As Holy Week begins, the Gazelle offers these words for meditation--from a respected Palestinian Christian church leader from Jerusalem:

I wish you every blessing as we turn our faces towards Jerusalem during the coming week, remembering that at the heart of our liturgical celebrations this week is the acknowledgement that human beings deny and kill the truth and the goodness of God when it comes among us, for it subverts our ways of doing and arranging our world. We do not like it when there is an Oscar Romero around, or a Martin Luther King. They tend to challenge our norms of doing things and thinking about our 'security', so we resort to killing them. It is in this sense, that we say, Jesus died because of our sin, for we simply do not want his truth, He literally died because we do not like him - that is our sin. And yet God in his mercy, forgives, and accepts us even before we have confessed our wrongdoing: 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do'. Jesus intercedes for our forgiveness even before we have asked for it, reflecting the nature of the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, who accepts the son before he even began to speak.

We know not what we do. And in our mutual relations, and the destructive relations between nations, we tend to expect and seek flippantly for retaliation in first. Jesus, on the other hand, gets his forgiveness in first. How shocking? We do not know that we hurt ourselves too when we do not seek mutual healing from others. Jerusalem does not know what it is that provides for its peace. But, it is made possible, and is revealed to us to be God's gift always, in the history of Jesus. In his God-sized Resurrection that cannot be assessed or defined in human terms we have God's yes to us. As it is a God-sized event, it has made the history of Jesus of Nazareth not limited to one time and one place, but to all the places and even the darkest corners of the earth; for now we know that even death is invested with God's mercy. May we grow to accept that gift, and always seek to forgive one another as God forgave us in Christ, accept one another as God accepts us in Christ, and love one another as God loves us in Christ, and in no other way. And may this especially be the case in Jerusalem, which seems to refuse God's presence at all times, as the two peoples of Israel and Palestine refuse to look each other in the face, and see their goodness there. We too need to look Jesus in the face, and see our victim there; but, in that gazing into our victim, we do not find a request for revenge, or retaliation, and even reparation, but sheer grace to release us and sustain us anew at all times.