IPMN Worship Service for Palestine: A Reflection
Written by Dr. Aida Haddad, M.D., M.Div.
We all know some iteration of this story: a pregnant Mary and a confused Joseph, both second-class Palestinians in a hostile empire, travel to Bethlehem. They do so to add their names to a registry which would subsequently be used to hunt their newborn babe, Jesus the Christ.
Was the last part jarring to hear?
In a sense, it should be. Because that part of the story is more disturbing than it is hopeful, it is more an unraveling than a resolution, and it has more connections to present U.S. and Israeli policy toward Palestinians than I could make during this short reflection.
Many church Christmas pageants have dwelled dramatically on the journey into Bethlehem; truthfully, the journey itself is only alluded to in two verses of Luke’s narrative while persecution riddles the rest of the Christmas scripture.
I re-discovered this truth when I went back to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth and the Holy Family’s subsequent journey. Soon after Jesus is born, an angel tells Joseph to seek asylum in Egypt with his family–otherwise, Herod would ‘destroy’ Jesus. In short, Herod begins as a demagogue obsessed with controlling the lives of the vulnerable and orders a genocide because he fears losing power (Matt. 2:3-8). Jesus is spared, but Herod’s wrath falls on ‘all the [Palestinian] children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under,’ based on what he knew of the timeline of Jesus’ birth.
Sometime later, an angel arrives at Joseph’s home in Egypt, telling him that his family can return to Judea; they only move as close as Galilee because Herod’s son is now the ruler of Judea.
The Holy Family cannot return home.
And so, one of the lessons we glean from the Nativity story is this: Christ may have brought a new Kingdom to Earth, but God worked alongside and through the Holy Family as soon as Christ arrived, in the midst of incredible suffering. The documentation of that suffering exists in the same verses we gloss over, year after year, to make the Nativity story something it simply is not.
Today Mary and Joseph are running away from sniperfire in Gaza–she with Jesus in her womb and Joseph clutching a white flag in his hands, hunted and afraid. Today they suffer from the U.S. and Israel’s collective punishment. Today Mary’s maternity ward has been destroyed by an artillery strike and her baby, Jesus the Christ, was left behind in the neonatal intensive care unit to die and rot after Israeli soldiers promised his nurse that someone would care for him after the nurse was forcibly evacuated. Today Joseph, sleep-deprived and traumatized, is frantically digging through rubble outside a Gaza hospital with his bare hands after the already sick and displaced were buried alive by Israeli bulldozers. Today God is missing under the rubble, either screaming, starving, bleeding, or suffocating. God will die under the rubble if Joseph doesn’t find them soon. And the Holy Family will die in a concentration camp in the coming days, weeks, and months if we lose our endurance in the fight for a Free Palestine.
May we acknowledge that God remains with the Palestinians, our present Holy Families, in a more tangible way than we will ever experience. May we act accordingly in word and deed, in the name of our Lord Jesus.
Let it be so.