paul does this in some of his letters. In the book of Acts, the apostles gathered in Jerusalem to debate some of these issues, such as whether the Jewish rite of circumcision needed to apply to Gentiles who became Christian. Our faith is cradled in their debates, their deliberations, their interpretations. The New Testament as we have it is their work, their record, of the Christ event and what it can mean for us and for the world.
And there is yet more. One of the things that theologians and NT scholars have debated over the years is what is called typology. This is the way in which elements of the Jewish faith journey fore-shadow the gospel story. So, for instance, Jesus, spending forty days in the wilderness mirrors the forty years that the children of Israel spent in their wilderness after their escape from Egypt. Just as they were tempted during those forty years so too Jesus is tempted in his forty days. There are other similar examples as well. So, the gospel writers, all of them Jews, drew on their understanding of the Hebrew faith journey as they recounted the story of Jesus. They saw the similarities and made the connections because that was their history, their faith, their world.
The land of Israel is the cradle of our faith. The saints of Israel were the men and women who fed the mind of a youthful Jesus. The first disciples and early apostles were all Jewish. They had to work through what that meant for their new-found faith in Jesus Christ their Lord.
But now back to the beginning, back to the 21c, and the horrific conflict now taking place in Gaza, and beyond. While it is right for us to own our huge debt as Christians to our Jewish heritage, we need to be very clear that acknowledging our debt to our Jewish brother and sisters is not the same as giving unqualified support to the modern secular state of Israel. Jesus, had issues with both the religious and secular authorities of his day, serious issues. We follow in the best of footsteps when we too question the leadership of the secular state of Israel today.
Jesus calls for a very different style of leadership. The law that Jesus gave us, is not the law of an eye for and eye a tooth for a tooth, not the law of rough justice. Instead, that law, the law Jesus gave us says: “blessed are the peacemakers; blessed are the merciful; blessed are the meek … there is a message there both for Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, and indeed for Christians as well.
Jesus once shed tears over Jerusalem – today I believe he sheds those same tears for Israel, Lebanon, and the people of Gaza.
Norman E Brookes - August 2025