An old good news from Palestine

Mitri Raheb  maintains most European Christians don't get it.

Mitri Raheb is Palestinian, a theologian, and the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. Faith in the Face of Empire offers his insights, rooted in the conditions of occupied Palestine, into how place and circumstance shape the three great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These faiths, in turn, shape much of global history.

His undertaking is ambitious and more than a little mind-bending. And that's a compliment.

He wrote presciently in 2014:

My generation might be the last in Palestine to struggle with scripture and its meaning in its original context of permanent occupation. ... For me, as a Palestinian Christian, Palestine is the land of both my physical and my spiritual forefathers and foremothers. The biblical story is thus part and parcel of my nation’s history, a history of continuous occupation by succeeding empires. In fact, the biblical story can best be understood as a response to the geo-political history of the region.

In Palestine, to live under a cruel occupation is not a novelty:

The Bible is a Middle Eastern book. It is a product of that region with all of its complexities. While it might seem that I am stating the obvious, I firmly believe that this notion has not been given enough attention. ...

... The three monotheistic religions did not take root in and grow out of the Middle East haphazardly. And it is not coincidental that the Bible emerged from Palestine, not from one of the empires. It is, in fact, this context of ongoing oppression, of forever living in the shadow of the empire, that brought about the birth of both Judaism and Christianity, and across the sea, Islam. ... The revelation the people of Palestine received was the ability to spot God where no one else was able to see [God].

Firmly situated in his long suffering land, Raheb interprets Jesus' message:

... one cannot understand the Gospels if they are disconnected from their original context, which is Palestine. ... For the people at Jesus’ time, the occupation began with the Romans. Jesus had a far greater understanding of the history of Palestine. He looked at a thousand years all at once, and he saw a chain of empires.

There isn’t a single regional empire that at some point did not occupy Palestine. The first empire to occupy Palestine was that of the Assyrians, in 722 BC; it stayed for over two hundred years. The Assyrians were replaced by the Babylonians in 587 BC, who didn’t last because they were pushed out by the Persians in 538 BC. The Persians didn’t stay long either, because they were forced to leave by Alexander the Great. Then there were the Romans.

Two thousand years after Jesus we can continue reciting the list of empires that ruled Palestine: the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Crusaders, the Ayyubides, the Ottomans, the British, and last but not least, the Israeli occupation.

... We have been trained to naively connect Israel today with the Israel of the Bible, instead of connecting it to the above chain of occupying empires. If we focus on the latter, Jesus’ words make perfect sense. None of those empires lasted in Palestine forever. They came and stayed for fifty, one hundred, two hundred, a maximum four hundred years, but in the end they were all blown away, gone with the wind.

Jesus wanted to tell his people that the empire would not last, that empires come and go. When empires collapse and depart it is the poor and the meek who remain. The “haves” from the people of the land emigrate; they seek to grow richer within the centers of empire. Those who are well educated are “brain drained” and vacuumed up by the empire. Who remains in the land? The meek, that is, the powerless! Empires come and go, while the meek inherit the land. Jesus’ wisdom is staggering. ... Jesus was telling the Palestinian Jews that the Romans who had built those settlements would not be there forever. They would vanish because Palestine would be inherited by the meek.

Forty years ago, when I was first trying to get some kind of understanding of what most people then would have called the "Arab-Israeli conflict," an Arab friend insisted (I paraphrase from memory) that "we don't look at it that way. ... in 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, this thing called 'Israel' will be gone."

I couldn't imagine this. I wasn't going to argue; I was trying to learn. I still can't quite imagine this.

But this historical awareness of how time works in Palestine is very much the consciousness from within which Raheb elaborates a theology of liberation in Christian terms.

Those who are the "have-nots," those who cannot escape the brutality visited on them by the occupier, they cry out of their desperation, "where is God?"

He believes the life and death of Jesus in the context of imperial oppression answers that question.

If the first disciples had gone forth blaming the empire and trying to elicit sympathy, Christianity would not have been born. If the first disciples had believed all that they had to share was the bad news of the cruelty of the empire, they would have remained unnoticed. The cruelty of the empire is not breaking news, and the world, dominated by the empire, is full of such news.

The Spirit empowered the disciples to proclaim the good news, which was different from that of the empire. The disciples went out with the conviction that they had a message to share and that the world was waiting for just such a message. The world understood that if good news could hail from Palestine, then a miracle must have occurred.

This is faith in the face of empire.