Raised us I was when memories of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities against the Jews were still relatively fresh in the public mind (my grandparents took in two Jewish children for the duration of the Second World War), I never thought I’d see anti-Semitism rear its ugly head again in my lifetime, yet, tragically, it has become a very real issue today in British politics. Not that it is confined to there; in much of Europe it is once again on the rise, the far right having enjoyed disturbing growth in many countries. I never thought similarly that we’d see a return to overt racism in the UK, but it proved to be a key factor in the Brexit referendum, no matter much how some may like to dress it up otherwise, and is still seen in too many guises today in much of society. Any such prejudice should have no place in Christian thinking, as the following meditation, drawn from my book The Unfolding Story, makes clear.
Reading
Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.’ Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labour. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labour. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of them named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ‘When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.’ Exodus 1:8-16
Meditation
They hated us –
not because we’d done wrong,
nor through any fault on our part,
but because we were different –
another culture,
another faith,
another race.
It was as simple as that.
Immigrants, they called us –
and worse;
good-for-nothing layabouts, sponging off their state,
stealing their women,
taking their jobs,
sapping their wealth,
spoiling their country.
It was nonsense, of course, everybody knew it –
we’d become part of their land,
our lives and destiny interwoven;
pursuing our own faith, admittedly,
worshipping our own God,
but loyal, law-abiding citizens.
oh yes, they knew,
but they preferred to forget it,
for they wanted someone to blame for their troubles –
someone to hound,
someone to hate,
someone to hurt –
and we were the ones chosen,
the luckless scapegoats herded off for sacrifice.
What did they do to us? You wouldn’t believe it.
Things too unspeakable, too terrible to mention!
Yet they were people, that’s what I can’t understand,
ordinary people like you or me;
folk we’d walked with, talked with,
worked with, laughed with,
suddenly cruel, cold, callous monsters.
one day we were human,
the next, objects;
one day, friend,
the next, foe.
Who’d have believed things could change so quickly,
the world turn upside down?
We were different, that’s all,
another tongue,
another creed,
but, for all that, we were still people, just as they were,
flesh and blood feeling joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain.
I thought that mattered,
that whatever divided us, more must unite,
but I was wrong,
so hideously, hopelessly wrong.
Was God to blame?
I believed so at the time,
asking myself, day after day,
how he could stand by and let it happen,
remote in heaven from such dreadful crimes on earth.
And it troubled me deeply,
as much as the suffering itself,
my faith shaken,
dangling on a thread.
But it wasn’t God, I realise that now –
it was man,
man as I never dreamt he could be;
one human being destroying another,
life counting for nothing –
and that disturbs me yet more.
Prayer
Lord,
you have made us all different,
with different characters, different gifts,
different opinions, different insights.
Yet you have made us also, every one of us,
in your own image,
uniquely precious to you.
Forgive us that we allow our differences to come between us
rather than draw us together;
that we see them as a threat rather than a gift.
Forgive us that we find it so hard to change.
We do our best to overcome the prejudice within us,
but it runs deep,
emerging in ways we fail to recognise,
poisoning our very souls.
Teach us to look at ourselves and others with your eyes,
seeing the good and the bad,
the lovely and the unlovely,
the strengths and the weaknesses,
the truths and the falsehoods,
yet seeing always our common humanity.
open our hearts and minds to one another,
and so also to you.
Amen.