Article

Comment

Easter

Middle East

Resurrection

War & peace

29 March 2024

7 min read

The Friday world of the Middle East at Easter

Violence begets violence in a zero sum world.

Todd Deatherage

Todd is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Telos Group. It forms communities of American peacemakers across lines of difference and conflict, including Israel/Palestine.

A family look at the concrete shell and remains of a bombed building.

Christian Aid.

What do the events of Holy Week and Easter---these seminal events in Christianity-- have to say in a time of slaughter and now starvation in the Middle East? The closer we get to Easter Sunday, the most sacred day in Christianity, the more I’ve wrestled with that question.

I’m neither Palestinian nor Israeli, and so my connection to the historic tragedy continuing to unfold is not as visceral or as obvious as some. But as an American and a Christian, I’m deeply bound up in all of this. The realization of my own implication led me back in 2009 to co-found a nonprofit whose mission is to help Americans better understand the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the American role in it, and to learn about the difficult work of honest peacemaking. These past five months are a nightmare I can’t wake up from, and of course they’re more than a nightmare for the people in the south of Israel and the West Bank, and they’re an absolute hell on earth for the people in Gaza today.

For more than 20 years I’ve lived in a set of deep relationships with both Palestinians and Israelis. The horror and barbarity of the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the horror and devastation of the slaughter and starvation taking place unabated in Gaza even this Holy Week have left me begging God to intervene and begging our leaders to do whatever we can to stop the madness.

Sometimes there’s a lot more of the darkness of Thursday and Friday than the joy and light of Easter Sunday morning.

In most of the 65 trips I’ve led to the Holy Land over the years, after we’ve had our heart broken by the stories we’ve heard and the experiences we’ve shared with people on all sides, we visit the place on the Mount of Olives looking at the Old City of Jerusalem where Jesus stopped, looked at the city, and wept. It is here, just as he entered what we call his Passion Week, that he said “Jerusalem, Jerusalem if only you’d known the things that make for peace.” If only you’d known. If only we’d known. If only we knew.

I need this story to be in the Bible. Many times I’ve had to fall back on Jesus weeping for the mess we’ve made of our lives, the way we allow our fears and our hatreds or our indifference to guide how we treat our neighbors, how often we use violence and power to deny the way they too bear the image of God.

This is one of those times. The worst of those times in all the years I’ve been involved in Israel and Palestine. I’ve found myself weeping privately, in conversations, and sometimes in public places. And I’ve spent so much time asking God to intervene. To comfort the terrorized and afraid, to feed the starving, to silence the guns of war, to rescue and deliver those who are dying.

And the answer I keep getting has felt like silence. Deafening silence.

At times like this, the Christian life feels like a Thursday night in a garden when your friends can't’ stay awake to help you and even God is not answering your prayer. Or it feels like a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem when all hope has died and you can’t imagine how the world will ever be better. Sometimes there’s a lot more of the darkness of Thursday and Friday than the joy and light of Easter Sunday morning.

The work of justice and mercy make for peace. Revenge and violence do not.

But Lent and Holy Week have given me another answer, beyond God’s silence--the reminder that the people in Israel and In Gaza, even those this very night who are displaced and starving, are not alone. God is with them. And he weeps for them. And he weeps for us. If only we knew the things that make for peace. If only we knew how to love God and to love our neighbor and to love our enemies. If only we knew the limits of violence to achieve good ends. If only we knew the connection between peace and justice.

And the fullness of this Holy Week also brings me to this reminder that if God does not seem active maybe it’s because we are not listening to his call. My friend Bill Haley says this:

“The actual invitation of the Christian faith is not just to believe in Jesus or be like Jesus or tell others about Jesus (as right as these thing are), but actually to be the presence of Jesus in the world, our hands his hands, our feet his feet, our heart his heart, our bodies his very body... By this does the reality of the risen, living Jesus continue to be displayed, visibly and tangibly, in and around the world (and yours and mine), day after day.”

To do this we first seek to know the things that make for peace (and equally important is to know the things that don’t make for peace). The work of justice and mercy make for peace. Revenge and violence do not. The embrace of our mutuality and interconnectedness make for peace. Tribalism and dehumanization of our neighbors do not. Justice and respect make for peace. Systems of domination and ideologies of hatred do not. Respect for the sacredness of life and the inherent dignity of all as made in the image of God make for peace. Brutality, murder, and starvation do not. Acts of love and service make for peace. Fear and self-centeredness do not.

The Friday world is zero sum. Justice and peace are separate things. Some lives are more important than others.

In a Good Friday world, to live as if these “things that make for peace” are actually true is a costly endeavor. Jesus paid with his life. Others like Martin Luther King have also. For most of us, it may just be the way our reputation suffers, or how certain relationships are strained. There may be some economic cost or sacrifice of our time and attention required. But if it says anything, Holy Week teaches us that incarnational living is costly. Reconciliation comes at a price. The crucifixion wasn’t just something that happened to Jesus on the way to resurrection. It is central to it.

And yet, believers in Jesus know that Holy Week and the shame, humiliation, brutality and injustice of the crucifixion were not the last word. To borrow from the legendary Black preacher S.M. Lockridge, we live in a Friday world, but we know that Sunday’s coming.

In a world of Fridays, violence begets violence. The Friday world is zero sum. Justice and peace are separate things. Some lives are more important than others. There is minimal cost to looking away from people who are hungry and imprisoned. Religion is used to baptize injustice. We live in a Friday world. But we are Sunday people. And we are called to live as best we can as reminders that in a Sunday world we are responsible for what we know, responsible to each other, and responsible before God. To quote Dr. King again, in a Sunday world, "darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Sunday people are Easter people. And Easter people have a mandate to live as peacemakers in a world riven by conflict. To be purveyors of light and hope in a time of devastation and despair. Frederick Douglass said “I prayed for freedom for 20 years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” As we pray for peace, and we have to be people who pray for peace, let us also be agents of God’s peace. Let us be those incarnational Easter people who pray for peace with our legs. Let us do the urgent work for a lasting ceasefire, for a release of all hostages, and for food for hungry people. And when the guns are silenced and the hungry are at last being fed and the wounded and traumatized are given space to heal, then the greater work begins. Let us learn the lessons of how we got here and let us commit ourselves to a different path forward, one grounded in the sacred dignity of all the people of the land, Palestinians and Israelis alike. Let us support all those who seek justice and peace and security through the path of mutual flourishing. These are the things that make for peace.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Politics

20 February 2025

4 min read

The assisted dying bill is an undignified mess

Literally life-changing legislation needs a parliament at its best not its worst.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A parliamentary committee meets, sitting at wooden raised desks in a wood panelled room.

The bill committee meets.

The first clue came when MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill passed in the House of Commons at the end of November. She came outside to greet pro-euthanasia campaigners like she was emerging as a winner from the Big Brother house, in tears of joy, whooping and hugging and high-fiving, with prime minister Keir Starmer gurning awkwardly in her wake.

For her and her supporters, this was indeed great news. But these optics were far from great. It was as though she was celebrating the consequence of the legislation she’d introduced: “Whoa! Wonderful news everybody! We’re going to be allowed to help people to kill themselves.”

It’s not a good look, even to those who may wish for such assistance. Where was the dignity, the key word that assisted-suicide lobbyists have appropriated for their cause? Not in this carefree triumphalism, this cork-popping celebration of the prospect of death-on-demand.

Since then, the bill’s faltering passage through parliament has been characterised by this absence of dignity, a kind of cowboy rustler pushing a herd of supporters in a single direction, towards statute. And this lack of dignity matters. Not just because it is, literally, the most life-changing legislation any of us will see in our lifetimes, but because the dignity of parliament matters very much indeed.

I don’t mean the ritual flummery, the state opening by the monarch, people marching about with wigs and sticks, Black Rod and all that. I mean dignity in the sense with which we honour our democracy, the way in which we frame our legislature seriously and with due process.

Leadbeater presents as a good person and there is no apparent evidence to the contrary. But she is an inexperienced parliamentarian. Her selection for the seat of Batley and Spen, now Spen Valley, was rushed through in 2021, memories remaining acutely sharp of the murder of her older sister, Jo Cox, in the constituency in 2016. And, naturally, she has sat on the Government’s backbenches for less than a year.

Her inexperience of parliamentary process and scrutiny has shown. Committee hearings have been rammed with those who support assisted suicide and held in unseemly haste, such is the rush to get it into law. Before her bill’s second reading, she described it as having the strongest safeguards in the world, each patient requiring a sign-off from a High Court judge. When this proved impractical, the judge was replaced with a social worker, which apparently was “even safer”. So, safer than even the strongest safeguards in the world?

But more worrying still is how the passage of the bill has been factionalised. Leadbeater has alienated the mild-mannered by calling opposing voices “noise”, which is a bit like lamenting that a debate should have two sides at all. And she’s called those who disagree with her “unconstructive” and complained that opponents have “mobilised”. Well, duh. That’s how parliament works. Indeed, it’s part of its dignity, rather than a simple inconvenience for an MP in a hurry.

The media have noticed this lack of respect for procedure. I’m not sure that there’s ever been such resistance to proposed assisted-suicide legislation in the public prints before. Even the Guardian, which might be relied upon to see it as a progressive cause, has turned more than ambivalent. Only columnist and assisted-suicide flagbearer Polly Toynbee is available for a piece that amounts to saying we should move along, there’s nothing to see here and Leadbeater’s bill is doing just fine.

She, too, claims absurdly that opposition is only coming from people who oppose assisted suicide. Well, blow me down. Try as I might, I can’t trace her complaining that Lord Falconer’s supposedly independent Commission on Assisted Dying of 2011 was both funded and packed with his cause’s supporters.

In passing, it should be noted what an underminer of parliamentary dignity is Falconer too. He has claimed that justice secretary Shabam Mahmood’s opposition to the bill should be discounted because of her “religious beliefs”. Mahmood is a Muslim. For a constitutional lawyer, Falconer shows scant regard for our constitution. We might as well say that his views should be discounted because he’s a progressive secularist.

One might expect PM Keir Starmer to bring some quality to this, as an alleged stickler for legal procedure. It remains a mystery, as a supporter of the principle, that he’s left assisted suicide to a private members’ bill. If he really wanted it, it should surely be a Government bill. Cynics among us wonder if he has honoured a promise given to the terminally ill Esther Rantzen with token support for a private members’ bill, but knows it will fail.

Again, lack of dignity. If dignity in dying means anything since it was misappropriated as a campaign slogan for assisted suicide, then it should be accompanied by dignified debate and amendment in parliament. This bill has provided precisely the opposite. Let it die.

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