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.