REVIEW: “The First Advent in Palestine”
By Kelley Nikondeha
Broadleaf Books
Published Oct. 4, 2022
Reviewed by Noushin Darya Framke
As Easter Christians, we know that we can’t get to Easter without first walking through Good Friday. The same goes for Christmas and Advent which we have been taught is about waiting but has been hijacked by commercialism. In this short but powerful book, Kelley Nikondeha reminds us of how important this waiting is and why we must wade through Advent as we await the incarnation. Through practical theology, she also gives us some very good tools for getting there.
For many of us, the advent story has transmuted into something far from its origins. At best, it’s Christmas crafts and carols out of the sanctuary; at worst, it’s a shopping marathon bereft of its original meaning. Nikondeha describes it well, saying “Western Christianity has forsaken a deep understanding of Advent for strands of twinkling lights and the anticipation of seasonal pleasures.”
On my only trip to Israel/Palestine in 2006, I realized that Bethlehem is in Palestine not Israel. My first impressions were a lot like Nikondeha’s. After entering the birthplace of Jesus by waiting at Israel’s oppressive Separation Wall and checkpoint, we were finally allowed in after Israeli soldiers with automatic weapons inspected our bus. I expected to find despair in a downtrodden, occupied Bethlehem. What brought me to tears was that instead of despair, I found joy. And an enduring steadfast hope, which I learned is called sumud in Arabic.
But I’ve skipped to the end. Let me go to the beginning where, as advent begins, most of us also decorate our homes and trim the tree. We take out our cherished nativity creche —or several if we have collected them over the years— and carefully unwrap the tissue paper from the Holy Family and begin setting the scene in a prime location, maybe over a mantle. We add in the shepherds and magi, the animals, and of course the angel. But this homage to the story and the people of advent is now a ritual that has taken on a modern anodyne patina.
In The First Advent in Palestine, Nikondeha sets the scene and puts each nativity character in historical context, walking us through each of their stories to show us why they matter, and why they were chosen to lead us into the incarnation to come. Chapter by chapter, person by person, she tells their story of resistance to empire, the Roman Empire in their case. Each chapter is connected to a specific place and based on specific scripture, with the first locale being Israel at large. It is based on 1 and 2 Maccabees and Lamentations. The scene is set:
The first advent began in darkness and danger. Before light or its warmth came, generations of the Jewish people of Judea suffered at the hands of one empire or another. Each successive generation endured another wave of occupation. More sons lost in battle, more land confiscated, more hopes dashed. First the Greeks, then the Egyptians, then the Seleucids each took their turn.
When the Romans occupied Palestine, they put a local in charge known to us as King Herod. The years leading up to the birth of Christ were very dark and difficult and the profound sadness of the era comes through clearly in Maccabees and Lamentations. (Maccabees is included because even though the church thinks of the inter-testament years as The Silent Years, they were not silent to the Jewish people whose history and suffering is told in those books). There is palpable collective loss for the Jewish people and though the first and second exiles are in the distant past, they are still felt in the psyche of the community. To set the scene, Nikondeha starts here before delving into the people we know in the Nativity story.
Chapter 2 looks at Zechariah, takes place in Jerusalem and is based on Luke 1:5–25. Chapter 3 examines the story of Mary, takes place in Nazareth, and is based on Luke 1:26–38. As we revisit each of the characters in the foundational birth story of Christianity, we also meet new people who are rooted in the same land today. Different politics, same landscape. Nikondeha carefully examines the role of each of the characters of our creche: the shepherds, the magi, Joseph, the Angel, and more.
In “Mothers of Advent,” which is about Elizabeth and Mary, we go to the village of Ein Kerem just outside Jerusalem, which today is known as the home of Elizabeth and Zechariah and the birthplace of John the Baptist. It is also where Mary stayed with Elizabeth early in her pregnancy. Nikondeha brings the village to life with its terraced green hills, churches, chapels, icons and grottos, and she crowns it by saying that today Ein Kerem “honors two women who visited together while incubating God’s advent as the world carried on unaware.” In Luke’s telling, she says what two seemingly unimportant women did, “was as significant as joining in the start of a new world order.” Nikondeha deftly covers why and how these women give us a new way of looking at the world, inaugurating a new way of thinking about women.
Mary’s own chapter takes place in Nazareth in the Galilee region. Not for nothing did Nathanael ask “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) Unlike Judea to the south, the Galilee was a region dotted with hard-scrabble villages fighting for survival in a tough political climate. We get to know Mary, the girl who was “on no one’s list of important people” who grew up in a tense region where she “understood justice as rebellion against empires and their violence.” God chooses this unlikely girl to change the world through, showing “again and again in infinite reversals that human taboo and stigma don’t limit the Spirit.” Mary’s response to this taboo is a song we know as The Magnificat. Instead of despair, she sings; and her song of liberation is about God’s justice and upending the violent tactics of empire.
Before we leave Mary for the next figure being unwrapped into our Nativity Creche, we are introduced to another young girl, this one from today’s landscape. Her name is Ahed Tamimi and she is a young Palestinian teenager with long curly blonde hair and blue eyes. The world got to know her in 2017 because at a protest in her village against Jewish settlers taking control of their water supply, she slapped a Jewish soldier. She was arrested and detained and became a Palestinian icon of resistance. Her story resonated for Nikondeha because of all the parallels of resistance and humiliation she saw with Mary’s story:
We first meet Mary as an adolescent girl from Galilee. Like Ahed Tamimi, she was shaped by her place of origin. She saw soldiers riding into town, terrorizing her neighbors in the name of peacekeeping. She witnessed uncles humiliated and cousins hurt as a result of the soldiers’ presence. She watched women taken by force to be punished in unspeakable ways…. But without a doubt, she experienced the push and pull of war and resistance that shaped the villages of Galilee.
But Mary’s story doesn’t end with trauma. We know how the story ends; she “would become the where of incarnation as she trusted God as she could trust no other. From deep pain would now come impossible goodness for the world.”
The Shepherds are probably the most marginalized people of the nativity story. They are the easiest to find in the Palestinian landscape today, as young boys still herd sheep and goats in the hills surrounding Bethlehem and the West Bank. Nikondeha presents them as the most “invisible” in the system and hence the most vulnerable. In our context we might think of them as migrant laborers and farm workers who toil unseen in our midst, but they have always been central in God’s vision of peace. In the first advent, even though they were invisible in society, they were chosen to be among the first witnesses to God’s peace.
The Magi are outsiders who see the truth that most insiders deny or don’t see. They came from an empire that had been defeated by Alexander “the Great” of Macedon whose Hellenization of Persia had left people longing for their own indegenous culture and a return to Persian ways. Elites like the magi resisted and pushed against Hellenization. When they followed a star westward, it was a courageous move “likely rooted in resistance,” says Nikondeha. From the time of the Babylonian Exile under Persian rule, the Magi would have been familiar with Jewish prophecies and saw them as converging with their own hopes of liberation from outsiders. They went looking for a new king and found one in a most unlikely place, and worshiped him. To avoid Herod, they went home “by another way” and believed “for if it could happen in Judea, it could happen in Persia.”
Here we are introduced to the influence of art and culture as a force of resistance in the modern landscape of Palestine. We meet Sliman Mansour, whose painting graces the cover of the book. Even as the Israeli government makes it harder and harder for art to flourish in Palestine, Mansour’s work is shaped by his reality. Once when he is questioned by police on why his art is so political, he realizes his depictions of everyday life —olive trees, villages, people in traditional dress, and Jerusalem— are works of resistance. Art and culture play an important role in resisting empire as they reflect the hopes and realities of people in their own settings.
Nicondeha’s personal advent journey ends in the West Bank village of Kafr Malek where she has a reunion with an old neighbor. The two friends take part in the family’s annual ritual of the olive harvest at her friend's family’s orchard. Working all day, tarps are laid under each fruit-heavy ancient tree as they shake the olives loose. Sage tea is served. And Makluba, the traditional Palestinian pot of rice, chicken and vegetables, turned upside down on a platter for all to share. Nikondeha recalls, “Watching Tahany’s family work together on that final tree as the sun set behind the hills and the air chilled, I experienced a swell of joy that felt old and somehow golden. I bore witness to the beauty of the meek that day in Kafr Malik.”
Empires come and empires go. They declare their own version of peace in colonized lands. But the words of Jesus resonate still: the meek will inherit the land. And those who inherit the land are those who live into the hope of advent peace. By recognizing that God’s peace is according to a different clock and calendar, we can “join Jesus as incarnations of God’s peace on this earth for however long it takes.”
This is the advent story and we need to step into it and dwell in Advent. Those who use the gifts —or tools— of advent can practice hospitality, resist empire, and “enter into solidarity with God in the work of liberation for everyone.”