In his letter, presented to Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, the
Anglican bishop in Jerusalem, during a dinner with church
leaders, Williams said that "for the last few months, with all
the suffering and fear they have brought, it has been so
painfully clear that without peace and justice for all the
peoples of the Holy Land there is small hope of lasting
reconciliation in the wider world."
"Peace never comes without cost; so the deepest enemy to peace
is always the spirit of grasping and clinging to what makes us
feel safe while the truth is that we shall only be safe when
others are not frightened of us, when others do not feel
silenced, despised, or suffocated by us," Williams said in his
letter. "Meanwhile, those who love violence continue to keep the
wounds open. Disproportionate, indiscriminate force, applied not
only by weaponry but by constant harassment; the insane butchery
of terrorism, dressed up as heroism--these things serve only to
keep the door firmly closed to any hope of taking away fear."
As believers and human beings "we stand at the gates of the
city...where so many sufferers are silenced and where so many
innocent on both sides of the terrible conflict are killed and
their deaths hidden under a cloak of angry, selfish, posturing
words." One must recognize that people share "the passionate
longing never to be a victim again, the hunger for security
expressed in the ownership of the land, the impotent
near-mindless fury that bursts out in suicidal ways, and brings
destruction to so many," Williams said in his sermon.
"Jesus does not steer us away from the gates and send us back
into the holy silence of the desert or the peace of the
countryside. He keeps us close to him as we stand at the gates
and he tells us that these are also the gates of heaven,"
Williams said. "If you recognize your involvement and prepare to
walk with Jesus into the city, to the cross and the tomb, there
is a joy and a mystery at the end of the path because it is
inexhaustible divine love that walks with us. We stand not just
at the gates of the city of wrong," as one great Muslim writer
called it, "the great city where the Lord was crucified, as
revelation says, but also at the entrance to the Garden of
Eden."
"At these city gates we see the possibilities," Williams added.
"We can enter with Jesus and walk with him to his garden of new
life. Or we can enter and find ourselves caught up in the
murderous crowds and, at the end of it all, find ourselves with
hands both empty and bloodstained. Or we can stay at the gates,
unwilling to commit ourselves because we know that as soon as we
enter there sill be trail and suffering; but if we stay there we
shall never reach the garden."
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