Thomas Kleinert
War rages in Gaza. To my ears and my mind, the word ‘war’ is a terrible, shorthand compromise of a word. It may be fit for history books and legal texts, but not for the full reality of violent destruction and slaughter human beings are capable of perpetrating against human beings, not for the full reality of suffering and death, and their consequences. On the periphery of the war unleashed by Hamas in the brutal attacks on October 7 against Israel, other stories beg for our attention; but when the media spotlight, sporadic and flickering as it is, is directed at Gaza, Rafah, and Khan Younis, stories from the Jordan valley don’t make it to the top of your news feed. On the West Bank, the fate of thousands of Palestinian farmers and shepherds looks grim. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has done next to nothing to stop rampaging Israeli settlers who are hell-bent on driving Palestinian families off their lands, and the inaction is intentional. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have both warned that this settler violence has to be curbed. In response, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated, “There is a tiny handful of people who take the law into their own hands, [and] we are not prepared to tolerate this.”
“So far he seems able to tolerate it quite easily,” writes David Shulman.
The same day he reassured his supporters, including the hundreds of thousands of settlers in the territories: “I told President Biden that the accusations against the settlement movement are baseless.”
Shulman, who is a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an Israeli human rights activist, reports that
Over the last few months, and more so since the war began, we have been seeing entire villages fleeing in panic from the settlers. … [We] are doing what we can to support those who are left… but in many cases the Palestinians can simply no longer stand the threats, violence, and harassment. In Wadi a-Siq in September, before the war, the elders of the village said to me, “We want to stay on our lands, but our children cry all the time; they are terrified.” Wadi a-Siq no longer exists. Neither does the once-beautiful village of Ein a-Rashash.[1]
A few weeks ago, back in September, Shulman wrote that “On the grassroots level, in the villages, most Palestinians want what most Israelis want—a livable life, without war. They also rightly want, and some day will certainly achieve, equality and an end to the current regime of discrimination, oppression, and constant threat.” At the end of his article, Shulman quoted his shepherd friend Jamal:
We were born to live in peace with one another. We think that hell lies somewhere beneath the earth, and heaven lies above us. But in fact people create their own hell on earth, when paradise, right here, could be ours.[2]
I wanted you to hear from David and Jamal today, especially Jamal. He’s a shepherd, and I was about to tell you that there are no shepherds keeping watch at night in the Gospel of Mark, just as there are no angels singing Gloria, no star-gazing visitors bearing gifts from far-away lands, no ox and ass, and no baby Jesus in the manger. Mark hits the ground running and jumps right into the Jordan with John the baptizer, the wild man sent by God to prepare the way of the Lord with his proclamation of repentance and forgiveness, and a baptism to mark the new beginning. There are no shepherds keeping watch at night in the Gospel of Mark, but there are shepherds among us keeping watch—voices in the wilderness reminding us that we were born to live in peace with each other and that repentance is the gate to paradise.
Mark opens with something like a headline—“The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Why “the beginning” instead of simply “the good news of Jesus Christ”? Some hear an echo of the opening of Genesis, the beginning of creation, and they hear Mark tell a story as wondrous and good as the story of life itself; they hear the beginning of life’s liberation from all the powers that deform and disfigure it; the beginning of God’s promised future for this beautiful, broken world.
Others hear “the beginning of the good news” because, with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the good news isn’t complete yet. The beginning of it is complete, but now the good news continues and unfolds in the lives of all who hear it and live it. Mark can only tell the beginning, because the good news continues with us, in all the ways that we hear the story and follow Jesus on the way, shepherds keeping watch at night, inn keepers opening doors to weary travelers, peace makers lighting candles in the dark, all of us proclaiming with our very lives the glad tidings of God’s faithfulness.
So here we are, at the Jordan with John; at the very river where Israel gathered after forty long years of wilderness wanderings, after their escape from slavery in Egypt. John meets us at the river of almost there, the river that marks the border between being on the run and coming home.
At the Jordan the prophet Elijah was taken up into heaven, and he was expected to return before the day of the Lord—and Mark’s quick portrait of John suggests more than a resemblance between the two. The baptizer is undomesticated, focused on essentials: he wears only the most basic clothing, eats only what God provides and the earth produces on its own, boils down all covenant demands and commitments to a single one: repent, and announces the coming of one who would bathe the world in Holy Spirit. This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ: to turn from what was, whether we look back with nostalgia, with anger, or regret—to turn from what was to the one who is coming. To reorient our lives in the light of God’s coming reign; to look at ourselves with honesty; to name what we notice and lament what is missing, and repent. That is the beginning of the good news. That is how we begin, again and again, as practitioners of the good news. We turn away from our complicity with the old order of things and become a community of the repentant and expectant, an Advent community. The end of what was is now, and now is the beginning of what shall be—and repenting isn’t a one-time thing nor is it easy, no, it’s hard, but it is possible and it is critical and it is so liberating. We turn from our idolatries to faith. We turn from self-absorption to love. We turn from despair to hope.
John meets us at the Jordan, in the borderlands between what is and what shall be, between the promise and the coming true, and he calls us to repent. It’s easy and tempting to think of others who really need to hear him, but right now, he’s talking to us. War rages in Gaza, and on its periphery, violence creeps and sneaks into human encounters like a pandemic. Here in the U.S., Sherrilyn Ifill writes,
We have become inundated with and inured to violence, held hostage to a uniquely American combination of white supremacy, untreated mental illness, misogyny, money in politics, and a gun culture that has come to take on the attributes of near-religious fervor. We have lived through Uvalde and Buffalo and El Paso and Tree of Life. Gun violence has saturated places like Baltimore, where I live, with young people shot in broad daylight, sometimes outside their schools. We have watched the massacre of our children—little children, high school students, college students, young adults—and have decided that we are powerless to stop it. And in those places where the population and its elected leaders have roused themselves to rein in unlimited gun access, the Supreme Court has frustrated those efforts, delivering interpretations of the Second Amendment that suggest its framers meant it to be a national suicide pact.[3]
Where’s the good news? Where’s the good news in a world where autocratic rule has become sexy again, and where it is far from clear that a year from now the United States will continue to be counted among the peoples and governments who push back against its spread?
When Isaiah declares, Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God, we know it has nothing to do with, “Make my people a little more comfortable in their exile.” What the prophet proclaims is the faithfulness of God: We’re facing mountains, enormous mountains of injustice, mountains of suspicion and distrust, mountains of hurt. And between them run valleys where the shadows are deep, valleys of resignation and despair—but God is coming.
There’s push-back in the heavenly assembly, according to Isaiah: “The people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field.” It sounds like an objection or a lament: The people are short-lived, unreliable, hardly worth the effort, here today, gone tomorrow, they wither, they fade, they don’t have what it takes to truly reflect the full glory of creatures made in the image of God. But another voice in the heavenly court replies: “Surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” The faithfulness of God’s people and their leaders may wither and fade, but God’s faithfulness is firm. God’s commitment to creation is unshakable. That, and that alone, is our hope: our God is faithful, and our God is coming. That is why we look at ourselves and at the world, and we don’t say, “Well, that’s just the way it is.” We say, “That may well be the way it is, but it’s not how it’s supposed to be; and it’s not how it shall be.”
One of the ways people in the ancient Mediterranean world used and understood the word ‘gospel’ was ‘good news from the battlefield.’[4] The gospel is good news from the place of struggle. The good news of Jesus Christ is that God has entered the struggle against all that is opposed to God’s reign, and word from the front line has it that Jesus is risen. God moves mountains to get through to us, and so we turn and grab our shovels to prepare the way of the Lord: we lower the steep hills of suspicion and distrust with honesty and kindness; we fill the valleys of resignation and despair with friendship and courage; we follow Jesus on the way.
[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/a-bitter-season-in-the-west-bank-david-shulman/
[2] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/19/heading-toward-a-second-nakba-a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama/
[3] Sherrilyn Ifill https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/21/how-america-ends-and-begins-again-sherrilyn-ifill/
[4] Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary (New Testament Library; Louisville: WJKP, 2006), 30.