The last words Jesus spoke to his follower's before his martyrdom was to "put down the sword" and his first words after his resurrection was "peace be with you."
During one of my seven trips to occupied Palestine since 2005, Mohammad Alatar, film producer of "The Ironwall" addressed my group on an Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions tour through Jerusalem and to the village of Anata and the Shufat refugee camp, in the very area where the prophet Jeremiah in the 6th century B.C. critiqued the violent conflicts in the Mid East, which were already old news: "I hear violence and destruction in the city, sickness and wounds are all I see." [Jeremiah 6:7]
After we broke bread and ate a typical Palestinian feast prepared by the Arabiya family in the ArabyiaPeaceCenter, Mohammad Alatar said, "I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it. What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues. Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel. After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. It is a moral issue that the churches must address."
Christians are called by God to prayerfully use the gift of discernment and to test all things according to the teachings of Jesus. A follower of Jesus- perhaps anyone with a good conscience- would understand that war is the ultimate form of terrorism as well as the supreme expression of the spirit of the Antichrist-meaning against what Christ taught and modeled with his life-which was to be a Peacemaker, not to bomb, torture or occupy any.
The term Christianity was not even coined
until three decades after Christ walked the earth. Until the day of Paul,
followers of Jesus were called members of The Way; the way being what he
taught!
Christ was never a Christian, but he was a social justice, radical
revolutionary NONVIOLENT Palestinian devout Jewish road warrior who rose up and
challenged the job security of the Temple authorities by teaching the people
they did NOT need to pay the priests for ritual baths or sacrificing livestock
to be OK with God; for God already LOVED them just as they were: sinners, poor,
diseased, outcasts, widows, orphans, refugees and prisoners all living under
Roman Military Occupation; and what got him crucified was for disturbing the
status quo of the Roman Occupying Forces.
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