Lifting Up Our Gaze to Gaza

Over the next three weeks, the Christian season of Lent will overlap with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which started yesterday at sundown. Yesterday. When a billion Christians read the Gospel text where the radical rabbi Jesus tells the wealthy and powerful Nicodemus that Jesus himself must be lifted up on a cross – just like Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. 

Jesus was giving a little sermon on the story in the Hebrew bible about the post-exodus Israelites getting bit by poisonous snakes. God tells Moses to make a bronze snake, put it on a pole and raise it up whenever someone gets bit – so they can look up at the snake and be healed. Jesus says that he is now playing the role of the bronze snake. 

In the Gospel story, Jesus will inevitably be lifted up on a cross. Because he paved a path that threatened those who clung to their privilege, power and wealth. Radical Christian spirituality roots salvation in gazing at Jesus up on that imperial cross. 

We gaze to get out of denial. 

We gaze to remember who empire is crucifying – and resist it. 

We gaze to get healed from the ways that empire 

gets inside of us and makes us spiritually sick. 

For far too long, Western Christianity has counterfeited the gaze. It played the role of imperial savior instead of being the balm that heals the world of the imperial disease of supremacy. It has signed off on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Black racism. It has sanctified the colonization and crucifixion of Muslims all over the world. 

For the next three weeks, what if radical disciples in the West set our Lenten intention to gaze at the crucified people of Gaza? Gaza, where Muslim Palestinians - forced into famine - will be fasting during daylight hours. 

We gaze. 

We mourn. 

We metabolize. 

We mobilize. 

We are not playing the role of imperial saviors. 

We are getting saved from empire itself. 

Which might get us crucified in the process.