Each week we let Saint Pope John Paul II share meaningful signposts to spark socio-economic resolves through justice and righteousness combined with mercy and compassion; in short, love
The Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Linz – Friday, June 24, 1988: It is difficult to find more expressive words than we have just heard from the lamentations traditionally ascribed to the Prophet Jeremiah.
More than 40 years have passed since the death camps, including Mauthausen, spread shudders and horror. This atrocity happened in the heart of Europe. These high crimes against humanity – brutality, evil, barbarism, cruelty, violence – occurred in the middle of our century, towards the end of the second millennium after Christ.
The lamentations of Jeremiah foreshadow the sufferings of our Messiah.
…
In this place, here in Mauthausen, there were people who, in the name of an insane ideology, set in motion a whole system of contempt and hatred of other people. They tortured them, broke their bones, and ruthlessly abused their bodies and souls. They callously persecuted their victims. “In the dark, they let them live like people who have long since died.”
They “walled up” those who were captured. They “put them in heavy shackles,” “barred their way with blocks” to freedom, to their dignity, to the fundamental rights of every human being, to life. Here one relied on death, on the annihilation of everybody who was thought to be the other; also, because they were just “different.” And perhaps only because they were “human”?
Are the roads really “blocked” for people, society, humanity? As the Prophet says, they were “fed with bitter food, soaked in wormwood” and finally “pressed into the dust.”
People from yesterday – and today, if the system of extermination camps is still going on somewhere in the world today, tell us what our century conveys to those who come next?
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What Does Christianity Say About One People, One Land, One God?
By Abraham A. van Kempen
When asked on my first day in kindergarten, ‘where were you born,’ I sparkled with pride: ‘Palaestina!’ Palaestina, pronounced in Dutch, sounded so exotic.
Later, I realized I was born a refugee, onboard a British ship on the Red Sea, between Africa, Asia, and Europe; on the outskirts of Israel-Palestine, of Dutch parents with dual nationalities, British and Dutch, making me more European than most (but I look Kamaāina, Hawaiian; a long story). To complicate matters, I was born a Jew — my mother was a Jew — in Israel-Palestine, a life without borders.
The Region is home. Inside my soul and within all my being, I am attached to the splendor of its many colors, their tints and hues, and ALL my people. I understand intuitively why neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will ever leave.
My story is the story of many Jews. We are blessed with diversity. That we are one immortal pure-race tribe, exclusively begotten from the seeds of Abraham, is spiritual. Physically, it is improbable and genetically implausible. Nonetheless, myths abound.
What is not mythical is that many indigenous Palestinians are more heritably linked to the Ancient Israelites than most European Jews who have wandered into the Region, seeking refuge from 1,900 years of persecution, especially after World War II. Historically, many Jews in the Diaspora descend from pagan converts into Judaism.
Will a shared identity prompt the ‘cousins’ to share the Land? Is there another choice?
‘Christian Zionism … Enraptured Around a Golden Calf’ pits the Holy Trinity of Zionism – One People, One Land, One God – against the Holy Trinity of Christianity– ALL people, ALL nations, One God. The New Testament’ ingathers and redeems ALL people, not just one tribe; ALL the nations, not just one state; indeed, glorifying the ONE ‘I Am’ with Many Names – in Hebrew: Hayah asher hayah, ‘I Will Be Who or How or Where I Will Be’ or just Eloah; or, in the Arabic sound-alike, Allah.
Our New Covenant 1) frees Modern Jews from their Jews-only, ancestry-ghetto-mentality; 2) renounces Modern Israel’s obsession for possession of a Land once promised and fulfilled; and 3) refutes the Israeli edict: “What is mine is mine, what is yours is mine also.”
‘Christian Zionism … Enraptured Around the Golden Calf’ aspires to gently hammer Christians into fully embracing the Good News. Many Evangelicals unwittingly sideline the Gospel’s stance on the Promised Land by replacing the Promised Land with Modern Israel. Christian Zionists confuse Biblical Zionism with Pagan-Zionism, their Golden Calf.
Will Evangelicals rediscover New Testament Revelations? Is restoration — a revival — imminent?
When theology becomes too puzzling and perplexing even for the theologian and geo-politics, too convoluted for the politicians, students, scholars and researchers, and just plain folk from all walks of life come out of the woodwork to help disentangle the ambiguities, to combine the contradictions creatively. What sort of people are they? People with common sense!
The result?
A provocative perspective to review and reevaluate in line with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity!”
What’s he saying?
“A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions,” says Holmes.
What does Jesus say about the Promised Land?
“The ‘Promised Land,'” says Jesus Christ, the Messiah, God in the flesh … the Promised Land is the Kingdom of God, on earth as in heaven, Land without borders.‘
The Title of Ownership in the Promised Land, the Kingdom of God, the ‘New Jerusalem,’ the ‘City of God,’ ‘Zion,’ is vested in the New Testament, inscribed in blood on Calvary, for all people of all nations, indeed, endowed by God, the one ‘I Am’ with many names of ALL, for ALL.
van Kempen, Abraham A. Christian Zionism … Enraptured Around a Golden Calf – 2nd Edition: Evangelicals Rediscovering New Testament Revelations (p. 1-4). Fast Pencil Publishing. Kindle Edition.
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Saint Pope John Paul II continues …
Tell us, have we not forgotten your hell in too great a hurry?
Aren’t we erasing the traces of old crimes in our memory and consciousness?
Tell us in which direction should Europe and humanity develop “after Auschwitz, “… “after Mauthausen”?
Are we moving away from the terrible experiences of that time [TO NEVER AGAIN]?
Tell us how human beings should be and how future generations should live beyond the traces of humanity’s great defeat of humankind?
How should a person react today to inhuman acts?
Tell us what should the nations and societies be like?
Speak because you have the right to do so – you, the person who suffered and lost your life … we must listen to your testimony.
In the words of the Lamentations, the Prophet exclaims: “The Lord’s grace is not exhausted; his mercy is not over. It’s new every morning; great is your loyalty“.
One is “the man of pain” who has been loyal to all people of pain, here in Mauthausen, and wherever in the world where they have suffered or are still being scorned by an inhuman system.
There has been such a man of pain. Pain still exists. His cross remains present in the history of the world
Are we allowed to move away from this cross?
Can we walk past him into the future? Europe, [Israel-Palestine, America, World] can you walk past him?
Don’t you at least have to stop by him?
Christ! Christ of so much human suffering, humiliation, and desolation.
Christ crucified and risen! In a place – one of so many – that cannot be erased from the history of our century.
Stay and live on in our future!
Stay and live on!
Where shall we go? You have words of life that death did not hide, not destroy …
Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, you have words of eternal life. Have mercy on all of us – forgive us!
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