The aftermath of Hamas murdering children

On Feb. 20, Hamas handed over to Israel the corpses of four dead Israeli hostages, including two small children, but only after using them for propaganda. 

Before handing over the remains, Hamas staged a parade of the bodies through streets of Gaza, proudly and cruelly displaying them  to cheering Gazan crowds. As the Wall Street Journal observed, 

Hamas put their coffins on a stage in front of a huge propaganda poster of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A crowd looked on and milled around, and “triumphant music” played, according to one news report. Mr. Netanyahu was depicted with fangs, dripping blood above the faces of the four dead hostages, smiling in photographs from happier times. “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes,” the poster claimed.

The coffin propaganda underlines the challenge of deradicalization for any postwar plan for Gaza.

Israeli medical staff conducted autopsies on the returned hostages. One was Oded Lifshitz, 84. The other three were Kfir and Ariel Bibas and their mother, Shiri. The Israeli government then announced: 

A. The bodies of the two children, one taken hostage at 4 years old and the other at 9 months, are injured in ways completely consistent with being brutally murdered, mainly by manual strangulation, and inconsistent with being killed by an air strike, as Hamas claims. 

Update: It is also confirmed that after the two boys were strangled, their bodies were pounded with rocks to make them appear to have been killed by an air raid. Details here, if you can stomach them.

B. The body of Shiri is in fact not Shiri at all. Hamas gave a corpse to Israel of a dead woman whose identity is unknown. 

Update: Hamas has now returned the actual remains of Shiri, whose identity has been so confirmed by Israel. 

What Hamas did drew sharp rebukes from very senior Arab Muslim authorities. 

And in yesterday's WSJ, author Bernard-Henri Lévy had this and other things to say about Hamas. 

Once, children were gassed as they descended from the trains. Hamas waited. Damn those who try to drag us into the false game of moral equivalency. These two breaths cut short, this double death of innocence, is Hamas’s abomination alone—and it is unforgivable.

Were the two muftis sincere in their condemnations? I think so. The muftis know very well that Muhammed specifically forbade the intentional killing of children, even in warfare. (That is no doubt why Hamas lied about Kfir and Ariel being killed by an Israeli airstrike. Hamas openly celebrated that they were dead but lied about how they died. Why one and not the other?)

Islam holds that there are two inarguable sources of commandments that must be obeyed with no exceptions. One of course is the Koran. The other is the Hadith, which is a collection of sayings of Muhammed. The Hadith is equal in status to the Koran. 

In a well-known hadith, Muhammed instructed his companions during military expeditions, "Do not kill children, women, or the elderly, and do not attack those who are not fighting." (Reported in Sahih Muslim, Sunan Abu Dawud, and other collections)

Another narration states, "Do not kill a child, nor a woman, nor an old man, nor destroy crops, nor kill those who are in their places of worship." (Sunan Abu Dawud)

Islamic jurisprudence distinguishes between combatants (those actively engaged in fighting) and non-combatants (those who are not involved in hostilities). Children, by their very nature, are considered non-combatants and are protected under Islamic law.

The deliberate targeting of children, whether in warfare or otherwise, is considered a grave sin and a violation of Islamic law.

The looming question now is, "In light of these Hamas atrocities, what happens (eventually) to Hamas and the future of Gaza and its people?" 

On Feb. 4, President Trump raised a lot of eyebrows by declaring that Gaza should become an American protectorate, the Gazan people should be resettled elsewhere, and then the US would rebuild Gaza as a sort of "Middle East Riviera." Political and media commentators scornfully denounced the idea right away. On Feb. 6, I commented on Facebook:

When the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in (IIRC) 2004-2005, they actually offered to do much the same thing as Trump said, although on a smaller scale. Hamas seized power shortly afterward and killed every Gazan who got in their way.

But could it happen now? I think this is less a real proposal than Trump's way of signaling to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states that the status quo antebellum must not be restored. Trump's real message, I think, is, "The perpetual warfare between Israel and Hamas stops now." And yes, it has been perpetual; I visited the southern Israeli town of Sederot in 2007 on the same day it received a rocket bombardment from Gaza.

What Trump did was describe a wealthier, peaceful future for Gaza and the next step is to simply ask, "If not that, then what? Because more years of war is not on the table."

The Wall Street Journal's editorialists said much the same thing, but with more historical context and detail. 

President Trump’s idea that the U.S. might remove and relocate some two million Palestinians from Gaza and then “own” and rebuild the strip isn’t going to happen soon, if ever. But the idea, however preposterous, does have the virtue of forcing the world to confront its hypocrisy over the fate of the Palestinian people.

What was the Arab powers' reaction? It was that they got Trump's message, at least in part. 

Egypt led the response, probably because Hamas was a child of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist, insurrectionist movement dating to the 1920s. Egypt's government finally defeated the Brotherhood only in 2013, although the Brotherhood cannot be said to be fully neutralized yet. That Hamas and the Brotherhood are so closely linked is doubtless the reason that when the present war between Gaza and Israel began, Egypt publicly announced it was sending a tank battalion to its border with Gaza with orders to shoot on sight anyone crossing the border without prior permission. Egypt also strongly reinforced its border wall.

So it is no wonder that Egypt's immediate response to Trump's declaration was that it would refuse to resettle any Gazans, even temporarily, and that Hamas must have no role governing postwar Gaza. 

And now the rest of the Arab world understands that Hamas has committed atrocities that directly violate the commandments of Muhammed. Of course, the Arab elites already knew that, but Hamas handled the return of the dead hostages, especially the two dead children, so stupidly that it could not be ignored or shrugged away. 

I think a corner has been turned. If, as I wrote at the time, Trump's real message was "this is the last war Hamas will fight, ever," then I think the Arab powers are taking it seriously, regardless of the rest of what Trump said. The stupid parading of the four dead hostages to celebrate their deaths and the obvious lie that Hamas did not kill the children have forced Arab elites and rulers to take Trump's declaration seriously, even if not literally. 

So has a corner been turned? We can hope so, but at this point only the steering wheel has moved. The war is not over. But at least the Arab powers are finally confronting the fact that when it ends, the ending must be permanent this time. And that is progress. 

Jesus was raised from the dead. So what?

The apostle Paul had founded the church in Corinth, Greece, and discovered after he left that over time some problems had arisen in the church. One of these problems was a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of resurrection.

Paul explained to the Corinthians at the beginning of the letter that teaching Christ was raised from the dead would seem like foolishness to people who thought themselves well educated and full of wisdom, but that for those being saved it is the power of God.

But here’s the problem: the Corinthians did not understand resurrection conceptually. They seemed to think that the whole point of Christian faith was the resurrection of Jesus and only Jesus. They had made Jesus’ resurrection the stopping point of their faith. Paul knew that Jesus’ resurrection is beginning point, not the ending point, of Christian faith.

Jesus's tomb was empty. So what?

So Paul ends his letter to answer the “So what?” of Jesus’ resurrection, to correct the misunderstanding that Easter, by itself, is all that Christian faith is about. There were a lot of other issues Paul covered in the letter, this one was central. Here is what Paul wrote:

1 Cor. 15:12-20

12It is proclaimed that Christ has been raised from the dead, so how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either. 14And if Christ was not raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15Moreover, we are liars about God, for we have staked our reputations that God raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if all the dead are not raised. 16For if all the dead are not raised, then neither has Christ been raised. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith does you no good because you’re still in your sins. 18That means that those who died believing in Christ are gone forever. 19If Christ matters only for this life, we are more pitiful than anyone else. 20But Christ really has been raised from the dead; he was the first to be raised of all the dead.

Let’s remember that the concept of resurrection from death was alien to the pagan world, where stories of a mythical or divine figure dying and living again would not even appear for at least 150 years after Jesus lived. That the Corinthian Christians did not quite grasp the concept is understandable.

But what about us? For most of my life I was taught and believed that the Christian faith stands or falls based on the resurrection of Jesus. And in fact it does – as Paul emphasizes, if Christ has not been raised then we Christians are pathetic people because what we profess to believe would be false and we are still unredeemed of our sins and we just lie to each other at funerals because even “those who died believing in Christ are gone forever.”

Yet that is just the beginning point of what “resurrection” means. So, Paul teaches what the resurrection of Jesus means in the grander scheme of things. Jesus’s resurrection is the guarantee of a promise.

The resurrection that matters most of all, says Paul, is the general resurrection, yet to come, of all the dead. In this letter and in others, Paul is very clear that just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so will all of us. And that resurrection is really what is at the center of Christian faith.

The people in Corinth made a basic mistake: they did indeed profess that Christ was raised, but they dismissed the whole notion that all the dead would be raised. Paul explains that you can’t have one without the other. "How can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" Paul asked. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either."

Paul was trying to explain that resurrection of the dead is a general category into which the resurrection of Jesus was a specific example. The Corinthians accepted the specific example but rejected the category.

It would be like saying, "I know that every October 31 kids go trick or treating, but there is no such thing as Halloween."

Or, "I have a basset hound, but there is no such thing in general as dogs."

Or "I watch the Daytona 500, but there is no such thing as NASCAR racing."

You can’t have the one without the other.

That Christ was raised was a real event, Paul wants to make that clear. But if Jesus’ resurrection is ripped away from its context of the general resurrection of all the dead, then Paul knows we are professing Christ for "this life only," and that’s just pitiful. Divorced from the resurrection of all the dead, the meaning and power of Jesus’ resurrection is lost, Paul says. Simply affirming Jesus’ resurrection cannot bring us to God, anyway. As Paul’s co-apostle James wrote, even the demons know that Jesus was raised.

Paul concludes this passage this way:

1.    Jesus really has been raised from the dead. He does not linger on that point because the Corinthians already believed it. But he restates it to set the grounds for what that means, which is:

2.    Jesus was the first to be raised of all the dead.

In the resurrection of Christ, Paul says, the general resurrection of the dead has already begun. That’s why the Corinthians were so profoundly in error about what Christ’s resurrection meant and why they were at risk of still being lost in their sins.

The fundamental promise of God is that he will bring human beings into reconciliation with himself and preserve the redeemed to live with him forever. The dead will be raised to a new life as the way God accomplishes this when, as the Scriptures put it, "Christ puts all things under his feet."

The book of Hebrews says, "And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that comes judgment ..." (v. 9.7). Which is to say that each of us dies and that afterward we are the judged by a wholly righteous God for how we lived this physical life and what we did. The passages emphasizing this point are so numerous that I hardly feel compelled to point them out. Start with Matthew 25, for example.

But how do we know that any of this is true? The whole idea of even a single dead person living again is so preposterous on the face of it that it begs credulity to proclaim it. Can we grasp scaling that up to every person who has ever lived? Paul could, and later he explained that it is not the physical body of the dead that is raised, but the spiritual body. This body of flesh and blood is like a seed. And just as seeds planted in the ground disappear as the plant grows, so does this physical body disappear but the resurrected body appears later of a different kind.

This body perishes, says Paul, but the raised body cannot.

This body is ordinary and unimpressive, but the resurrected body is glorious.

This body is weak, but the resurrected body shows the power of God.

This body is physical, but the resurrected body is spiritual.

But again, how do we know that we will be raised from the dead? We know because God has already raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection is how God has proved he will keep his promise to raise everyone the dead at the end of the age. In fact, Paul sees Jesus’ resurrection as the actual inaugural event of the general resurrection.

Now, I must be careful here because the near-universal belief among us Methodists – and American Christians generally – is that when Christians die, their souls are liberated from the physical body and fly immediately to heaven. This is actual doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, with a pit stop in purgatory along the way to work off unremitted sins.

But that is only one understanding. In Jesus’ day most Jews believed that the dead awaited the resurrection in a state of neither heaven nor hell, but basically are just “warehoused” until the general resurrection. And this is the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I think there is good reason from Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels that he affirmed this idea.

Another understanding is found in Lutheran and some other protestant teaching called “soul sleep” that the souls or spirits of the dead await the resurrection of the dead in a sort of spiritual deep coma. It was only after Luther’s movement succeeded that the RCC made its teaching dogma, about 450 years ago.

And another understanding is that the Bible does not teach the idea of life after death in which a disembodied soul floats out of the body into heaven or survives at all. This says that we do not exist as souls contained in bodies, but we exist as bodies of unified flesh and soul. The death of the body is therefore the destruction of the person altogether. Paul explains elsewhere that death is the most powerful enemy of God, so powerful, in fact, that it is the last enemy of God to be destroyed. So, the Bible does not promise us "life after death," it instead promises that we will live again after we die. After all, if we simply go straight to Heaven when we die, what is the point of the resurrection of the dead?

There is a story of a man leaving a bar after having a rousing time there. He decided to take a shortcut home at midnight by walking through a cemetery. He didn’t see an opened grave and plunged into it. The impact stunned him just enough to enable his whiskey-laden mind and body to go straight asleep.

At daylight he awoke, seeing the blue sky above and the walls of earth all around him. With a sudden fright, he leaped to his feet, stuck his head up and saw hundreds of tombstones and graves all about him. “How about that?” he exclaimed. “Here it is Judgment Day and I’m the first one up!”

That’s what Paul means: Jesus was the first one up. That’s why Paul calls Jesus "the first fruits of those who have died." Your resurrection and mine into eternal life have already begun. Jesus has showed the way. As Hebrews 12 puts it, Jesus is the pioneer of our faith.

Jesus’ resurrection, simply as an historical event, would be a mere curiosity unless it signified something greater than one day in the life of some women who went to a graveyard. The power of Jesus’ resurrection is about what it means for us now.

·        It means that the promises of God are true, that what God says and what God delivers are the one and the same.

·        It means that when God says we will be called to account for how we live out lives, we better take that to heart.

·        It means that when Jesus said and the apostles proclaimed that in him is the remission of our sins, then it is so.

·        It means that we can trust someone who died for us and whose promises of a more abundant life now can be realized now.

·        It means we really can live in love with God and one another. We really can live in peace, filled with joy, in habits of kindness and gentleness and self-control.

The resurrection of Jesus proves that destruction of the physical body is no impediment to God’s saving power, and so our own resurrection is a sure promise of God, also. Hence, we can say with certainty, as Paul later wrote, "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8). 

The only thing of eternal significance

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do

not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant

5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.

7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;

10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

 

Ah, love! Moonlit nights and soft violins! Autumn walks in the park with your one and only. The first time he took your hand, or the first time she didn’t pull her hand away. Your first kiss! Love makes poets of lovers. Samuel Rogers wrote an ode to his sweetheart Jacqueline:

“She was good as she was fair, “None – none on earth above her!

“As pure in thought as angels are:

“To know her was to love her.”

Shakespeare observed that lovers can be oblivious to the obvious. In The Merchant of Venice he wrote,

“But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

“The pretty follies that themselves commit” (Act ii. Sc. 6.)

The praises of love are found in literature reaching back into far antiquity. Socrates philosophized about it, Virgil wrote about it, Jesus commanded it.

Watching soap operas or listening to pop music reveals that as a culture we are very confused about love. It’s easy to get the idea that modern Americans think that love is sex. We are very careful about to whom we say, “I love you.” Grownups can say it to their children innocently, and to parents, but cousins are probably off limits. Even in a church we make sure that when we tell each other of our love, it won’t be taken the wrong way.

Obviously, Paul isn’t talking about sex or romance in this passage. He’s not talking even about the profound thankfulness parents have when they consider their children, although that is probably pretty close.

We are called to love one another as Christ loved us. The love we are to have for one another and neighbor is a holy love that displays us in the image of God. God’s love for humanity is not based on the fact that we are lovable because, let’s face it, often we aren’t. God’s love springs from the nature of God’s own being; that’s just how God is. As disciples of Christ, we are commanded to love that way. We are to love one another and neighbor as an act of the will, not because the object of love can benefit us in some way.

There was a small boy who asked his mother, “How old is God?” His mother answered, “Well, no one can say, but he must be at least billions and billions of years old.”

“Wow,” the boy replied, “I wonder whether God ever gets tired of being God!” That stumped Mom until she remembered that the Bible says, “God is love.” So she answered, “No, God never gets tired because God is love and love never gets tired.”

Love, wrote Paul, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

Let me propose that godly love is the predisposition to desire the best for another, and to act accordingly. Thus, God’s will and God’s love can’t be pulled apart. The love of God for creation is found in God’s creative acts to lure each event toward its best possible outcome. I would say that God cannot will anything apart from his love, nor can he love anything apart from his will.

The supremely best thing for humanity is that we exist for all time in the presence of the one God who brought us into being. It is the best possible outcome for human life and has nothing to do with our own character; it has everything to do with God’s character. If that is God’s will – the Scriptures are explicit that it is – then it must be possible for God to bring it about. (If not, then God is merely a dreamer rather than true deity.) God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we might have eternal life. God’s desire for the best for us and God’s actions to bring it about are indistinguishable. God gave God’s own self to reconcile us with him. God’s love and God’s will are the one and the same.

A teacher examined the school enrollment forms of two brothers one day. The first brother had written his birth date as May 10, 1986. The second brother had written his birth date as May 22, 1986. “That’s impossible!” the teacher declared. “No, it’s not,” said one of the brothers, “because one of us is adopted.” “Which one?” asked the teacher. “We don’t know,” said the other brother. “Mom and Dad have never told us. They said it doesn’t matter.”

That’s how God’s love is. Paul wrote in Romans, “. . . we are God's children [and] heirs of God and co‑heirs with Christ,” (Rom 8:16‑17) and in Ephesians that we are “to be adopted as [God’s] children through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his delight and will” (Eph. 1:5). And it just doesn’t get any better than that for you and me!

We are not God and what comes naturally to God doesn’t come so easily for us. We continually ask, “What’s in it for us?” or “Does the other person deserve it?” We are finite and limited while God isn’t. And so we have to realize that the best we can do for another is also going to be finite and limited. We will rarely know what is truly best for another. We will often fail to act on what we do know. Sometimes the simple perversities of the human spirit will overcome even the strongest predisposition to give of ourselves. Even so, the fact that we cannot do everything must never hinder us from doing something. Love in the name of Christ is a verb, not a noun.

One month a woman in my congregation named Maxine had foot surgery and was fairly immobile for some time afterward. I took her communion one first Sunday. Maxine and her husband and I shared the Lord’s table together in her upstairs room. I visited for awhile and it was just a wonderful time. We joked and laughed and talked about the church and what her recovery would be like, and we prayed together before I left.

As I pulled out onto Murfreesboro Road to head for the nursing homes I had a sort of epiphany. It suddenly struck me what keeps me doing this pastor thing. I answered God’s call out of fear – I was afraid to say no to God. I began the ministry from duty – I had made a promise and had to keep it. But soon after I left Maxine that day, I had a revelation that I am staying in this vocation from neither fear nor duty. I suddenly understood what my job description is: It is to fall in love every day with Christ’s friends in Christ’s name. That’s it.

My only real job as pastor is to fall in love with God’s people every day. And that’s why I do what I do – because love never tires and every day someone needs whatever of Christ’s love I can share. Being in love in Christ’s name is the best thing about being his disciple; in fact, I guess it’s the only thing about it that matters.

Years ago, every Thanksgiving my family and I joined my brother, Will, and his wife at my parents’ home for dinner, altogether nine gathered around the table. My older brother and his family live in Delaware, too far to come for such a short time. Will and I had a running joke one of us always told Dad whenever we gathered with him and Mother for such celebrations, whether Thanksgiving or birthdays or something else. Sometime during Thanksgiving dinner either Will or I said to Dad, “Of course, you know that all your children who truly love you came home for Thanksgiving.” And Dad responded, “Oh, sure, I know that.” We all laughed because we know it isn’t true.

But at such times, if you looked closely, you could see fleeting sorrow flicker across Dad’s face, and a wisp of wistfulness in his eyes. For the breath of one sentence, Dad’s heart was in Delaware because while the table was crowded, it was not full. Not everyone was there who belongs there.

That moment lingered with me when I read something author Bob Benson wrote in Come Share the Being. He and his wife had three children, and he told of how they grew up and went away to college and then got married and made their own homes. They were proud of their children, he wrote, but after their youngest son moved away, “our minds were filled with memories from tricycles to commencements [and] deep down inside we just ached with loneliness and pain.

“And I was thinking about God,” Benson wrote. “He sure has plenty of children – plenty of artists, plenty of singers, and carpenters and candlestick makers, and preachers, plenty of everybody . . . except you, and all of them together can never take your place. And there will always be an empty spot in his heart and a vacant chair at his table when you’re not home.

“And if once in awhile it seems he’s crowding you a bit, try to forgive him. It may be one of those nights when he misses you so much, he can hardly stand it.”

At the end, says Revelation, there is a family reunion. All God’s children are there, seated at the banquet table.

“And yet,” writes David Lowes Watson, in this day “our joy remains guarded . . . for the homecoming celebration has not yet begun in earnest. There are still empty places at the table. There are sinners who still need to come to their senses. There are millions of God’s family still without enough to eat. There are countless of God’s little ones who are still being sinned against with all the demonic ingenuity” of the human race. “We must help invite them home. We must help Christ dry their tears and heal their wounds” – everyone. Should there be even one empty place at the table, even one person whom we have neglected to invite to the banquet as our brother or sister in Christ, “then God’s cry of anguish will rend the cosmos, and the heavenly feast will be eaten in terrible, terrible silence.”

I think the love we are called to have is a love that gives Christ away and invites people to God’s table, to prepare the reunion of God’s children, to leave no vacancies at the heavenly banquet.

Do we dare to say to each other, “I love you”?

I love you.