For The Christians Still In Gaza
We can still remember we have Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ trapped in rubble ruined churches; pray with them in solidarity, forgiving those who sin against us, in faith, hope and love.
If you suffer because you do good, because you are in the right, because you are loving; if it is because you are for a good cause that you live despised, persecuted, ridiculed, in poverty, then you will find that you do not doubt Christ's resurrection.
Why? Because you need it.
Kierkegaard, Provocations, p. 256
Six months later, and still the salty and spirited Christians in Gaza suffer, only a few hundred of them still alive, barely. We must remember them, we must remember their suffering, we must remember them in solidarity, for through the YMCA we are connected with them, and we are held together by the prayer of Jesus in John 17.
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, John 17.20-23 NIV
The World YMCA Alliance logo includes an image of an open Bible and John 17:21 emblazoned on it, a significant statement about the role of the Y in connecting Christians, especially those enduring the worst of humanity. The YMCA facility in Gaza has been destroyed, and the leaders seeking to both care for those around them, their families, and trying to survive the war. Founded in 1952, the Gaza YMCA built bridges of friendship, peacemaking, and reconciliation through their programs.
In the spirit of the YMCA and the Kingdom of God in Gaza and the 900 people of Christ that lived there, one of the ways we can honor them, remember them, stand in faith and love with them is through our faithfulness to forgiving those who sin against us. Kierkegaard remarks that when Christians suffer, it is then that we experience the most clarity about the reality of the resurrection of the crucified Christ Jesus. He also observes how potent our forgiving is - which is a central reality of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
Here is more provocations from Kierkegaard on the salty and spirited practice of forgiveness:
Christianity's view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness which you give, you receive, not contrariwise, that you give the forgiveness for which you receive.
It is as if Christianity would say: pray to God humbly and believing in your forgiveness for he really is compassionate in such a way as no human being is; but if you will test how it is with respect to the forgiveness, then observe yourself. If honestly before God you wholeheartedly forgive your enemy (but remember that if you do, God sees it), then you dare hope also for your forgiveness, for it is one and the same.
God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive your trespasses. It is only an illusion to imagine that one himself has forgiveness, although one is slack in forgiving others.
It is also conceit to believe in one's own forgiveness when one will not forgive, for how in truth should one believe in forgiveness if his own life is a refutation of the existence of forgiveness!
For, Christianly understood, to love human beings is to love God and to love God is to love human beings; what you do unto men you do unto God, and therefore what you do unto men God does unto you.
If you are embittered towards men who do you wrong, you are really embittered towards God, for ultimately it is still God who permits wrong to be done to you. If, however, you gratefully take the wrongs from God's hand "as a good and perfect gift," you do not become embittered towards men either.
If you will not forgive, you essentially want something else, you want to make God hard-hearted, that he should not forgive, either: how, then should this hard-hearted God forgive you? If you cannot beat the offences of men against you, how should God be able to bear your sins against him?
If you have never been solitary, you have also never discovered that God exists. But if you have been truly solitary, then you also learned that everything you say to and do to other human beings God simply repeats; he repeats it with the intensification of infinity. The word of blessing or judgment which you express concerning someone else, God repeats; he says the same word about you, and this same word is blessing or judgment over you.
Such a person will certainly avoid speaking to God about the wrongs of others towards him, about the speck in his brother's eye, for such a person will rather speak to God only about grace, lest this fateful word of justice lose everything for him through what he himself has called forth, the rigorous like-for-like.
Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p 348-353
For the Palestinian Christians still in Gaza and in the West Bank, and throughout all the Holy Land, may they experience justice, peace and the solidarity of the Suffering Servant as well as the power of our prayers as we honor them through our practice of forgiveness towards those who sin against us here where we live.