Autor: mendocinomx

  • El fuego de DiosKim en Joong OP, La Pentecôte, Saint Genès, 2012

    The fire of God

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    Israeli missiles, drones, and snipers are ravaging Gaza and the West Bank today, aiming to complete the total destruction of the Palestinian people.

    It's been 77 years now Nakba or catastrophe, which began in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their territory. The Israeli army gives biblical names to this new artillery of annihilation, conceived by the human mind but executed with precision by artificial intelligence. A recent example was the "Gideon's Chariots" operation announced by President Netanyahu to attack the terrorist group Hamas, implemented in 2025 by the Israeli army. This name recalls the battle of a Hebrew peasant who gathered 300 men to wage war on the Midianites in the name of God to occupy a territory "promised by God" as the ideology of the time. This story from more than three thousand years ago, recounted in the Book of Judges (6-7), is now evoked by Israeli power to justify the ongoing genocide.

    As an expression of this control of the imagination of the Jewish people today, we can see the videos circulating on social networks, showing Israeli soldiers and settlers playing at killing Palestinian children as if it were a video game. millennialsPerhaps those actors of today's horror grew up from childhood in that artificial world of wars where the victor lives in the aseptic space of a digital screen. To top it all off, today's horror takes on a festive, "messianic" appearance, as it is a "holy war," accompanied by Hebrew choirs and traditional Jewish dances of those who mock the filth that represents the enemy. This people must be annihilated to liberate the land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) from their invaders. The Bible already told this story when a people enslaved in Egypt created the story of the divine promise that would give them “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:17), interpreting a symbolic message as a mandate to conquer territory.

    A similar version of military colonialism with a religious ideological cloak gave birth to the United States in modern times. English settlers fleeing religious wars and famine arrived in the lands of the Powhatan and Massachusetts people on the East Coast with "messianic" rhetoric, seeking to seize those lands with God's supposed blessing. The speeches of the Founding Fathers are inspired by biblical quotations, as are Trump's current incendiary speeches, especially after the 2024 attack, when the White House resident openly claims to have been sent by God to "save the free world." Bolsonaro expressed this same religious delirium in Brazil a few years ago to justify a racist regime with hate speech.

    And so the supposed divine fire that inspires the Zionist state, the US government, and many of today's populist leaders launches "flames of fire" to annihilate anyone who opposes its divine mission, which, in reality, masks today's colonialism in its most brutal and cynical form.

     

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    But the Bible tells others Stories of God's fire. Over thousands of years, the Hebrew people first and the early Christian community later discerned between the warring fire of false gods and the divine fire of the Eternal One, which prophets and poets, healers and apostles received, addressing the people in the name of God, healing their wounds, and announcing nonviolent messianic hope amidst the horror.

    This divine fire is a flame that does not destroy, but rather builds from within, an experience initiated by the prophets of Israel, from Elijah to Jeremiah. This inner fire is like a spark that shares in the flame of the Eternal, where women and men in trance, illuminated by this divine light, announce new things for an oppressed and hopeless people. This fire is not military, but divine. It enables those who receive it to see and act with boldness, creative imagination, and loving compassion.

    A fire different from that of the drones becomes light, splendor and strength, as in the story of Jesus the Galilean, who "transfigures" himself on the mountain to reveal his deepest being, preparing to go to Jerusalem at a critical moment of his mission, the center of religious power of his time, to bear witness there, in the heart of the empire, to the glory (קבֹד kabod) of your Abba. Glory is not power, but life.

    That divine fire inspired Jesus and his community to weave a liberating and loving closeness with the invisible people of his time: the poor, women, strangers, and the sick. It also enabled them to denounce the corruption taking place, especially the perversion of the religion of the Temple and, later, of the Pharisees who called themselves teachers of the Torah.

    A fire another world that, after the atrocious execution of Jesus on a Roman cross with the complicity of the angry mob and some religious authorities, settled on the head of the community terrified by the fear of suffering the same mockery as his RabbiAfter a time of mourning and fear, that fire opened their minds and hearts to understand what was happening. The crucified One was back, alive. otherwiseHe had awakened and was following his steps, babbling another message with his disciples and apostles, performing signs of new life in the midst of new communities, both within and beyond the borders of the Hebrew people. These communities in the diaspora recognized him as the crucified Messiah by rereading the Hebrew Scriptures and breaking bread in his memory, symbolic acts to continue the work of divine redemption in the hearts of suffering and hopeful peoples.

    This divine fire is not exclusive to any nation, nor is it a monopoly of any sacred institution, whether secular or religious. Nor does it justify wars of conquest and colonization. Much less is it a destructive fire that annihilates other nations.

    That fire is harvest retireThis is the powerful symbolism of the fifty-day cycle of the Hebrew and Christian calendar. The Hebrew Jubilee Year, which every fifty years forgives debts, lets the land rest, and frees the captives to make way for God's glory. Fifty days after Jesus' Passover, the Christian community celebrates God's loving abundance, which does not launch drones or missiles to destroy his enemies, but communicates flames of divine fire to "raise the humble of the earth from the mire," as Hannah and Mary sang in both Testaments (1 Samuel 2:10 and Luke 1:52).

    Divine fire recreates the face of the earth from the survivors of the horror story, who interweave life with memory, dignity, and mutual care, amidst the death that surrounds them.

    Blessed feast of Pentecost.

     

    Mexico City

    June 7, 2025

  • Muerte y resurrección del pueblo palestinoPeace in Times of War | Mouneb Taim | 2019

    Death and resurrection of the Palestinian people

    By Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez

     

    Since November 2023, following the Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,159 Israeli citizens and took 251 more people into captivity, a new phase of the extermination of the Palestinian people that began decades ago has been unleashed.

    Foreseeing the uncertain times ahead, Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb convened a group of fifty colleagues from around the world to form a network called "Theology After Gaza." He invited us to think together about how to confront the genocide of the Palestinian people that began with the Nakba or Catastrophe in 1948, which is reaching its final phase with the current extermination in Gaza and the West Bank.

    Since then, we have met numerous times, in person or virtually, to organize research projects aimed at raising awareness in our academic, religious, and civil society circles around the world about the cause of the Palestinian people. We must not forget other forms of violence, such as in the Congo, South Sudan, and Ukraine, nor the victims of terrorism and the necropower of criminal mafias around the world, as is the case in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.

    Thanks to this initiative of the rector of the University Dar-Al-Kalima, based in Bethlehem, Palestine, we have been sowing seeds of social and intellectual resistance in universities in Asia, the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through research programs on the culture of the Palestinian people and other peoples in resistance. A primary source for our work is the ancestral Palestinian wisdom of Sumud, or firmness with constant perseverance in the face of evil. It is a long-standing resistance, where the connection to the land, mutual care, and the arts as guardians of memory have played a preponderant role in keeping the dignity of the Palestinian people alive amid the Israeli army's bombardment of Gaza and the control of their territories by insatiable Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

    The arts have been an essential part of people's resistance throughout history. The Zapatista youth reminded us of this a few days ago with the festival "(Rebel and Revel) Art. A Gathering of Art, Rebellion, and Resistance Toward the Day After," held at the Caracoles in Jacinto Canek and Oventik, and at the Cideci in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. A similar initiative, with a more academic tone, will be the congress. Decolonizing Power: Rethinking the Politics of Art and Religion which, if possible in the context of the current immigration policy against foreign intellectuals in the United States, is being organized by Dar-Al-Kalima University in Boston next November, in conjunction with the annual convention of the American Society of Religion (AAR) to bring together more than seventy speakers of decolonial thought around the theme of the arts as an essential means to strengthen the imagination of peoples in resistance to the current neocolonialism that is spreading across the planet.

    But today it is urgent to remember that the destructive force of the capitalist hydra does not abate, but rather threatens with new heads that devour everything in its path. It now deploys a strategy of fear to control freedom of expression, as is currently happening in the United States with the criminalization of human rights thought, international law, and peace processes. This strategy has led to the cancellation of research programs, as well as the harassment, detention, and deportation of foreign graduate students and professors, accused of antisemitism and of being a threat to national security, for their academic and social activities in favor of the ceasefire in Gaza.

    However, this is only the beginning of a broader strategy that seeks to dismantle critical thinking in American universities as part of a master plan of the new white imperialism, of extractive capitalism controlled by 9/11, with a toxic masculinity bias that reinforces millennia-old patriarchy, and with an ideology that corrupts Christianity by justifying racist colonialist projects around the world as an expression of a populist political messianism.

    In recent weeks, Israeli bombings of Gaza have continued to kill the civilian population, especially Palestinian children. Meanwhile, the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank continues, with international indifference. Muslim and Christian holy sites are being closed as places of worship by Israeli authorities on the most important dates in the religious calendar for both traditions.

    I began writing these lines on Holy Saturday, when the Christian community commemorates God's silence following the public execution on the cross of Jesus the Galilean, accused of being a criminal by the Roman Empire and a blasphemer by the authorities of the Temple of Jerusalem. That silence from the tomb of the crucified is shared today by the Palestinian people and by so many other victims executed for the sake of necropower. A time of silence that portends a new world yet to be born. But that day will not come soon, for the night is long. Today, in the silence of the ruins of Gaza, as of the extermination camps in Mexico, the murmur of the survivors who resist is the bastion of humanity that can save us all. Do we hear it?

    Forty days of silence and hopeful mourning, represented in that symbolic Christian religious calendar with Hebrew roots as a time of passage or Easter, give rise to a time of rescue of the innocent in the Merkaba or chariot of fire that symbolizes the divine and human compassion that dignifies the righteous people of history, such as Elijah and the Galilean.

    It is the powerful symbolic background of Jesus' ascension to heaven that Christian communities celebrate these days. It is not merely a myth of the past for a community mourning its murdered Rabbi. The chariot of divine fire is a way of expressing that every creature in the cosmos, especially the innocent victimized by necropower, live in the divine and human sphere of loving compassion.

    May this be an opportunity to trust in this human-divine movement that rescues and dignifies the Palestinian people and the innocents of history, disfigured faces of our humanity, but a presence that is "like a splinter that hurts" and that calls us to live radical compassion to stop the spiral of hatred that is sweeping the planet today.

     

    Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro

    June 1, 2025.

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