Speeding Up Jesus' Return

One belief that many Jews and Christians share in common is that when the Jewish people finally reassemble in what is a Holy Land for both religions, the Messiah will return and usher in God's Kingdom. From this conviction, though, others spin in very different directions within both groups, often leaving in their trails a dangerous mixture of confusion, over-zealousness, mutual suspicion, and even full-blown hostility. Making things even more complicated is the fact that there is still another group, the Palestinians, with a stake in determining whose land it is going to be when all this takes place, and that right now this group is having difficulty getting either a word or a bullet in edgewise.

As if all of this has not made the present situation in the Holy Land sufficiently volatile already, add to it the long-standing commitment of the U.S. government to the massive support of Israel --- not only of her existence, but of her conquests as well --- in the interest of having a democratic presence in the Middle East. It is a good thing that this commitment has recently been getting a going-over, and that the idea of a separate Palestinian state is finally receiving the consideration it deserves, even to the point of acknowledging that a Palestinian state that does not include East Jerusalem is hardly a Palestinian state at all. But this latter idea is not without its own problems on the strange religious terrain that Israel's orthodox Jews and the Gentile world's millennialist Christians currently occupy together. If the Mount of Olives, where the Messiah may return, winds up controlled completely by Muslim-minded, or even secular-minded Palestinian authorities, it would seem that he may have to apply for a visa before landing there for his last journey to earth.

One of the things that puzzles me most about the hurry-up project to get as many Jews back home as possible, to a land whose resources cannot possibly support the return of all of them, is the naïve openness of so many Jews to accept the kind of help that shaky and flakey Christians have been all too willing to offer them. A case in point: Christians United for Israel, a pro-Israel lobbying group whose leaders act like they are on a first name basis not only with the members of the Trinity, but of the Congress and the White House staff as well. On the one hand, this outfit is a gift horse into whose mouth it is hard to imagine at least some Jews wanting to look for very long. On the other, looks can be deceiving; what looks like a horse may actually be a larger than normal hog, and a very hungry one to boot.

What this organization actually roots around in are the slops of a theological outlook from which Jews interested in preserving not only their integrity but their spiritual destiny should be turning away without the slightest glance backward, precisely like Lot's wife did not. Only a little oversimplified, the outlook with which Christians United for Israel are identified is one which sees things roughly this way: as soon as Jews the world over have returned to Israel, Jesus, who has really been their Messiah all along, and contrary to what their Rabbis have been teaching them for two millennia, will meet them on the Mount of Olives and in their presence usher in their long-awaited Kingdom --- at least, the Kingdom of those who confess him to be their Messiah and renounce any further waiting around for anyone else. Actually, there will be no more time for anybody to wait for anything. There and then, only believers in Jesus as the Christ will have any future worth having. Everyone else the world over, Jews and Gentiles alike, will be damned forever.

In the light of what Christians for Israel really stand for theologically, their organization's noble-sounding pronouncements about the importance of "protecting" Israel, and their sacrificial giving in the name of worthy social causes and of promoting further immigration to this essentially Jewish state, are not only hypocritical. In their seductiveness, they are expressive of what is in fact a profound disrespect of the Jewish people in their Jewishness, and of a disturbing unwillingness to let God, and God alone, be the final judge of who may enter his Kingdom and who may not. One thing that Jews can be certain of about Christians for Israel is that those under its real protection are the Christians, and not the Jews. Getting as many Jews as possible back to Israel, soon, is in this organization's mind the quickest way for good things to begin happening, exclusively, to Christians.

The Freedom To Express Hate

It is hard to imagine the Founding Fathers anticipating just how far we would eventually push our freedom to express whatever might be in our hearts and minds at any given moment. Many of them were rightly suspicious of their fellow human beings, enough to build into the Constitution all kinds of blocks to using power for purposes of self-aggrandizement. But they also believed that, in most instances at least, civility would triumph over impulsivity, that destructive feelings and attitudes could generally be tempered by rational discourse, that most people understood the difference between talking about doing bad things and actually doing them, and that it is generally a good idea to put voluntary limits on our expressions of feeling and thinking by cultivating a mindfulness of what serves our own and others' needs most constructively.

These thoughts came to mind the other day as I listened to a local radio station while coming back from teaching a class, and was told I had only two minutes to wait before the "noon flip-off," a time opened to listeners who wanted to call in and rail against whomever, for whatever reason, in pretty much any tone of voice and with almost any words they chose. Curious about what kinds of calls would come in, I kept the dial steady for a while, and actually heard a few well-argued complaints rather than just fulminations. For the most part, though, blowing off steam seemed the order of the day, and eventually I decided to exercise my own right to do a flip-off, by switching to the classical music I should have been listening to in the first place.

There is a lot of blowing off steam going on these days, far more, I think, than the Founding Fathers could have anticipated. The good thing about the eruptions is whatever may be harmful about them usually ends up dissipated into the air. The bad thing is that whatever may be valuable in them suffers the same fate. What I would like to think about the blowhards themselves is that more often than not they are left with an affective emptiness that they might be willing to begin filling with thought. Putting feelings in their place at least temporarily, they could get down to the business of what is really bothering them, whether their complaints have anything to them, whether they point to conditions about which all of us ought to be concerned, and whether, together, we might begin the really hard work of doing something about them, instead of merely blowing off more steam, and flipping more people off.

I am not as optimistic as many of the Founding Fathers were about the possibility of transforming the power of anger and outrage into the kind of thinking that ensures lasting change for the better. But I am still convinced that attaching the transformers to the synapses of anyone who will let us do it, beginning with ourselves, is still the best hope we have of making our God-given, Constitutionally-ratified freedom to express ourselves work in the way that it is supposed to work. One thing that made me especially frustrated as I listened to people flipping off each other the other day was that I could not get close enough to any of them even to begin to find out who and what they were really flipping off. In most cases, it could not have been who and what they were telling us; their feelings were far too intense, and their mental states far too confused, for their flip-offs to be taken at face value.

As are those of the noose-hangers around the country these days. Apparently, they have been at it for some time; most of us simply have not been paying sufficient attention, anymore than I have been paying attention to Confederate flags waving in my face, except to let them annoy me for a nanosecond or two. It may be that we are going to have to stand up more explicitly for Old Glory if the specter of a not yet completely buried Confederacy keeps on rearing its very, very ugly head. But for sure we are going to have to start untying nooses whenever we find them, and put the ropes to more useful work, like pulling people out of the poverty, discrimination, and diseases in which we have forced them to languish for far too long.

Standing up for our flag and untying nooses, however, cannot mean burning others' flags and hanging people with their own nooses. If we are to get anywhere with either, we will have to find out more about what the wrong kind of flag and the wrong use of rope is really expressing in the lives of those who are running so far afoul of Jesus' cautions against calling anyone a fool.

The Jena Tree

As weary as many people must be in Jena, Louisiana of outsiders messing with their lives, it is not likely that they will be free of their stunned and outraged critics any time soon. A genuinely repentant District Attorney might help, or at least a judge or two. Not to mention white barbers who will cut blacks' hair without anyone else's having to make a federal case for it. As for deep-down change on the part of the all-their-lives racists in the community, however, little if anything is likely to make much difference for a long time, Al Sharpton to the contrary notwithstanding. But the very worst thing that could happen to, and that could come out of, Jena would be for its critics, within and beyond, to give up trying.

My personal vision of reconciliation in Jena had a tree at its center, with the whole town standing under its branches, in the charred remains of their burnt-out school, spreading out across the school property and beyond as necessary, but also squeezing close enough together to sing and pray as one voice --- old and young, blacks and whites, parents and politicians. If Kum Bah Yah hadn't already been flipped off by the know nothings of a generation younger than mine, I would have written it into my ideal scenario as much the more realistic accompaniment than We Shall Overcome.

The tree I had in mind in my vision was the tree where all of Jena's troubles began. It was a 20-year-old oak, lovingly planted, sheltering more and more kids as it gained height and as its branches slowly spread wider and wider. Although pretty young for an oak, it had already become a lovely tree; who wouldn't have wanted to nestle under it? The problem, of course, was that the kids who did nestle were only its school's white kids. The black kids had to stand, sit, and otherwise congregate in the sun, the dirt, and the winds. At least until one of them had the temerity to ask a school official if it would be all right to sit under the tree. Encouraged by the official's response, the kid invited some of his friends to join him. And the rest is sordid history: nooses on the tree's limbs, mutually traded insults, a beating, accusations, arrests, jail, and obscene assurances that people in Jena are all just good ol' boys at heart, with nary a prejudiced gene in their double helixes.

By the end of the summer, my vision for Jena was no more. Here's how it almost died. Apparently, some of the big shots at the school where all the nastiness began came belatedly to the conclusion that it was time to dissipate the force-field of hostility and hatred that had enveloped their school and their town. It is not clear whether their primary motivation was the best interest of the students or merely keeping the protestors out of town, but at least they showed a willingness to begin addressing the issues head-on. Well, not quite. Most people committed to ensuring justice believe that a good way of working toward it is to get and keep people talking to each other, respectfully and sensitively. What this not so very august body of leaders did, instead, was to hire a timber company to chop the Jena tree down for firewood.

It is difficult to fathom just what the thinking might have been that went into this awesomely incredible plan. (I would call the plan's immediate consequence immoral, but I realize that we have not yet succeeded in extending the scope of our moral actions very far into even the animal kingdom, much less to plants. The latter will just have to keep on handling things on their own for a while.) No tree, therefore, no nooses? No congregating, therefore, no place for fresh hostilities to break out? Make a little money for the school by selling pieces of the felled tree for souvenirs? If thy tree is a source of offense to thee, pluck it up? I can hear all the answers now: "we were only trying to help."

In that Jena schoolyard, the blows that felled what now has become my tree were blows struck for a truly perverse kind of justice. It is the kind of justice that, when believed impossible to render everyone, is denied anyone. It is the kind of justice that is blind to human beings' genuine needs, pressing problems, and God-given capacities to deal with both, constructively and together. But you know what, Jena? Your tree is still alive, because peoples' vision for you still is. How about we keep tending both?