Turn Back, O Man

Two Hezbollah rockets hit an open area of the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona on Monday, and Israeli police said 134 Hezbollah rockets slammed into northern parts of the Jewish state on Sunday. The news resonates with Amos’ prophecy in the Eighth Century BCE, when Assyria was the aggressor: “the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste…” (Am 7:9) Assyria was just one of the rising and falling powers that have tramped upon the Promised Land over the centuries. International or inter-kingdom conflict has been a feature of the Middle East for well over three millennia.

“Age after age their tragic empires rise, built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep…” Clifford Bax, an English hymnodist, wrote this in 1916, at the request of his friend, Gustav Holst. This was during The Great War, of course – “the war to end all wars.” Bax was hopeful in his last stanza: “Earth shall be fair, and all her people one: nor till that hour shall God’s whole will be done.” Fifty-four years and a second world war later, Stephen Schwartz still had to use the future tense when he adapted Bax’s hymn for the musical, Godspell. This time, America’s was the tragic empire, though it was failing to rise in Viet Nam.

When will God’s will be done? Amos believed Assyria served as an instrument of God’s judgment upon Israel for her failure to act justly toward some of her residents. As God’s oracle, he said, “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the poor as upon the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed.” (2:6-7) Might we not say – without justifying or lauding Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, and the rest – that this most recent round of Middle East conflict may be a judgment for denying justice to the Palestinians?

This is not a matter of laying blame, but rather of pointing out that no one is blameless. In the long cycle of conflict in the Middle East, there’s enough blame to go around everywhere. Every capitol deserves Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” (Lk 19:42) But recognizing and then effecting these things are two different matters.

If any recent Middle East player recognized at least some things that make for peace, it was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. His 1977 initiative made him the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, leading to the Nobel Prize winning Camp David Peace Accord in 1978. Alas, this struck Egypt’s Islamic Jihad organization and most of the Arab world as a betrayal, and he was assassinated. (A Muslim cleric’s fatwa approved the murder beforehand.)

Recognizing the things that make for peace is only the first step. The will and the power to put them into effect are the second and third steps. Sadat made two out of three, and then struck out. It may seem from this that everyone is ultimately powerless in regard to peace. But still, Clifford Bax’s vision of a fair earth with all people one is much to be preferred to dreams of empire. It is an essential counterbalance, and till that hour God’s whole will shall not be done. So, as Bax insists, “turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways!” Or else high and low places everywhere shall be laid waste.