Sermon Archive

Lacking

Lacking One Thing

(Rutgers, October 15, 2000; 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B)

James 3:13–18 (truncated from 25OrdB; NT, p. 248);
Mark 10:17–22 (truncated; NT, p. 47)

“Shalom.” “Salaam.” The words for “peace” do exist in the vocabularies of Israelis and Palestinians, but, as we have seen quite vividly, the reality of peace does not. These past two weeks, a great tragedy has been unfolding in the land that Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike call holy.

Three months ago, Prime Minister Barak, Chairman Arafat, and President Clinton gathered at Camp David to negotiate peace. The Sunday before that Camp David meeting began, I preached a sermon entitled “For the Peace of Jerusalem.” In it, I stated my belief that a just resolution of the Israelis’ and Palestinians’ competing claims to the city of Jerusalem would pose the major stumbling block to their attaining of peace.

Near the end of that sermon, I expressed a thought which— I’m sad to say—has proven prophetic. I said: “ … these next few weeks are an absolutely critical period for the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. If peace does not come now, I foresee much violence ahead.”

It is now all-too-tragically clear that the two sides’ failure to reach an agreement on Jerusalem did set the stage for the violence that has this week brought the “peace process” to the brink of extinction.

For make no mistake about it, it will now take a great miracle, some form of divine intervention, for the seven-year-long “peace process” between the Israelis and the Palestinians to be resuscitated after the death-dealing blows it received last Thursday, when a Palestinian mob lynched two Israeli reserve soldiers, the Israeli army bombed Palestinian police posts and communications centers in Ramallah and Gaza, and terrorists attacked the U.S.S. Cole at the port of Aden. The peace that just three weeks ago seemed so tantalizingly near now seems so agonizingly far away and unattainable. For in the final analysis, as we can now see, each side has been lacking one thing.

Today’s Gospel Lesson tells the story of a wonderful man whom Jesus instantly loved when he met and talked with him. This man was ever-so-near to attaining his ultimate goal, which was to inherit eternal life. Jesus perceived that for attaining this goal the man was lacking just one thing. All that was impeding him was his attachment to wealth. Would he be willing to clinch attaining his ultimate goal by surrendering his purse? Alas, the man was not willing to do this one last thing, and his story, once filled with so much promise, turned tragic. So near to his goal, and yet so far.

Today’s Israelis and Palestinians strike me as being very much like that man in our Gospel Lesson. Wonderful peoples, whom to know is to love, as I have discovered firsthand during my many visits to the Middle East, visits totaling some two years of my life. And these wonderful peoples have come so close to attaining their ultimate goal—national co-existence in peace. Yet, in the end, each has proven to be lacking one thing, and their mutual inability to remedy that lack has turned this story of theirs, once filled with so much promise, into potential tragedy—tragedy for them, and tragedy for the whole world.

The tendency in the American media and among U.S. politicians has been to put almost all of the blame for the breakdown of the “peace process” on the Palestinians and Yasir Arafat. Well, they do deserve their share of the blame, but not all of it. For as I said, each side has been lacking one thing—the thing our First Lesson from the Letter of James calls “gentleness born of wisdom,” of “wisdom from above,” of wisdom that is “peaceable, … willing to yield, full of mercy …, and without a trace of … hypocrisy.” Yes, the one thing each side has been lacking is gentleness born of the wisdom of God—the gentleness of justice and non-violence that characterized Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, their wisdom that was so “peaceable, … full of mercy …, and without a trace of … hypocrisy.”

Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel has been in almost all respects a wonderful seeker of peace. Yet even he has been lacking this one thing—the wisdom to be gentle and just, a wisdom that, to exist, must be rooted in an awareness and acknowledgement of the injustices Israel has regularly inflicted, for more than three decades, on Palestinians.

I can imagine Jesus meeting Ehud Barak, instantly feeling love for him, and then saying to him, “You are lacking but one thing. Give up your claim to sovereignty over East Jerusalem and to the numerous Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.”
For the most part, the American media and U.S. politicians have failed, along with Israelis, to acknowledge and take into account the everyday oppression experienced by ordinary Palestinians, the oppression that has given rise to the anger that’s now boiling up within them into a violent rage.

[For much of the data presented in the fourteen paragraphs that follow, see George Martin, “One City, Two Peoples, Double Standards,” in the September-October 2000 edition of Catholic Near East, pp. 6–11 and the cover photograph.)

Since the State of Israel was created in 1948, it has always controlled the Western part of the city of Jerusalem. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel took control of Palestinian East Jerusalem as well. And since that time, Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents have lived in a kind of never-never land.

First, they have watched Israel redefine the city limits of Jerusalem by annexing to it parts of many of the Palestinian villages that stretch from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north.

Since 1967, by means of this process, Jerusalem’s boundaries have been expanded at least ten-fold, and Israel has gone on to assert that all this additional Palestinian land they’ve acquired has now become part of “Israel’s eternal and undivided capital,” lost forever to Palestinian autonomy.

Israel has slickly gerrymandered the boundaries of these formerly independent Palestinian villages so as to include in the newly defined “Jerusalem” as much of these villages’ land as possible but as few of their Palestinian citizens as possible, so as to keep the population of “Jerusalem” overwhelmingly Jewish. In some cases Palestinian towns have been divided in half, the section with fields being annexed to Israel as part of the city of “Jerusalem,” and the section with the people who own the fields being left isolated from their land as part of the occupied territories of the West Bank.

Take the case of Hassan Kalifa. Hassan owned land in the village of Walajeh, located between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Israel incorporated part of Walajeh, including Hassan’s land, into Jerusalem, so he and the other landowners have to pay Jerusalem taxes, even though to this day they receive none of the usual municipal services, like water and garbage collection. Tax collections from Palestinians account for almost 30% of the municipal budget, but typically the amount of the budget spent on Palestinian neighborhoods is only 5%.

But let’s return to the case of Hassan Kalifa and his land. As I said, Israel claimed his land for “Jerusalem,” but Israel would not grant to Hassan himself the status of a resident of Jerusalem. And not having Jerusalem residency meant that Hassan would never be able to get a building permit to erect a house on the land for which he was required to pay taxes. Angered by the injustice of this, Hassan proceeded to build a house there anyway for his family of six.

An Israeli court issued an order for the demolition of Hassan’s house. Two attempts to appeal that order to the Israeli High Court failed. So one morning an Israeli bulldozer reduced his house to rubble.

According to the Israeli civil rights group BeTselem, building houses without permits is common among Jews living in Jerusalem, but the demolition of whole houses by way of punishment is reserved solely for Palestinians. Never is a Jewish family rendered homeless, as was the Kalifa family, and as have been so many other Palestinian families who have had to watch their homes bulldozed.

But what of the Palestinians who have received Jerusalem residency? Well, Israel requires that they carry identity cards in order to live and work in the city and to apply for social benefits. But Israel makes it extremely difficult for Palestinians to get these cards in the first place and to renew them in the second place.

Without a Jerusalem ID, Palestinians cannot travel from one section of Jerusalem to another to get to work; and, as we have seen, they cannot obtain a building permit to erect a house even on land they own.

Without a Jerusalem ID, Palestinians also cannot get an Israeli license plate, and cars without such plates cannot be driven in Jerusalem.

And, as I said, Israel makes it extremely difficult for Palestinians to get and renew these Jerusalem identity cards, for Israeli authorities are eager in every way possible to reduce Jerusalem’s Palestinian population to a minimum.

The only place where such cards can be gotten and renewed is the Israeli Interior Ministry office in East Jerusalem. And this office is kept open only 18 hours a week. On one typical morning, an American visitor went to the office at the 8:00 am opening hour. There he found and interviewed a man who had come there to begin standing in line at 1:00 am, only to find fifty people already ahead of him. One man even farther back in the line was there for the third consecutive day, and, judging from his position, he probably would not get in before the closing time at noon on this his third try either. It seems that if you don’t arrive by 2:00 am you have little chance of ever making it inside by noon. And everyone in line has to wait by standing outside under whatever weather conditions exist. There is no inside waiting room, and no chairs. And none of these Palestinians has ever heard Ehud Barak, or any other Israeli prime minister for that matter, apologize for three decades of such unjust treatment.

Well, what of the second leader in the “peace process”? What of Chairman Yasir Arafat? Well, Yasir Arafat has received a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet, as has long and often been noted, and as is true, and as needs no further documentation, he is noticeably lacking in the wisdom to be gentle, lacking in the wisdom that is “peaceable, … full of mercy …, and without a trace of … hypocrisy.”

I can imagine Jesus meeting Yasir Arafat, instantly identifying in love with the suffering of his people, and then saying to him, “Still, you are lacking one thing. Give up your attachment to violence, your dependence on violence, and lead your people in non-violent resistance to the injustices you’ve experienced.”

Would that the Palestinians had a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King to channel their rage at injustice into non-violent actions!

And would that Israelis had a Nelson Mandela to channel their rage at brutal lynchings like the ones last Thursday into acts of forgiveness and reconciliation rather than revenge!

Would that both sides and their leaders possessed the wisdom that comes from above, the wisdom that counsels gentleness rather than violence, the wisdom that is “peaceable, … willing to yield, full of mercy …, and without a trace of … hypocrisy”!

Somehow, may God work a miracle, beginning tomorrow in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for it will take a miracle! Somehow, may God be able to challenge the hearts of both Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat when they meet again, by saying to them, “I love you both, and I love your peoples as well, but each of you is lacking one thing. Ehud, together with your people, give up your claim to sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and Yasir, together with your people, give up your attachment to violence.”

Will they and their peoples each be able to do the one last thing that can lead to attaining their goal of national co-existence in peace, and that can keep their story, once filled with so much promise, from ending in tragedy? Will they?

I am pessimistic. Nonetheless I pray that they will be able to do so. I pray that God will give to each of these leaders and to their peoples the will and the grace to grow in a wisdom that is “peaceable, … willing to yield, full of mercy …, and without a trace of … hypocrisy.”

Let us pray:

O God, be with Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat as they meet. Change their hearts and the hearts of their peoples, and grant to them all Your wisdom, the wisdom of gentleness, the wisdom of justice and non-violence. Amen.

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