The Christian Witness

In a statement that has topped many of the headlines this week, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, has offered his response to the still-escalating conflict in Israel and Gaza: demanding the return of the children taken into Gaza during Hamas’s initial attack on Israel, he offered his “absolute availability” to be taken hostage in exchange for them, expressing their return as “absolutely necessary” for ending the astounding violence still erupting in the Holy Land.

The Cardinal’s willingness to make so extreme a sacrifice for the sake of peace is accompanied by the witness of other Christians in the area clinging, too, to the dictates and promises of the Gospel even in the midst of their grim circumstances. The hospital that suffered a devastating airstrike earlier this week was – it turns out – being run by the Anglican church, with Christians standing at the frontlines of caring for those sick and injured. And the Christian leaders of Jerusalem released a statement last weekend, inviting all those of goodwill to observe a Day of Prayer and Fasting this past Tuesday, in support of those suffering and of those families “reeling.” Citing Genesis, they took “God created mankind in his own image” as the epigraph to their letter.

In a moment of escalating humanitarian crisis and astonishing devastation, that image might be hard to see. But it may also be that the present darkness illuminates the true brightness of the ordinary charity demanded of each of us, all the time – our willingness to lay down our lives for our friends, to care for the suffering, to pray and fast for our brothers and sisters. As Christians in the Middle East continue to carry out this charity in extraordinary circumstances, we can hold them as signs, surely, of the image and presence of God made manifest through their “ordinary” Christian witness (and our own) even now.

In the midst of troubling times, it can be helpful to turn to the life and theology of the saints. Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque was a French nun to whom Jesus appeared numerous times, giving her the task of spreading devotion to His Sacred Heart: Jesus showed her his flaming heart and told her that he could no longer contain his burning love. He wanted to pour it out on all mankind, and she was to spread this message to the world.

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