Shrieking Stones
This Sunday will be Palm Sunday, the day when our lenten journey focuses in on the painful story that leads to the glorious hope of our Christian faith. Jesus told his disciples to grab a colt and then he put on a really impressive, politically satrical, show. The Palm Procession described in Luke 19 is a direct mimcry, if not subtle mockery, of the entrance of conquering generals and rulers into Jerusalem, an ancient city with abundant history of processions like these.
But instead of accompanying an army or a crowd of sycophants and courtiers, Jesus’ path was covered in robes and palm fronds by a crowd of normal people in Jerusalem, the poor and hopeful. Instead of riding a war horse or a chariot, Jesus rode a colt. A humble donkey. Jesus knew what he was doing. He was eliciting memories of the prophet Zechariah who wrote,
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9 NRSVUE)
But something new to me caught my attention this year, as I looked at this story. It’s something else Jesus said, something that referenced yet another prophetic oracle. When Jesus was asked to silence the voices of the raucous crowd he said, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” It’s likely that he was hinting at a prophetic oracle of Habbakuk, who wrote, “For a stone from the wall shall shriek and a wooden beam answer it: woe, who builds a town with bloodshed [and] founds a city with wrongdoing.” (Habbakuk 2:11-12; translation Robert Alter ©2019 W.W. Norton and Company)
Sometimes, the realities of the present bring up echoes and memories of the past. Just as Jesus’ theatre elicted memories of the past, and his words rhymed with the prophets’ warnings, I find myself thinking of stones today, too.
The stones that come to mind litter the streets of the modern day Gaza Strip. The stones I find myself pondering consist of demolished infrastructure across the open-air prisons that trap the Palestinian people in the lands we Christians call “Holy.”
More than anything else from this passage in Luke and its prophetic quotations, I am stunned by the relevance of the words of Habbakuk Jesus refers to as Habbakuk’s words seem speak directly to the plight of the Palestinian people: “For a stone from the wall shall shriek and a wooden beam answer it: woe, who builds a town with bloodshed [and] founds a city with wrongdoing.”
How much bloodshed and wrongdoing has been baked in the expansion of the state of Israel? (Like recognizes like; it seems very much like the same bloodshed and wrongdoing suffused in the expansion of the United States as a nation in its own history.)
Over fifty-thousand Palestinian people, a third of that number being children under the age of 18, have perished at the hands of a vengeful military force in the state of Israel—a state founded by land taken from the people who lived there for centuries, some of them jewish, through the joint actions of European colonizers and the United States in the wake of World War 2—whose military actions have been funded to the tune of over 19 billion dollars in just three years by the United States.
My tax dollars have decapitated children. The blood of innocent Palestinians are on my hands. If you are a US citizen, they are on yours too.
I’d love to have something more lighthearted to say as we approach a season of egg hunts and joy over the retelling of our resurrection story. But before we can get to hope of any kind, we have to fully confront reality. And confronting reality means acknowledging something that we really aren’t capable of fully understanding at this point: the sheer devastation, loss of life, and extent of violence endured by Palestinian people for multiple generations, amplified astronomically over the past two years.
I write this not to discount the heinous acts of murder and kidnapping by Hamas on October 7, 2023. But confronting reality also requires us to acknowledge the unfathomable discrepancy that now exists between that act of evil, and the ongoing genocide unfolding in Palestine today.
I also write this fully aware of the climate of discourse in our country that so often has a kneejerk reaction to any criticism of the state of Israel, labeling such criticism as anti-semitic. And to that I say, if criticizing this genocide (yes it is a genocide) is, indeed, anti-semitic, then the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, among so many others, would also be considered anti-semitic for their own criticism and warnings about the behavior of the Kings and governments that led the Isrealite people.
I write this pondering Jesus’ words as he processed into Jerusalem among so many desperate people. What would the stones have said if they had to cry out then? And what would the stones in Gaza shriek today? And, perhaps most difficult for me to acknowledge due to my complicity, at what point will the shrieking of stones truly begin in response to the thundering silence of the world as it relates to the plight of the generationally dispossesed, starved, bombarded and murdered people of Palestine?
As a pastor, I still claim to be a captive to hope. And my hope isn’t necessarily in a two-state solution or any other geo-political strategy concocted in smoked filled rooms or cabins at Camp David. If I can find any hope in this story, it is in the remarkable resilience and strength of the Palestinian people who still, to this day, write poetry, pray to God, and press olive oil despite the bombs, starvation, and genocide.
And for that bewildering strength, I give thanks to God. الله أكبر.
