Articles - From the Vicar

How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!

Lamentations is a book of the Bible more commonly associated with Passiontide than Eastertide. Its five chapters are a haunting threnody whose original context was almost certainly the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587BC and the subsequent exile of the Jews. Some six centuries later Christians began to interpret Lamentations as pointing to the suffering and death of Jesus as he took upon himself the sins of the whole world. For both Jew and Christian the unremitting darkness of the text of Lamentations certainly justifies the words of one writer who sees the book as part of the struggle of human beings 'to speak in the face of God's silence'.

These sombre reflections arise out of a different - and contemporary - Middle East catastrophe. The Israeli Defence Force, acting in the name of a nation whose population has been brutalised by indiscriminate suicide bombings, has in turn brutalised the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a symmetrically indiscriminate attempt to eradicate terrorism. In the wider world, meanwhile, Jews, Christians and Muslims look on in horror as places and buildings holy to all three faiths are rendered inaccessible for security reasons or, worse, desecrated in increasingly savage and deadly confrontations.

The Palestinian and Jewish populations of the Middle East exist under adjoining yet separate carapaces whose impenetrable hardness has been formed by the accretions of history. On the one hand Israel, a nation whose self-identity was forged in the furnace of the European Holocaust, seems psychologically unable to recognise the despair that has led to teenage Palestinian girls blowing themselves up on crowded Israeli streets. On the other hand the Palestinians, whose self-identity has been forged in the squalid refugee camps of the Occupied Territories and the wider Levant, seem psychologically unable to recognise the fragility of the Jewish people's sense of security, surrounded as they are by nations many of whom continue to deny the right of Israel to exist.

As we continue to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and the whole Middle East, let us pray particularly for a dissolving of those twin carapaces of history that have for so long prevented Israeli and Palestinian from working together for a future that is founded on peace, justice and reconciliation.

{content}