A Christmas Mediatation
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Christmas Meditation
“What child is this who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping, whom angels greet with anthems sweet, while shepherds watch are keeping.”
Lyrics by William Chatterton Dix 1865 set to the traditional melody Greensleeves.
What child indeed? As we continue into the second year of a genocide that our government is fully participating in I can only think of the children of Gaza. The fact that Gaza has become the largest collection of child amputees in the world and that tens of thousands of children are dead has marred the joy I usually feel at this time of year for the second year running with no end in sight.
I am no theologian. I’ve never been to seminary but I have had some remarkable teachers that taught me Jesus is a force for liberation. He was a threat to the powers that ruled his world and that is why he ultimately had to die. We as people of faith should also challenge the powers of hate, oppression and violence that we are so surrounded by in every corner of the world. We should be advocates for the oppressed as Jesus told us in Matthew 25: 40, “Whatever you do for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” We should not let the arbitrary borders drawn on a map stop us from using the power of our faith.
As I sit in the predawn of my house waiting for my family to awaken for gift exchange I can’t help but think of the parallels between the story of Nativity that we celebrate on December 25th and what is happening now in Palestine. The biblical story tells us that Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem, which is located in the Palestinian territory known as the West Bank the scene of much less violence but violence none the less, as Israeli Settlers steal more and more Palestinian land.
Joseph took his pregnant wife Mary to Bethlehem his ancestral home to fulfill the census requirements of the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. Like the current residents of Palestine, they were forced to act at the whim of an uncaring bureaucracy. “and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because they was no guest room available for him.” Luke 2:7
The baby was placed in a manger, usually a crib used to hold feed for livestock. The man who would command millions of followers was born in a barn. The symbolism that Jesus will nourish our souls as the manger he lie in nourished the farm animals and as his parents used the hay to give Jesus a place to sleep makes a sad parallel to the parents of Gaza who are forced to use hay to fend off the starvation caused by Israel’s refusal to let aid in.
It is important to note that the first strangers to visit the infant Jesus were shepherds from the fields surrounding Bethlehem. In 1947-8 when Jewish militias were forcing Palestinians out of their homes with violence and intimidation Palestine was largely still pastoral with small-scale farm. Shepherds lived in the hills near Bethlehem just as they did 2,000 years ago when we think Jesus was born. This is a symbolic representation of Jesus’s later words in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, “The last will be first and the first will be last.” Matthew 20:16. When we ignore what’s going on in Palestine, we are also ignoring Jesus’s commandment to “Love Your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:39.
Herod the Great heard the prophecy that a great king would come out of Bethlehem. He was afraid that this great king would usurp his power. He tried to get the three Magi to investigate for him but instead they went home by another route after visiting the infant Jesus so they didn’t have to face Herod again. In a fit of anger he had every boy under the age of two in Bethlehem and its vicinity killed. Fear is also the touchstone of the genocide being perpetrated in Israel, fear that the next generation of Palestinians will be the ones to win back the land stolen from them in 1948 and all the years since. To alleviate this fear, Israel has embarked on a mass genocide on a scale not seen since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. They used the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7th, 2023, where at least half of the victims were soldiers and civilians killed by the IDF’s invocation of the Hannibal Directive. We will never know the true number because Israel destroyed the evidence before an independent investigation could take place.
Mary and Joseph fled the killing of the innocents and escaped into Egypt where they stayed until the death of Herod several years later. They returned to Palestine and lived in Nazareth until the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. Israel has been trying to force the people of Gaza to leave the territory so they can take over the land and never allow the people of Gaza to return. Of the original 750,000 Palestinians forced into exile in the Nakba tens of thousands were never allowed to return to their homes and villages. This “right to return,” has been a sticking point in many of the negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. During the current genocide Egypt has refused to allow Palestinian refugees to cross the border into Egypt proper.
The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Palestine is revered by many Christian faiths as the birthplace of Jesus, is the oldest site continually used as a place of worship in the Christian world. In 2002 the IDF placed it under siege looking for suspected freedom fighters and after a 39 day standoff, the suspected fighters were allowed to surrender and go into exile again, never to return.
Rome during the time of Jesus was a colonial settler project that had taken over most of the mediterranean basin and some further extant territories such as the British Isles. Local rulers such as Herod were given a degree of autonomy as long as they pledged fealty to Rome and paid their taxes. When any act of rebellion was committed, Rome acted swiftly and harshly. The height of the Roman Empire came several hundred years after Jesus’s death. Today in a saddening role reversal, the Zionists have become the colonizers and their treatment of the local indigenous people is no less harsh than the Romans they lived under 2,000 years ago. Some of the descendants of the survivors of the German genocide that killed 10 million people are now trying to rid Palestine of the Palestinians. They are literally trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible regardless of the civilian status and trying to make Gaza uninhabitable before they are forced to stop.
The story of the Baby Jesus had a happy and hopeful ending. He was allowed to grow into adulthood before he ran afoul of the authorities again. Over 200,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israel, a large majority of them being children, in a bizarre reenactment of the slaughter of the innocents. They weren’t allowed to grow into adulthood. The ones that miraculously survive the bombing which has been magnitudes greater than the bombing of Dresden in WWII, will have physical and emotional scars that will last their lifetimes. As is often said, Jesus was a brown skinned Palestinian Jew who probably looked more like the current inhabitants of Gaza than the fair skinned European that many artists have portrayed him as.
As I sit at my computer in the early morning hours of another Christmas Day I realize that what is going on in the birthplace of Jesus has changed me. It took away any last vestige of hope that I had that our country was a force for good in the world. It made me doubt the common decency of so many Americans who supported the candidate of genocide or the other candidate who vowed to make the genocide worse and it made me grieve for the loss of the faith that I used to have in those things.
The story of the Nativity should be one of hope and love. Let us take the image of the helpless infant, born in a stable, laid in a manger and clutch him to our hearts. Let us remember that he was a symbol for the downtrodden and let us challenge the princes and principalities that oppress the least of our brothers and sisters anywhere in the world but especially here at home where our own government has become such a force for evil.
“Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace.” Luke 2:14
Dedicated to Pastor Katie Aikens, Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart and Reverend Nicholas O’Rourke a few of the wonderful teachers who taught me what it means to be a real follower of Christ.