I stayed at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn in Bosnia-Herzegovina for about five months once. It was during the winter and spring of 1996, as part of NATO’s implementation force (IFOR) peacekeeping mission established by the Dayton Peace Accords a few months earlier.
IFOR had leased the hotel as its Coalition Press Information Center (CPIC), in which the daily media briefings occurred in the conference room and the upstairs rooms were used by the military members assigned there.
It was an ugly brown and yellow building, made uglier by the United Nations’ plastic sheeting affixed where windows once were. The four- foot-wide holes in the walls made by a barrage of mortar fire during years of trench warfare in the city offset whatever heating efforts the furnace made.
When Slobodan Milosevic began his genocidal attacks against the Bosnians in 1992, the Holiday Inn corporation removed itself from any affiliation with the hotel bearing its name in the city that had housed the Winter Olympics just eight years before.
We hadn’t realized until we’d been there for a while (dealing with the local hotel management and the logistical issues of living in a war zone), that the building that proudly displayed their Holiday Inn signs out front and throughout the building’s interior had had no relation to the real Holiday Inn for years.
This memory came forward during my quiet time with God today, as I was reading about how the Holocaust was the turning point in Christian behavior toward Jews. Prior to and during that, Christians had treated Jews horrifically throughout our history.
In March 1492, which American history records as the time when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain funded Christopher Columbus’ journey to the New World, those same monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, forcibly expelling about 200,000 Jews from Spain. Many were forced into the ocean and drowned. Others had been charged exorbitant fees by ship captains who brought them hundreds of miles away from the shores of Spain before dumping them overboard.
The Christian nation of Spain killed or banished all these people while at the same time sending Columbus forth to bring Christianity to the world. The Alhambra Decree wasn’t officially overturned until Dec. 16, 1968, at the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II).
Vatican II was just two decades after the Holocaust. Christian silence and acquiescence during the murder of six million Jews eventually shook the Christian spirit enough to change its perspective regarding them. Today, as Israel’s own government attests, there are no better friends or allies for Jews than the evangelical Christian community. But it took centuries of un-Christlike behavior culminating in such a horrific climax as the Holocaust to make Christianity look deeper into its role and mission in the world.
It seems as though the Church has forgotten that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah promised to Israel before he became the friend we sing about in the popular children’s hymn. He was born Jewish, of Jewish parents, celebrated the Jewish feasts and festivals, grew up to become a rabbi with thousands of disciples, and left no indication that he converted after the resurrection. The Bible says Jesus is our great High Priest—a distinctly Jewish term depicting a distinctly Jewish position. The Jewishness of Jesus has always existed despite Christian efforts to ignore it. Jesus is not, and never has been, “Christian.” That was a term coined in Antioch to describe Paul, Barnabas, and the other followers of Jesus.
(I always thought it strange that Christians blamed Jews as “Christ Killers” despite Romans being the ones who actually crucified him, and yet Italians never faced similar persecution.)
William Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, delivers a timeless soliloquy by the antagonist Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, about the ongoing persecution of Jews even in 17th-century Europe:
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (Act 3, Scene 1)
Much like the phony façade of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, the Christian Church has frequently shown a false face to the world as the Body of Christ, while behaving in extremely un-Christlike ways within.
Christianity has done wonderful, helpful things as well: building hospitals, schools, orphanages, homeless shelters, charities. My point isn’t whether the Christian Church has done good in the world; it definitely has; but the Christian Church is composed of individual Christian persons, who also do things that are not good.
We wear our crosses around our necks, post Bible verses online, and show other external signs of Christianity, but do our other behaviors honor the God we represent? Or do we create a façade that disguises a less-than-holy demeanor within?
The Sarajevo experience seems to come back to me now as a reminder of my duties as a disciple of Jesus Christ to always behave according to his guidance. I would dread departing this earthly existence to find that, like Holiday Inn’s corporate management, Jesus had disavowed any association with me—that I had carried his name as part of my identity fraudulently, disparaging his good name by my own misdeeds.
Jesus warns us about that in his Sermon on the Mount:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord,Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ — Matt 7:21–23 (NIV)
This dread strengthens my resolve to ensure I’m doing Jesus’ will, instead of my own, each day. We can oppose sin, and still love. We can be wronged by others, and still forgive. We can accept that God’s plan for each of us will often involve doing things we don’t particularly want to do but doing them anyway.
Advent is a season in which we are called to examine our hearts and ensure they align with God’s. John the Baptist’s admonition to “prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight” refers to our spirit—to adjust the areas we have bent to accommodate our own perspectives instead of God’s, and to smooth the places made rough by our sins.
This Sunday begins a new year in the Church with the first Sunday of Advent. Let’s prepare our hearts for our Lord and Savior with determined love and forgiveness.
We must be more than a façade.
Your Brother in Christ,
Fr. Austin