Transcription
Let us pray. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Oh most holy trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We bow before you in this sacred moment. We ask you, Lord Jesus Christ, the prince of peace, the king of all nations, the alpha and the omega, to descend upon this place. Send us your Holy Spirit, that spirit of truth, who leads us into all truth, that we might not be deceived, that we might not be seduced by the spirit of this age, that we might not follow false prophets who come to us wearing the garments of piety, but who carry within their words the seeds of destruction and war.
Blessed Mother Mary, Queen of Peace, intercede for us. Stand beside us as you stood at the foot of the cross, courageous, unwavering, never abandoning your son, even in his darkest hour. Help us to stand with equal courage beside the truth of the gospel today.
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our safeguard against the wickedness and the snares, the snares, I tell you, of the devil.
Lord, open our eyes. Open our ears. Give us hearts that are not hardened, minds that are not clouded, and souls that are not captivated by any earthly empire, any earthly king, any earthly agenda, but only by you. Only by you. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
What if I told you? What if I told you right now in this very moment that there are millions of Christians, tens of millions of Christians who are not merely tolerating this war in the Middle East? What if I told you they are celebrating it? What if I told you they are praying for it to continue? What if I told you they believe they sincerely, devoutly believe that God Almighty, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, wants this war, that he demands this war, that he has ordained this war as the necessary prologue to the second coming of our Lord.
Stay with me, my friends. Stay with me because what I am about to share with you is perhaps the most important theological conversation the church must have in our time. It is a conversation that has been avoided. It has been whispered about in seminaries and suppressed in pulpits. But I tell you, I tell you with every fiber of my being as a shepherd of souls, it can be avoided no longer. We are talking about Christian Zionism. And we as Catholics, as heirs of the full deposit of faith, as the church built upon the rock of Peter, we have a response. We have a responsibility. And we have a truth that the world desperately needs to hear. So let us begin.
You may have heard the name John Haggi. You may have seen the rallies, the enormous stadiums filled with people waving flags, singing praise music, weeping tears of what they believe to be holy joy as maps of the Middle East are displayed on enormous screens. You may have heard the declarations, the proclamations that say the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, that the gathering of the Jewish people in the land is the beginning of the end times. That the church must support unconditionally and without question every military action, every political decision, every territorial expansion of the modern state of Israel. Because to oppose it, they say to even question it is to oppose God himself.
This is not a fringe movement, my friends. I want you to understand the scale of what we are discussing. This movement has shaped the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. It has influenced presidents. It has mobilized billions of dollars. It has sent weapons. It has blocked ceasefires. And it has done all of this in the name of Jesus Christ. And I ask you, I ask you with pastoral urgency, what does Jesus Christ say about this? What does Jesus Christ, the prince of peace, the one who said in the Gospel of Matthew 5:9, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." What does he say about those who pray for war, who fund war, who obstruct peace in his name? What does he say? That is the question we must answer today.
Now, I want to be precise. I want to be charitable but precise because precision is an act of love. Christian Zionism as a theological system is built upon what is called dispensationalism. It is a relatively modern theological framework, my friends. Relatively modern. It was systematized in the 19th century by a man named John Nelson Darby. A man who, with all due respect, was not a bishop, was not a theologian of the great tradition, was not in communion with the apostolic faith handed down through the ages. It was popularized in the early 20th century through something called the Scoffield Reference Bible. a Bible with margin notes. Margin notes that became more authoritative for millions of American Protestants than the actual teachings of the church fathers, the saints, the councils, the 2,000 years of sacred interpretation. Let that settle into your heart for a moment. margin notes written by one man in the 19th and early 20th centuries became the lens through which millions read holy scripture.
And from those margin notes emerged the idea that history is divided into separate dispensations, separate periods in which God deals with humanity according to entirely different rules. And critically, crucially, fatally, the church, the body of Christ is understood in this framework as a kind of parenthesis, a temporary interruption, something that was not anticipated in the Old Testament and will one day be removed, raptured away so that God can finish his original plan with the Jewish people.
Do you see what happens when you accept that framework? Do you see where it leads? If the church is a parenthesis, if the new covenant is merely temporary scaffolding, then the sermon on the mount is temporary. The command to love your enemies is temporary. The beatitude of the peacemakers is temporary. the entire moral vision of the gospel temporary because what matters what ultimately matters in this worldview is not the New Testament ethic of Jesus Christ but rather the fulfillment of what they believe are Old Testament territorial and political promises to a modern nation state. My friends, this is not Christianity. I say that with all the gratitude of my office. This is not the faith once delivered to the saints. This is a new religion wearing Christian clothing. and it is sending people to their graves.
Now, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something about how the church, the true church, the Catholic church, the church of the ages, reads the Old Testament prophecies. Because this is where the great divide lies. And this is where the truth sets us free. the fathers of the church, those great men, those brilliant and holy men who lived closest to the apostles, men like origin, like St. Justin Martyr, like St. Irenaeus, like St. Augustine, like St. John Crysttom. These men understood the prophecies of the Old Testament to be fulfilled truly and completely and gloriously fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Not in a future political arrangement, not in a modern nation state, but in the person of Jesus Christ in his church and in the eternal kingdom that has no end.
The Bible says in the Gospel of Luke 24:44, "When the risen Lord appeared to his disciples, he said to them, everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Everything. He said everything. Not most things, not some things. Everything. And the Bible says in the second letter to the Corinthians 1 20 that all the promises of God find their yes in him. All of them. Every single one. Every covenant promise, every territorial hope, every prophetic vision, they find their yes, their ultimate fulfillment, their complete realization in Jesus Christ. This is what the church has always taught. This is what the great tradition confesses. And this is precisely what Christian Zionism must deny in order to function as a system. It must tell you that God has two separate peoples, two separate plans, two separate destinies, one for the church, one for Israel.
But St. Paul, St. Paul himself writing in the letter to the Galatians 3 28 cries out across the centuries, "There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. One, one people, one covenant, one Christ." This is the scandal of the gospel that the Christian Zionists cannot absorb. This is the sticking point because once you accept that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of everything everything then you cannot subordinate the moral law of the gospel to the political ambitions of any earthly state any earthly state.
And so here's the question here's the question that will keep you watching because I want you to understand the full dimensions of this. How did this theology become so politically powerful? How did a system invented in the 19th century, never held by any father of the church, never taught in any ecumenical council, never confessed in any historic creed? How did it come to reshape the foreign policy of nation? How did it come to the point where American politicians compete with one another to demonstrate their unconditional support for Israeli military operations? Not out of careful strategic consideration, not out of genuine human rights concerns for all peoples in the region, but because their evangelical voter base believes that to do otherwise is to curse what God has blessed.
The Bible says in the book of Genesis 12:3, God told Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you, I will curse." And this verse, this verse addressed to Abraham, the father of faith, has been extracted from its context, stripped of its fulfillment in Christ, and transformed into a political formula, a blank check, a theological justification for supporting any action, any policy, any military campaign, no matter the cost in human lives, as long as it is associated with the modern state of Israel. My friends, this is isogesis, not exugesus. This is reading into scripture what you want to find, not drawing out what is actually there. And it is dangerous. It is terribly dangerous because when you believe that supporting a particular nation's military actions is a matter of divine obligation, you will not advocate for ceasefires. You cannot. to advocate for a ceasefire becomes in this theological framework an act of rebellion against God. When you believe that the gathering of all Jewish people in the land is the necessary precondition for the return of Christ, then displacement, disposition and suffering of other peoples in that land becomes not merely tolerable but theologically required. Not merely acceptable but divinely ordained. And when you believe that the rapture will come before the worst of the tribulation, when you believe that you personally will be whisked away to safety before the bombs fall and the blood flows, then you have no skin in the game, do you? You can pray for Armageddon with a light heart because you believe you will not be there for it. You believe the suffering will happen to everyone else. This is and I choose this word carefully. This is sociopathic theology.
Now let me pause here. Let me pause here because I anticipate an objection. I anticipate someone saying but your eminence surely you are not denying the unique place of the Jewish people in salvation history. Surely you are not dismissing the real and terrible suffering of Jewish people throughout history. Surely you are not ignoring the horrors of the show of the Holocaust. And to that I say absolutely not. Absolutely not. The Catholic Church at the second Vatican council in the declaration clearly and definitively repudiated anti-semitism in all its forms. The unique role of Israel in salvation history is not in question. The covenant of God with Abraham is not in question. The dignity and humanity and beloved status of every Jewish person before the eyes of God not in question. What is in question is whether the modern state of Israel, a political entity established in the 20th century, governed by secular law, engaged in military actions, making political decisions, is to be identified with the Israel of sacred scripture, and whether the identification grants it an immunity from moral evaluation that no other state on earth possesses. And the answer, my friends, is no. No, it does not.
The Bible says in the Acts of the Apostles 10:34 that God shows no partiality. None. He does not have one standard of justice for one people and another standard for another. The same moral law that condemns the targeting of civilians applies to every nation, every army, every military force on earth. This is not anti-semitism. This is the universality of the moral law. This is the teaching of the natural law written on every human heart. This is what the church has always proclaimed.
But here is the deeper tragedy. Here's what I want you to truly understand because this is where my heart breaks. As a pastor, as a shepherd, as a man who has given his life to the gospel, the deepest tragedy is what Christian Zionism does to the followers of Jesus Christ who embrace it. Because when you are taught that your highest Christian duty is to support a political agenda, when you are taught that peace is naive and war is prophetically necessary, when you are taught to look at a map of the Middle East and see not human beings in their suffering but chess pieces in a divine drama, something of Christ eyes in you.
The Bible says in the first letter of John 4:8 that God is love. Not God is love. Not God sometimes loves. God is love. It is the very definition of his being. And the Bible says in that same chapter verse 20. If anyone says I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. A liar. The word of God does not mince words. A liar. How can you claim to follow the God who is love and simultaneously pray for the deaths of children? How can you worship the Prince of Peace on Sunday morning and lobby for the obstruction of ceasefires on Monday? How can you read the beatitudes, blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers and conclude that you are theological. Judy demands the opposite of everything those beatitudes describe. This is the contradiction at the heart of Christian Zionism. And it is a contradiction that does not merely damage foreign policy. It damages souls. It warps the conscience. It teaches people to look at human suffering and see it as a feature, not a bug of God's plan. And I must say this, I must say this because it is the truth. Among the innocent victims of this theology are not only the people of Gaza, not only the people of Lebanon, not only the Christian communities of the Middle East who have been decimated, who have been displaced, who have been forgotten by their Western brothers and sisters. Among the victims are the evangelical Christians themselves who have been given a stone when they asked for bread, who have been handed an ideology when they needed a savior, who have been taught to hate when they were created to love.
Now, let me speak about something that is not spoken of enough. Let me speak about the ancient Christian communities of the Holy Land. Because when we speak of the Middle East, when we speak of Israel and Palestine, most people in the West think in purely political secular terms. They think of nation states. They think of governments. They think of armies and borders and international law. But the Holy Land is also, it has always been the home of Christians, ancient historic apostolic Christian communities. The Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, the Marinites, the Melkites, the Armenian Apostolic, the Syriak Orthodox. These are communities that trace their faith in an unbroken line to the time of the apostles that when the apostles walked those streets, when the Holy Spirit descended in that upper room in Jerusalem, those are the spiritual ancestors of these communities. And I ask you, I beg you to ask yourself, where is the concern of American evangelical Christianity for these brothers and sisters? Where is the rallying? Where are the stadium events for them? Where is the political lobbying on their behalf? They are invisible. They are invisible to Christian Zionism because they do not fit the script. They are the wrong kind of Christians in the wrong part of the story. and their suffering, their displacement, their dwindling numbers. The Christian population in the Holy Land has collapsed has collapsed dramatically in recent decades. This suffering does not register in the prophetic timeline that Christian Zionism has constructed. And that invisibility is a sin. That invisibility is a theological failure. That invisibility is the fruit of a system that has replaced the universal charity of the gospel with a narrow tribal politically convenient reading of scripture.
The Bible says in the letter to the Galatians chapter 6 verse 10, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone and especially to those who are of the household of faith. Everyone, the household of faith, our brothers and sisters in Christ who are suffering in the holy land, they are the household of faith. They are our family and we have abandoned them.
Now, what is the Catholic response? What does the church say? What do we proclaim in the face of this distortion, this theological error, this dangerous and deadly ideology that is doing such harm? I want to be clear here and I want to be bold because the times demand boldness.
First, we proclaim the universal lordship of Jesus Christ, not a partial lordship, not a lordship that was interrupted 2,000 years ago and will resume at some future point. The lordship of Jesus Christ is total, complete, and present right now. The Bible says in the letter to the Philippians 2:es 9-11 that God has exalted Jesus and given him the name that is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Every knee, every tongue already. Now this is not a future hope. This is a present reality into which we are called to live.
Second, we proclaim that the new covenant in the blood of Christ is the fulfillment of every covenant that preceded it, not its cancellation, not its suspension, its fulfillment. The Bible says in the letter to the Hebrews 8:13, in speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. The writer of Hebrews is not engaging in anti-semitism. He is proclaiming the great truth of salvation history that everything was pointing forward to Christ. And now that Christ has come, everything has arrived at its destination.
Third, we proclaim that love of neighbor, every neighbor, every human being made in the image and likeness of God is not negotiable, not suspendable, not subject to override by prophetic timelines or political agendas. The Bible says in the Gospel of Matthew 25:40 that whatever we do to the least of these we do to Christ himself. The least of these. The child in Gaza is the least of these. The elderly man in the West Bank is the least of these. The mother weeping over her dead child in Beirut is the least of these. And Christ says Christ says with the full weight of his divine authority, whatever you do to them, you do to me.
Fourth, we must proclaim the peace of Christ as something real, something achievable, something that we are morally obligated to pursue. Not as nity, not as weakness, not as theological ignorance, but as the very mandate of the gospel. The Bible says in the letter to the Romans 12:1 18, "If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceibly with all. if possible as far as it depends on you. The assumption of the gospel is that the follower of Jesus Christ exhausts every possibility of peace before accepting that war is inevitable. And to do the opposite, to begin from the assumption that war is God's will and peace is a human obstacle, is to invert the entire moral order of the New Testament.
Now I want to address something directly. I want to address those who are watching this who come from an evangelical background who were perhaps raised in Christian Zionism who sang the songs and waved the flags and believed with their whole hearts. I am not mocking you. I am not dismissing your faith. I know that you love Jesus. I know that you read your Bible. I know that you pray and that your prayers are genuine and that your love for God is real. But love of God demands that we be willing to follow truth wherever it leads. And the truth of the gospel, the truth of 2,000 years of church teaching, the truth that the great saints and martyrs gave their lives to preserve. That truth calls us back. It calls us back for every ideology that has hijacked the name of Christ. He calls us back to the Christ who wept over Jerusalem. He calls us back to the Christ who said, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." He calls us back to the Christ whose first word after his resurrection was shalom. Peace, not war, not Armageddon, not the satisfaction of prophetic timelines. Peace.
The Bible says in the Gospel of John 14 27, Jesus says to his disciples, "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. His peace. His peace. Not the peace of a temporary sessation of hostilities that serves as a prelude to the next campaign. Not the peace of the powerful imposing silence on the suffering. But his peace. The peace that passes understanding. The peace that is rooted in justice. The peace that sees every human being as a child of God. The peace that refuses to let any political agenda, however cloaked in religious language, convince us that the lives of some children matter less than the lives of others. Because that is what it comes down to, my friends. That is the irreducible core of what we are talking about. comes down to whether the death of a child in one place is more tragic, more theologically significant, more worthy of moral outrage than the death of a child somewhere else. And the gospel, the actual gospel, the gospel that Jesus preached, not the gospel of the margins of the Scoffield Reference Bible, the gospel says they are equal. They are equally precious. They are equally beloved by the God who formed them in the womb, who knew them before the foundation of the world and whose son died for each and every one of them. This is the scandal. This is the offense. This is the stumbling block that Christian Zionism cannot get past. The absolute universal unqualified love of God for every human being without exception. And this is why we cannot be silent. This is why the church must speak. This is why I am speaking today because souls are at stake. Not just the souls of those dying in the wars that this ideology enables, but the souls of those who have been convinced that wararmongering is disciplehip, that political tribalism is faithfulness, that the God revealed in Jesus Christ has favorites among the nations of the earth, and that being on the right side of those favorites exempts you from the ordinary demands of the gospel.
The Bible says in the second letter of Peter 3:9 that God is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. All, every person, every soul. That is the heart of God. That is what burns in the chest of the one who hung on the cross for the sins of the world. Not a geopolitical agenda, not a dispensational timeline. all every soul everywhere.
And so let me bring this to a close though not the end of the conversation because this conversation must continue. Let me bring this to a close with what the Catholic tradition offers as an alternative because criticism without an alternative is merely complaint and the church does not merely complain. The church proposes. What does the church propose? The church proposes what has been called in our tradition integral human development. The development of every person in every dimension of their humanity, spiritual, moral, physical, social. The church proposes that genuine peace in the holy land requires justice, real, substantive, universal justice for every person in the region, Jew and Arab, Christian and Muslim without exception. The church proposes, in the words of every pope from Paul the cyst onward, that a two-state solution, a negotiated peace with security and dignity for all peoples is the only path to a just and lasting settlement. The church proposes that we listen to the Christians of the Holy Land, that we give them voice, that we amplify their cries, that we fund their institutions and their schools and their hospitals, that we ensure their presence in the land where the faith was born does not disappear from the earth. The church proposes that American Catholics, that we who have voice and vote, influence in this greatest democracy on earth, use that voice and that vote and that influence not in service of any partisan agenda, not as a captured constituency of any political party, but in service of the universal moral law, in service of the truth of the gospel, in service of the peace that Jesus Christ commands us to make.
The Bible says in the book of Isaiah 2:4 that in the fullness of God's kingdom, the nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. This is the vision. This is the direction. This is the trajectory of salvation history as the church understands it. Not toward Armageddon, not toward a final battle that believers eagerly anticipate from a safe distance, but toward the universal peace of the kingdom of God. The peace that we are called to build brick by brick, prayer by prayer, act of charity by act of charity on this earth. This is the Catholic response to Christian Zionism. Not hostility toward the Jewish people. Not denial of the significance of the Holy Land. Not indifference to the security of Israel or of any people in the region. But the insistence, the firm, charitable, uncompromising insistence that the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be hijacked, that the name of God cannot be weaponized, that the prince of peace cannot be made into a cron of perpetual war, that the command to love your neighbor cannot be suspended by prophetic timelines invented in the 19th century. and that the church, the bride of Christ, the pillar and ground of truth, has both the right and the duty to say so clearly and without apology.
My friends, I have spoken to you today with the urgency of a man who believes that what is at stake is not merely political. What is at stake is the integrity of the gospel itself. What is at stake is whether the name of Jesus Christ will be associated in the eyes of the watching world with peace or with war with mercy or with cruelty with the God who so loved the world or with the God who is being rewritten [clears throat] repackaged and resolved as the patron deity of a particular national project. And I tell you, I tell you from the depths of my priestly heart, the world is watching. The Muslims are watching. The secular humanists are watching. The hundreds of millions of people who have been told that Christianity is a religion of violence and imperialism and tribal favoritism. They are watching. And what they see when they see Christian Zionism confirms everything they feared. And it drives them further from the God who loves them, the God who died for them, the God whose arms are outstretched to receive them. This is the missionary catastrophe of our age. This is the wound in the body of Christ that bleeds but is not spoken of. This is the reason why the church must find its voice, recover its prophetic courage, and proclaim even when it is unpopular. Even when it costs something, the whole truth of the whole gospel for the whole world.
The Bible says in the Gospel of John 8:32, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Free, not comfortable, not politically convenient, not universally popular, but free. That is my prayer for you today. That is the grace I implore the Holy Spirit to pour out upon every soul who hears these words. freedom. The freedom that comes from knowing the truth. The freedom that allows you to look at every human being and see the face of Christ. The freedom that empowers you to be as he commanded, a peacemaker. And thus, in his own words, to be called a child of God.
May God bless you. May the peace of Christ guard your hearts and minds. And may the blessed virgin Mary, queen of peace, intercede for all the peoples of the holy land, that they may know one day one blessed long for day, the peace that only her son can give. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.