Christmas, Gaza and the politicising of Christianity

This Christmas a lot of our thoughts are about the situation in Israel and the war between Hamas and Israel. Palestinian civilians are caught in the middle of this and it is horrendous to see the death and destruction of people whom God loves and who are created in His image. Most of us wish to see an end to this carnage and peace in the Middle East centred around Jerusalem which means city of peace.

'Christ in the Rubble'
an icon by Kelly Latimore

There are a number of images circulating this Christmas of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Two are notable: The first is a crib in the Lutheran church in Bethlehem where the baby Jesus is shown in a Palestinian kafeeyah amongst rubble, and the second an icon showing Jesus, Mary and Joseph in a bombed-out area that looks like Gaza.

Whereas, as followers of Jesus, we wish to care for the oppressed, these images illustrate a lot of falsehoods and wild inaccuracies that are making the situation more complex than it already is. One example of this was the sermon at St Helena’s Church in Larnaka on Christmas Day where it was claimed ‘Jesus was born a Palestinian Jew into an occupied oppressed land.’

Whereas he was indeed born into a land that became occupied and oppressed by the Romans during his lifetime, he was not a Palestinian but Jewish, which was both a religious and ethnic description. It is very important theologically to see Jesus as a Jew not a Palestinian. The Palestinians as a people group primarily come from the other side of the family divide, not from Isaac but from Ishmael, ‘a wild man’ living ‘in open hostility against all his relatives’ which fairly accurately describes the actions of the Hamas terrorists! This is not to say all Palestinians are wild terrorists, far from it, but they are not descendants of Isaac and thus not covenant inheritors of the land.

But let’s put this all in context: At the time of Jesus birth Judea was a Jewish kingdom under King Herod, a Jewish kingdom. The Kingdom of Judea had been a Roman ally since the second century BC; albeit since 63 BC and the war of succession in the Hasmonean court effectively a client of Rome. It only formally became a Roman Province in 6 AD, some years after Jesus was born, and hence was a Roman province by the time Jesus was put to death.

More than 30 years after Jesus' death, in AD 66, someone emptied a pot of urine outside a synagogue, thus defiling a holy place. This led to riots and the Roman governor demanded the Jewish authorities hand over the culprits, which they refused to do. Florus, the Roman governor, then ordered his troops to massacre everyone in the market. This turned the violence into full-scale revolt, described by Jewish historian Josephus as ‘From one end of Galilee to the other there was an orgy of fire and bloodshed.’ In 69 AD the temple was destroyed and many Jews escaped from the Province of Judea which later became known as the Province of Syria and Palaestina. Between 6 AD and 1948 AD there was no nation-state of Palestine though the name was used by the occupying powers over more than 1900 years.

That bit of history is important for several reasons. We see that bloodshed and an orgy of killing is something that has happened against the Jewish people right down through the centuries, the holocaust was not, by a long way, the first genocide against the people God had identified as having a special relationship with Him.

The second is that it demonstrates that to describe Jesus as a Palestinian Jew is both inaccurate and misleading. It carries political and theological implications that should definitely not be promulgated. Hence too, the crib in Bethlehem with Jesus in a Palestinian kafeeyah also creates an inaccurate picture. The fact that crib is in a Lutheran church, a church which during the Second World War embraced antisemitism, further complicates the issue.

The Christmas Day Sermon again: ‘Sometimes preachers are criticized for being political, but how can the act of God in coming into the world in this way not be political? He comes to bring peace and love, justice and mercy—these are all political words… Being a Christian means… accepting the political significance of that (Jesus) birth…’

Jesus himself, when accused of being political, responded to the Roman governor by saying ‘My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world.’ Thus he separated political and spiritual kingdoms. In Arabic and Aramaic it’s easier to see this as there are two words memlekah (physical/political kingdom) and malakoot (spiritual kingdom) so in the Lord’s prayer it uses malakoot for ‘May your (spiritual) Kingdom come soon’.

Alongside this, justice should be a function of the judiciary rather than politics. One of the disputes between the European Union and Hungary is that there is a cross-over between the political government and the judiciary. Although it was as far back as Aristotle that the problem of mixing political governance and the judiciary was recognised, it was Calvin in the 1500s (and later John Locke and Montesquieu) who suggested that the separation of political and judiciary was important for the functioning of a democracy. Hence, bringing 'justice' into the realm of politics is both counter-the-way of Christ and counter-democracy. That concept may sound counter-intuitive but we will see why later.

Now it’s clear within Israeli Jewish thinking – which doesn’t accept Christ’s separation of the political and spiritual – that the formation of the nation-state of Israel is both political and spiritual. This merging is also common in Islamic thinking. 

However, this is further complicated by the fact that Hamas bases their thinking on a debunked conspiracy theory called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a notorious 1903 document that falsely purports to reveal a global conspiracy by Jewish leaders, known as the ‘Elders of Zion,’ to seize control of the world. (https://bxi.international/2023/10/30/hamas-and-israel/)

Because of this, Hamas sees a battle between ‘good’ (Islam) and ‘evil’ (Jewish take-over of the world) which requires the elimination of all Jews everywhere:

‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'’ They see it as the duty of all Muslims to take part in the elimination of Jews worldwide. ‘The day the enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jews' usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.’ (Quotes from The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, 18 August 1988 which is the Hamas governing document.)

Hamas is therefore implicitly antisemitic and the claim ‘Palestine shall be free from river to the sea’ is about the elimination of Jews as much as freedom for a nation-state that never existed.

Within all of this, of course, are the horrors we see of what Israel is doing to the civilian population in Gaza. On the website of the Anglican Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf they quote the pastor of the Lutheran church which created the Palestinian crib as saying ‘In Gaza today, God is under the rubble. If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble. We see his image in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble.’ 

This of course wouldn’t be true because Jesus was born a Jew, not a Palestinian and the rubble is in Gaza, not Israel. God didn’t choose to make a political statement of his son being born in an occupied oppressed land but being born within a specific family within a specific tribe within the Jewish people group. To get that confused is not only theologically incorrect but changes the Christian faith into a political movement rather than a relationship with the incarnate God.

However, separating political and spiritual can sometimes be seen to favour the oppressor and to accept the horrors to the civilian population in Gaza. In fact, this is far from the truth and separating justice from the realm of the political and returning it to the realm of the spiritual elevates the problem. The death and injuries to the people in Gaza are not merely a political issue to be debated at the UN Security Council but an existential issue against people created in the image of God. It is therefore against God as much as against man.

Of course, this is complicated by Hamas and the conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But that brings in another part of the nature of Christ, that of truth: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’ As followers of Christ, we are truth-bearers exposing the lies of Hamas and the injustices of the Israeli government against the civilian population of Gaza who have been led astray by the lies of Hamas. Palestinians are not covenant inheritors of the land, and thus, as part of that same covenant with the people of Israel, require protection not death and destruction from the Jewish nation!

This politicising of Christianity by some factions of the church ends up leading us down a path that is away from the covenant pledges and demands that would end up protecting the very people they claim to support. The problem is intensely spiritual rather than just political. But the error is to see the spiritual world as merely passive and not active. Following Christ is not being part of a political movement but listening to the Holy Spirit on a day-by-day basis and being involved with what God is doing in the world.

Jesus explained, 'I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.' (John 5:19)