NO END IN SIGHT

 

NO END IN SIGHT

I was five years old and remember talk of the end of the Japanese war that year, 1945, but if there was mention of the liberation of the death camp in Southern Poland, I knew nothing of it. And many to this day do not know of the systematic killing of millions of people, mostly Jews, by the Nazis in the terrible war of that period. Perhaps that is why such publicity has been given this week to the discovery, by Russian soldiers, of the many emaciated people awaiting death in Auschwitz eighty years ago.

The Northern Irish reporter, on a recent visit to the camp, was close to tears as he showed us the ordinary looking railway lines that carried millions to their death, the block houses and the gas chambers. How could human beings devise a complex efficient system of deliberately killing millions of people? Even after eighty years it still sounds unbelievable.

And eighty years later, we are in the midst of the long-drawn-out re-assertion the Jewish people have been pushing ever since that terrible time. With international backing, they carved out a foothold in Arab lands without the agreement of the people who had lived there for centuries. The result was tension, violence and war. The Holy Land is now an armed camp with both peoples locked in a bitter struggle with no end in sight. Thousands have been killed, homes destroyed and lives of survivors blunted forever. This week has seen a truce given joy to a few on both sides but no sign of a lasting peace.

Also this week, we commemorate another event involving Jews. Following custom, every first born male Jewish child was brought to Jerusalem and ‘presented to the Lord.’ So Mary and Joseph took the child Jesus up to the temple and ‘offered in sacrifice a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.’

Is there any connection between these events? Jewish history was supposed to be about hope. Abraham was the father of a movement that would see his descendants as numerous as the sand on the sea shore – impossible to count. The child who suddenly appeared in the temple was the fulfilment of the longed-for promise, a pilot project that would multiply and create a new world where everyone would be a new born son and daughter. A light would appear in the darkness and each would look at their neighbour and say, ‘brother, sister’.

It hasn’t happened – yet. Paul’s ‘sorrow and unceasing anguish’ because ‘my brothers – my own flesh and blood ... have not recognised God’s saving justice and have tried to establish their own’ remains.

2 February 2025   The Presentation     Mal 3:1-4    Heb 2:14-18    Lk 2:22-40