This is the 5th Sunday of Lent. I've read the liturgical selections as found on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' website. Anticipating Easter in just two weeks, the first reading is about Ezekiel's 6th century BCE promise of resurrection to a Jewish people in their Babylonian Exile. The day's selection from the Gospel of John describes Jesus' raising of his friend Lazarus from his moldering grave.
In in the face of what the odious Benjamin Netanyahu doing in Gaza (with 95% support from his constituents) it all nearly turns my stomach. It has shut down my ability (and desire) to write anything sympathetic to any tradition about "God's People" returning home.
Think of the ironies contained in today's readings!
In the selection from Ezekiel, the prophet writes about the sixth century BCE Babylonian Exile. Exile, he laments, has meant death for his people.
So, to encourage them, he writes of a future when graves will be opened, where the dead will rise, and return to Israel, their home. More than that, the prophet promises that the returnees will embody God's own Holy Spirit.
Then the liturgical response drawn from Psalm 130 acknowledges God as the liberator of the oppressed. It sings of a God whose mercy responds to the prayers of captives by expressing forgiveness and kindness.
Who among us can read such sentiments without throwing up?
I mean, the Zionist Jews with their people's lamentable history of exiles and occupations by foreigners and with their experience of pogroms, and Holocaust at the hands of Christians have suddenly been revealed as the monsters they've always been. Absolute monsters!
Yes, it's true: the Jewish people have more than once risen from the dead and returned "home" just as Ezekiel promised. But this time since 1948 and especially since October 7th, 2023, contemporary Zionists have completely assumed the identity of their oppressors. They've become Nazis! Yes, Nazis!
And the hell of is: so have we Americans. With "Genocide Joe" Biden leading the way, virtually all the U.S. senators and members of Congress have enthusiastically supported Israel's ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, infanticide, femicide, and starvation tactics. They (and we who fail to protest) are just as guilty of genocide as the Nazi apartheid Zionists.
And in the face of it all, where in the collective west are Christian voices united in protest and calling genocide what it is? Why is Pope Francis not unambiguously joining Jesus portrayed in today's Gospel selection as railing against death and promising resurrection? Why are he and other Christian leaders not publicly weeping before the mountains of dead bodies who (unlike Jesus' friend) can't even claim the dignity of proper burial?
It's all too much for me.
And so, I'm sorry. In the face of the Zionists' current genocide against Palestine's indigenous people, in the face of the apartheid Jews' utter arrogance and cruelty, I find it impossible to write anything sympathetic to their religious tradition. I find it impossible to comment on "God's word" that has been invoked so cynically to justify the sadistic slaughter of far more than 31,200 innocents, more than half of them children and their mothers.
My stomach is sickened. I can think of almost nothing else. My heart is broken. My faith is challenged. I can write no more.
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