The Way This Christian Thing Works…
Without comment, an excerpt from an article appearing in Trinity Magazine, published quarterly by Trinity International University, affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America:
It was nearly midnight. Bible college professor Yohanna Katanacho (MDiv. ’99) closed up his church in Bethlehem and stuffed the stack of pamphlets he’d just finished photocopying inside his jacket. Then the young Palestinian Christian began an uneasy walk home. Under a new law, if an Israeli soldier called out to a Palestinian and the Palestinian did not respond, the Israeli could regard the Palestinian as a terrorist and shoot him.
As he neared the Damascus Gate, Yohanna saw three Israeli soldiers standing in the shadows, watching him. One soldier lifted a hand and crooked his finger at Yohanna to come to them. The area was empty of any observers, and as he approached the soldiers, Yohanna’s heart pounded and he began to pray. Without thinking, he rapidly unzipped his jacket and just as quickly found three machine guns pointed to his head.
Yohanna looked at the soldiers. He had seen many soldiers who looked just like these men, mocking his students at Bethlehem Bible College, forcing Palestinians to stay indoors during sudden curfews that could last for weeks with no possibility of work, food, or medical attention.
He looked at them and raised a hand up to his chest. “I have here a heart that loves you,”, he said.
For a moment, the three soldiers stared at Yohanna, shocked. Slowly, they laid down their guns. They began to talk. After twenty minutes, one soldier told Yohanna, “I wish that all Palestinians were like you.” “No,” Yohanna responded. “I wish you were like me.”
Then he told them the story of how Christ had changed him.
The article goes on to talk about how Christ worked a change in Yohanna’s heart, given that he found it difficult to love these who seemed so bent on hating him, and living in a culture that accepted hatred between Jews and Palestinians as a given. It continues:
Yohanna joined a group called Musalaha (Arabic for “reconciliation”), where Palestinian and Jewish Christians meet to listen to one another and pray together. Yohanna began to speak out about the radical love to which Christ has called the church, preaching among both Palestinians and Israelis. He and a Jewish Christian shared the gospel together on the streets of Tel Aviv, continuing even as a mob threw stones at them…Yohanna hopes to develop a discipleship program that takes Christian love seriously. As a required component of the program, Palestinian and Israeli Christians will become involved in one another’s lives. If that kind of program grows, Yohanna says, hope grows. A united church evidencing a radical love could choke the culture’s flow of hate.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
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