Some of you know that I had a few speaking engagements in the last few weeks, some of them were in Toronto and some here in the lower mainland. This morning, I thought I would share some of my highlights from my trip to Toronto, where I led Bible study at the United Network for Justice and Peace in Palestine and Israel, where some of you attended, and then I was one of the keynote speakers for the James Graff Memorial Lecture with Daniel Bannoura, a fellow Palestinian scholar who I knew as a teacher at the Bethlehem Bible College when I was working in Jerusalem.
I started each presentation with a reflection, recently published here, I wrote to try and capture my current state of being the last year.
As Israel's genocide in Gaza has been unfolding, I find myself inhabiting multiple realities - a perpetual state of emotional jetlag. Like travelers caught between time zones, I'm simultaneously living in Pacific time and Gaza time, my body and mind never quite synchronized. I wake up to morning here while following night raids there, eat lunch while tracking dawn evacuations, try to sleep while monitoring real-time bombardments. This isn't just about different time zones - it's about living in multiple states of being: attempting normalcy in one reality while carrying intergenerational trauma triggered anew in another.
My days follow a pattern shaped by this temporal and emotional displacement: wake up, check news compulsively, attempt to work, return repeatedly to news feeds seeking reassurance of loved ones' survival. Like jetlag's disruption of our natural rhythms, this constant switching between realities - between here and there, between ordinary life and extraordinary devastation - leaves me perpetually disoriented, never fully present in either space, always carrying the weight of the other.
The chronology of horror unfolds in this disjointed time: the devastating attacks of October 7th in Be'eri and other kibbutzim engulfing Gaza in their wake, babies in incubators at Al-Ahli Hospital, the mass exodus South, Saad Al-Shawwa burned alive in the bakery as hundreds waited for bread, Nahida Anton and Samar Kamal - two Christian women killed by snipers in the Holy Family Church compound, young Hind Rajab's desperate calls, the search for Vivian Silver - the Woman Wage Peace activist whose life was dedicated to Palestinian-Israeli peace, hostages released while thousands remain imprisoned, Dr. Abu Safieh praying over his son in blood-stained medical garbs, Sha'ban al-Dalou burned alive in his tent near a hospital in Deir el-Balah, water infrastructure deliberately destroyed, children clustering around aid trucks. Disease spreading. People imprisoned in their own land. Each event triggers not just present pain but historical memory, each loss connected to generations of losses before, creating a spiral of time where past and present trauma merge.
In this disjointed time, how do we read scripture? When we open to John 4 and read about "living water" while watching people in Gaza die of thirst, what happens to our theological language? Our very act of reading becomes a site of tension - between the material and the spiritual, between divine promises and human suffering, between sacred text and genocidal reality.
Reading Location & Sacred Space
Where we stand shapes not just how we read, but what we're able to see. Biblical scholar Musa Dube, a Botswanan biblical scholar and postcolonial feminist theologian, reads scripture from the experience of African Christians who witnessed how the Bible was used to justify colonization, famously captured in the saying: 'When the colonizers came, they had the Bible and we had the land; they said 'let us pray,' and when we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible.' Her analysis helps us recognize patterns of conquest in biblical interpretation.
Here are a few examples from the text:
"I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor" (John 4:38) justifies taking others' resources
"You worship what you do not know" (4:22) claims religious superiority
"It is no longer because of your words that we believe" (4:42) erases marginalized voices
However, when I as a Palestinian read scripture (reading from a place of powerlessness), I see it as a Text of Liberation:
The Greek "*dei*" in "he had to go through Samaria" (4:4) shows divine necessity - God's deliberate choice to enter excluded territory
"Give me a drink" (4:7) reveals divine vulnerability
"Neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem" (4:21) challenges all claims to exclusive sacred space
These aren't just interpretive differences - they reflect our relationship to power and suffering. This becomes starkly clear at Jacob's Well today in Nablus, Palestine. The well sits across from Balata refugee camp, its ancient stones witnessing both sacred history and present suffering. (Read more about the story of Archimandrite Ioustinos - the gauardian of Jacob's Well Church here. You can watch a video about him here in Italian)
Politics of Water
The Gospel's use of Greek terms for water becomes painfully ironic today. When describing living water, John uses "pēgē"(v. 6) - a spring welling up to eternal life. For the physical well, he uses "phrear" (v.11 and 12)- a mere cistern. How do we hold this distinction when people in Gaza haven't had running water for over a year? What does it mean to speak of spiritual thirst while children die of dehydration?
Yet the text itself refuses to separate physical from spiritual need. Jesus - God incarnate - experiences real thirst. The conversation begins not with theology but with shared human vulnerability: "Give me a drink." The Samaritan woman's practical questions ground the encounter in material reality: Where is your bucket? The well is deep. Only through acknowledging these physical needs does the encounter open to deeper meaning.
Today's water collection points in Gaza embody this same inseparability of survival and sacred encounter. Communities share dwindling resources while maintaining human dignity. Mothers navigate dangerous terrain to secure water, embodying resilience for their children.
Politics of Movement
Under Israel's apartheid system, Palestinians face severe movement restrictions, which highlights the ease of movement in this story. If Jesus were making this journey today, his ability to travel would depend entirely on his ID card - Israeli citizens cannot enter Bethlehem where he was born – grasping the notion that Jesus would not have been born in Bethlehem altogether. Furthermore, while Palestinians face endless checkpoints to reach Nablus where Jacob's Well stands, the probability of getting to Jacob’s well is determined by long hours of travel, threats of settler violence. In any case, Jesus would have been tired, thirsty and hungry by the time he arrives there.
The Greek "dei" - indicating divine necessity in Jesus' travel through Samaria - takes on new meaning when movement itself becomes nearly impossible. What does divine presence mean in a land carved up by walls and checkpoints? Where is God when evacuation orders lead nowhere safe?
Wrestling with Divine Presence
Like Hagar in the wilderness, we find ourselves demanding to see and be seen by God in the midst of displacement and abandonment. This wrestling connects us to a long tradition of faithful questioning: Hannah pouring out her bitter soul before the Lord, refusing to be silenced; Rizpah keeping vigil over her dead on the mountain, her grief compelling justice; Mary of Nazareth who sang of God casting down the mighty and lifting up the lowly, before bearing witness to her son's cry of abandonment.
This brings us to the cry that broke through during the second day when one of the participants interjected my attempts to notice divine presence in Gaza. She said "God is not in Gaza. How can he be there? God is dead." This isn't just an emotional response - it's a theological reckoning demanded by material reality. When bombs target hospitals, when children die seeking water, when sacred spaces lie in rubble, what happens to our claims about divine presence?
Our position relative to this suffering shapes how we answer. Those reading from safety might rush to spiritual metaphors. Those under bombardment might find both absence and presence in unexpected places - in shared water, in children's resilience, in human dignity maintained amid dehumanization.
Palestinian Agency
Through social media, Bisan declares "I'm still alive" - both physical fact and spiritual resistance. Sharon shared Bisan’s recent video yesterday. In the midst of genocide, Bisan is filming one family’s attempt to harvest olives. “It is Bisan from Gaza. For 20 years of my life I have never missed a single olive season, a single harvest. But because of the genocide this year, I can’t reach my father’s land in the north of Gaza in Beit Hanoun where we have over 500 olive trees. So I can’t join the harvest there. But, I’m not going to miss it because today, we are joining the farmers in al-Qarara, Khan Younis in their harvest.” One of the men she interviews summarized the situation quite eloquently: “despite the inhumane conditions and the reality that we are living in, I think the most grounding thing that people can do right now is to pick olives.”
On this Reign of Christ Sunday, we cannot separate the spiritual from the material. Divine presence manifests not despite but within human suffering - in water shared amid scarcity, in dignity maintained amid dehumanization, in community preserved amid displacement. We are called to locate ourselves honestly in this reality, to face both the horror of genocide and the persistence of human dignity, to hold both the cry of divine absence and the glimpses of presence in Palestinian resistance.
The emotional jetlag of inhabiting multiple realities becomes, paradoxically, a space of theological wrestling - a liminal zone where divine presence is not absent, but differently perceived. In this disorientation, we learn that hope is not the absence of suffering, but the persistent belief that God accompanies us through it. Like travellers between time zones, we hold multiple truths: the devastation of the present and the resilience of human spirit, the cry of abandonment and the whispers of solidarity.
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