Bethlehem and the Heart of Christmas

A call to repentance and hope--and what I am learning from my Palestinian siblings in Christ

Palestinian Christians are the descendants of the very first believers in Christ, a profound truth that should resonate deeply with all of us who honor his birth this season. This is not just hyperbole, but historic fact, confirmed in DNA studies. Some of the closest DNA matches to the bones of ancient Israelites are Palestinian Christians.

When we read the Christmas story—and the Bible in general—we are reading the history of Jews and Palestinians. When we read of Jesus’ siblings and disciples, we can literally meet their descendants selling pomegranate juice or jewelry in the old city today. Or perhaps they are mostly banned from Jerusalem and living on the other side of the separation wall.

Earlier this year, in reference to the Israeli settlement expansion in Makhrour Valley, outside of Bethlehem, Historian William Dalrymple writes: "The Israelis are eliminating one of the last Christian Palestinians strongholds in the West Bank and the place I chose to stay when I was researching the Palestinian Christians in From the Holy Mountain. It is a place with an incredibly ancient history, a cradle of Christianity, and its people have some of the closest DNA matches to the people of the time of Christ. Why is no one reporting this?"

For those of us who are Christians, our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ—who should be honored as the first fruits of our faith— are suffering under a racist regime (which they experience on both a local and global scale) that strips them of their humanity, history and dignity; denies their ancient connection to the land and deep indigenous roots; and erases their presence from the land. Now, they are on the verge of extinction. Worst of all, this racism (another type of antisemitism specific to those semites who stayed in the Holy Land for the past two thousand years) is most tragically laid upon them by their brothers and sisters in Christ around the world.

The honor we owe to our Palestinian siblings in Christ is no more or less than what is intrinsically owed to all humanity. God is not racist. Nevertheless, because so many people indeed view both Palestinians and Israeli Jews through a profoundly racist lens, I bring this up, allowing the DNA evidence to refute the logic that has been weaponized against Palestinians. It is also true that even if Palestinians were purely Arabs who migrated to Israel in the last few hundred years, as many as Zionists claim, that would still not justify Israel’s treatment of them, any more than systematic oppression is justified anywhere.

This prejudice, whether active or passive, doesn’t blink when Palestinian homes are demolished, when their lands are stolen, when their ancient olive trees uprooted, when their culture is intentionally divided, when they are ethnically cleansed, bombed, imprisoned, and erased from the story of “Israel’s redemption.” They are cast as opponents of God’s will, told to suck it up and move to a different part of the world because “God promised the land to the Jews.” They are even slandered as “antisemites” for daring to name and protest their oppression. There’s much more I could add.

One example of the erroneous history present in Christian Zionist circles: Palestinian Christians are often framed as Arab sons of Ishmael who only need to stop being jealous and resentful of their Jewish cousins who are sons of Isaac and to whom many promises exclusively belong. Jack Munayer, a Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem, wrote a devastating account of this type of preaching at a conference he attended in Jerusalem a few years ago. You may also want to listen to his address on the Delegitimization of Palestinian Christians at Christ at the Checkpoint around the same time.

It’s true that much of this racism has been accepted and taught in ignorance. Many in the West have not historically been aware of the existence of Palestinian Christians, and the church overall has had a convoluted, fanciful approach to both Palestinians and Jews. We have often reduced them both to mere tropes, as overly-simplified caricatures--players for good or bad in God’s end-time purposes. Both Palestinians and Jews are suffering and have historically suffered for our embrace of these tropes, and the suffering at this moment is at a crescendo in Gaza.

In the past we acted in ignorance. But with the information we have today, we must do better.

What better time to repent—to change our mind—than at Christmas? That genocide is occurring in the Holy Land for the second Christmas in a row should give us pause for celebrating as usual. Whatever is being destroyed in the Holy Land right now is being destroyed even moreso in us who passively enable it. As Munther Isaac said, “We Palestinians will recover from this. But I feel sorry for you who were silent during this genocide. Will you recover?”

“The Holy Child” by Ramone Romero

What is Christmas about, anyway?

Our Christmases are often shallow, susceptible to commercialization. We know this. We talk about it every year, even as we watch Christmas movies and dream about a perfect Christmas-- whatever that means. In our hearts we want Christmas to be more, but we often don’t know how to get there, even if we deck the halls of our churches with boughs of holly. Deep inside, many of us are looking for ways to connect more deeply with the power of this story and, to believe its message.

Here at the second Christmas into the Gaza genocide, I must ponder and provoke with these questions to my Western siblings in Christ. My words are strong, but I don’t know how else to say this. As I write, the suffering in Gaza is past description. Dogs and cats are feasting on the broken bodies of men, women, children, elderly, lying in the streets. In the past day or so, Kamal Adwan hospital, the last “functioning” hospital in the north of Gaza issued a strangled cry for help, cut off, isolated, surrounded by explosive-laden robots, and starving. The stories coming out of Gaza are the stuff of nightmares, far beyond the typical horror of war stories in which soldiers clash in battle. What is happening is not normal. This is the stuff of the darkest tragedies of human history. This is genocide. We should mourn this, which is unfolding in real time, exactly as we now mourn the Holocaust and other genocides in the past.

This Christmas, my heart is heavy for the role that bad theology has played in all of this. Haven’t we (particularly the church in the west, and Christians elsewhere who emulate us) caused enough damage with our hubris, our childish handling of God’s holy things? Haven’t we caused enough destruction now, to both Palestinians and Jews, to make us lie facedown on the floor in sackcloth and ashes for a few years, at least? We should be silent, humble, chastened. We should also be vocal, active. We should be anything other than going along with life as usual. We should be— as some of the ancestors of the Jews and Palestinians entreated us—rending our hearts before God. And Christmas is a perfect time to do it.

In that rending, he will give us a better story. We will encounter a bigger idea of redemption, honor, justice, mercy, healing, and reconciliation. We will find a bigger concept of God’s covenantal faithfulness, with love for all humanity shining at the center of it like a North Star that is brighter than seven suns. When we repent of passive racism, willful ignorance and abdicating responsibility—and all the other sins that distort the beautiful kingdom that flows through Christ’s incarnation—we will finally enter into the New Covenant and abide in its beauty. There we will find the grace to love as he does, for it will be his love flowing through us that will upend our little worlds and destroy our little theologies, turning us blind for a time so that we can ultimately, truly see. That is ultimately a very small price to pay to enter into the kingdom whose heartbeat is hospitality and welcome, and whose highest seats at the table are reserved for the poor and lowly.

It is Bethlehem and her inhabitants that taught me the real meaning of Christmas: God is with us in our suffering. He appears in unexpected ways and through people we’d not expect and in places we did not anticipate. His birth is a countercultural expression against all individual and collective dominance and arrogance.

Christ in the Rubble, by Kelly Latimore.

Christmas is God putting himself on the line as a vulnerable baby in midst of human slaughter and massacres and forced displacement and torture, God vulnerable under pompous power grabbers and their brutal governments. It is God with us, even in our worst suffering. Christmas belongs first and foremost to the broken, the lonely, the grieving, the outcast.

That is what Jesus and his family went through during the first Christmas, and it is what Jesus and his family are still going through today in Bethlehem.

While we drink the sweet honey of Christmas, let us especially honor those who paid the price for this holiday to be ours. The honey came forth from their bones and blood. It was and still is refined in their tragedy, under various occupations and empires which have come and gone over the centuries, and to which our nation is now a prime contributor. The sentimentality and hope of Christmas (in its best sense) is like the cream that rises to the top of the story. But when we sip the sweet cream and ignore the rest of the story, thus missing its point, we grow fat and complacent, dull and self-satisfied. When we sip the surface of the story and are sated, we become spiritually impoverished. What we need is a full immersion into the reality that produced the story so that we may live in a way that is worthy of the price others paid for us to receive it—a price which rests most completely upon the shoulders of a little child born in Bethlehem, whose birth we are now celebrating.

How can we repent and enter into a more fulfilling and accurate remembrance of the Christmas story? Here’s a start: Let us go forth to our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ, “outside the gate,” bearing their reproach, and so experience the deepest Christmas reality and its truest heart. And then, let us do something to help them remain in their ancient homeland, where their presence bears witness to His reality in a unique way. Let us do something to bring an end to this unspeakable violence in Gaza. Let us do something for healing and justice and mercy and truth in His land. I cannot think of a better gift we could give the Lord on this celebration of his birth.