Through Suffering

Lent 5, Week of March 22
Hebrews 5.5-10

“he learned obedience through what he suffered…”

Most of us who live in North America have all that we need—food, clothing, shelter and the freedom to get an education and make what we want of our lives. It’s the American dream, after all. When we have much we think that we can do it all for ourselves and that, in fact, we have already done it all ourselves—that our wealth, success and power is simply what we are entitled to because of our extraordinary cleverness, shrewdness or talent. We deserve what we have.

When we suffer we learn that we cannot. We cannot do it all on our own; we need strength and support from our friends and family and sometimes from our government. Those of us in a faith community also count on our faith in God to get us through the dark times. These are the lessons Jesus learned in his suffering, the lessons the writer of Hebrews is talking about.

For most Palestinians these lessons are the daily reality—of life lived behind the security wall, life lived at the whim of a soldier pointing a machine gun at the checkpoint, life lived waiting for the sound of heavy boots on the street and a knock on the door. In suffering there is no control—we are not in charge; that is part of the suffering, the lesson Jesus learned on the cross.

This has been the life of the people of Gaza, not just in December and January as they were attacked by IDF soldiers in Operation Cast Lead, but long before the columns of tanks and the helicopters fired on Gaza City. That’s what most Americans do not know about Gaza—that the suffering started long before the war. Gideon Levy wrote about their suffering in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week, as news came out about the atrocities committed in Gaza, civilians targeted by soldiers with no regard for Palestinian life.

Levy writes what we in America, resting comfortably in our homes, rarely hear about—
“The soldiers' transgressions are an inevitable result of the orders given during this brutal operation, and they are the natural continuation of the last nine years, when soldiers killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians, at least half of them innocent civilians, nearly 1,000 of them children and teenagers.

Everything the soldiers described from Gaza, everything, occurred during these blood-soaked years as if they were routine events. It was the context, not the principle, that was different. An army whose armored corps has yet to encounter an enemy tank and whose pilots have yet to face an enemy combat jet in 36 years has been trained to think that the only function of a tank is to crush civilian cars and that a pilot's job is to bomb residential neighborhoods.

To do this without any unnecessary moral qualms we have trained our soldiers to think that the lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever. It is part of a process of dehumanization that has endured for dozens of years, the fruits of the occupation.

‘That's what is so nice, as it were, about Gaza: You see a person on a road ... and you can just shoot him.’ This ‘nice’ thing has been around for 40 years. Another soldier talked about a thirst for blood. This thirst has been with us for years.

Ask the family of Yasser Tamaizi, a 35-year-old laborer from Idna who was killed by soldiers while bound, and Mahdi Abu Ayash, a 16-year-old boy from Beit Umar who was found in a vegetative state, another victim of recent days, far from the war in Gaza.”

This is probably too much suffering to contemplate, but if you want to read the article: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072821.html

O God, you know suffering and you hear the cries of those who suffer. As we prepare for the holiest week of the year, keep us mindful of those who suffer as you did on the cross, that we may find ways to bring healing and hope to our world. Amen.