Who do you say that I am?

Words don’t come easily – like sorry…. [and] forgive me, forgive me.

Tracy Chapman

Some years ago I was with a group of Christians and Jews travelling to Israel and Palestine at the invitation of the Council of Christians and Jews. The hope was that by visiting together, each of us carrying our incomplete understanding of the situation in the Holy Land, including of course unconscious cultural, religious and political biases, would see things through others’ eyes and return partially enlightened: gifted with a more nuanced understanding and greater openness to other readings of a notoriously complex situation.

In Jericho, an ancient and predominantly Muslim Palestinian city which, nevertheless, for people like us still echoes with stories from the Hebrew Bible, we met a small group of young Fatah activists. A Jewish member of the group, apparently forgetting the likes of Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, founding fathers of Israel and former members of the Irgun and Stern gangs, asked anguishedly why the walls had pictures of terrorists like Yasser Arafat and George Habash? The answer, of course, was that these were ‘martyrs’ of the Palestinian nationalist cause, just as Begin and Shamir were heroes of Zionism.

The conversation turned to the person of Jesus.  ‘Jesus, of course, was a Jew’ someone observed innocently. I don’t recall if they were Christian or Jewish. ‘No he wasn’t’ retorted fiercely a young Christian Palestinian woman who had been accompanying the group.  ‘He was a Palestinian.’  It was apparently unthinkable that he might be considered to have been both a Jew, and from Palestine.

Jesus, I suspect, would have smiled. Born out of wedlock, threatened from birth with assassination, a refugee before he could walk, destined to be stalked, arrested, interrogated, stripped, tortured and finally, assassinated, Jesus knew how hard it is to face the truth about who we are and who we are called to become.

‘Who do people say that I am?’ Fact and fantasy intermingle.  Glasses can be half full and half empty at the same time. The truth is always elusive, fleeting. Labels and identities can be, and often are deceptive. ‘Who gets to decide who is a terrorist?’ I was asked recently by a twelve-year-old at a local school where I’d been asked to give a talk.

So when Jesus asks his friends ‘Who do you say that I am?’ he is not looking for self-definition (his).  He is asking for them to commit to the journey, despite any confusion about the purpose or destination. For most of us, most of the time, the honest answer to the most deeply problematic existential issues about who we are, let alone who He is, is ‘I just don’t know.’ I don’t know why I feel the way I do watching my father approaching his death this New Year. I don’t know what to understand about human nature, or God’s nature, as I watch the killing unfold in Israel and Gaza. I have some reflections, momentary insights and emotions, but they do not add up to a convincing answer. They don’t point to any solution. The truth is that my brain cannot compute this level of hatred, aggression, depravity. My heart goes out, yes – as on a journey into the unknown. I feel strong emotions. But to what do they point?

Imagine if we were to pluck a mother from Gaza who has lost her children in an Israeli airstrike, and an Israeli teenager who has lost her grandmother, and ask them to ask each other ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Would any words come? Is it possible in such circumstances to acknowledge that at some profound level you are who I am, and I am who you are? We are both human. Crimes committed against you, and against me, are the same crime. One is not less hurtful, or destructive, than the other. Both degrade, dehumanise, destroy.

It was been hard to celebrate Christmas last year. Not impossible, but hard. Jesus came among us to save us from the hatred and the violence that we inflict on one another. He came so that we might believe that this is not who we really are. We are better than this. And with His help we can commit ourselves to being better. We can acknowledge our similarities. We can learn to forgive – each other, and then ourselves (or is it the other way round?). We can live with a hope that redemption, even from the gravest error, sin, corruption, is possible. 

In the midst of the horrors we are witnessing in southern Israel and Gaza, there has still to be some kind of hope. Not a hoping in me, or a hoping in you, or us hoping in each other. For now, that may be just too difficult. Especially if we experience ourselves as the victim of unwarranted aggression; or if we are the aggressor, subsumed with violent hatred or a deep, isolating sense of shame for what we have done. No, our hope can only be a hope in Him. Only through that hope comes the possibility that we can carry on and find another way – one that is not dehumanising, that doesn’t rely on the other being refused, cancelled, denigrated, even killed so that I, or mine, can prosper. My future at your expense.

I can’t pretend to have arrived in this hallowed place of hope or understanding. It is surely unrealistic to expect anyone who has experienced, or is still experiencing, the horrors of Gaza or southern Israel post October 6, to be in a place of hope. Almost certainly they won’t; not for a very long time. We have to be patient in our hoping.

At some point though, if we are not to surrender our humanity, we have to find the courage to ask each other, without presuming to know the answer: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ And take it from there.

© Tim Livesey, 2024.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “Abstract geometry” by kevin dooley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Tim Livesey

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Tim is CEO of Embrace the Middle East which partners Christian groups working with the marginalised in the region. Prior to his appointment in 2017 he worked in government – nearly 20 years in the Foreign Office - and politics, and as an adviser to Rowan Williams when he was Archbishop of Canterbury.

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