“The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’” – John 11:44
Last Saturday morning, a small group of us met up at the San Mateo campground. It’s right off a road called Cristianitos, which is Spanish for “little Christians.” It was named after the site of the first baptism in California history.
In 1769, European soldiers and priests were traveling north, up the coast, and came upon two young Acjachemen girls who were deathly ill. The strange fair-skinned folks did not have the power to heal them – or raise them from the dead. So instead, they converted them to their supremacist version of Christianity.
They wanted to make sure the girls would get into heaven.
Today, the trail that runs from the campground to the coast is called Panhe, which is the name of the Acjachemen burial and ceremonial site that’s been there for nine thousand years.
Today, Panhe is surrounded by a military base, a nuclear power plant, an interstate freeway, fast food joints, Richard Nixon’s old mansion, and a world-famous surf beach called Trestles.
Today, the Acjachemen are not recognized by the federal government, despite archaeological proof that they were reverent stewards of this land for thousands of years before Europeans occupied it, and built twenty-one missions up and down the California coast to forcibly convert the native people to the conquistador cult of the white Jesus.
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While we bathed in the beauty of Panhe, we opened up our bibles under an old Sycamore that’s probably been on that sacred land longer than white people. We read the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It was the lectionary text that more than a billion other Christians around the world were reading too.
In this Gospel story, the humanity of Jesus is on full display. By the time he arrives on the scene, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. Everyone is weeping, including Jesus. The word used to describe Jesus literally means that he was snorting like an angry horse. His grief took over his entire being.
Honestly, this feels foreign to me. Because I’ve been trained to keep it all together. Which is very European.
Lazarus lived in Bethany, a village two miles from Jerusalem. Today, it is called Al-Eizariya, which is Arabic for “the place of Lazarus.” My friend Husnia is Palestinian and grew up in Jerusalem. I asked her if she knew anything about this little village. She connected me with her friend Fadwa, who lives in Abu Dis, a town connected at the hip to Al-Eizariya.
On a WhatsApp call earlier in the week, Fadwa told me that the town has been named after Lazarus for centuries, and the cave where Jesus raised him from the dead is a sacred site for Christians and Muslims. In fact, Fadwa is a retired university professor who now runs a hostel for tourists who come from all over the world to visit the cave.
Fadwa told me that, for centuries, on the Feast of Lazarus, eight days before Easter, multitudes of Christians and Muslims would meet up in Jerusalem and march to the cave of Lazarus in Al-Eizariya.
Fadwa told me that the march got canceled in 2003 – and it’s been canceled every year since. Because Israel built a wall separating the twin towns from Jerusalem. Now, it takes tourists more than an hour to travel two miles, by bus or taxi, from the big city to the cave.
Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank – like Fadwa - are not allowed to travel to Jerusalem at all.
Fadwa also told me that, on the other side of the twin towns, the IDF blocked access to Palestinian land - with all its figs, almonds, olives, carob, lentils and wheat - and built an illegal settlement.
Fadwa told me that most of the residents of this gated community are wealthy Jewish-Americans.
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The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the cave is in the Gospel of John, which refers, dozens of times, to the enemies of Jesus as “the Jews.” Right before Jesus travels on foot from Galilee to Al-Eizariya, the Gospel says that the Jews wanted to seize Jesus and stone him.
For centuries, European Christians read “the Jews” and it stirred up all sorts of anti-Jewish sentiments. Which is really weird because just about every character in the Gospel of John is Jewish, including John the Baptist, Jesus, and all of his followers and friends, like Mary, Martha and Lazarus.
When the Gospel of John says “the Jews,” it is specifically referring to powerful Jewish elites in Judea, who were connected to the Temple in Jerusalem. A fierce intramural Jewish feud plays out between the establishment and the grassroots Jesus movement.
At the time, the real enemies were the Romans, who had been occupying Palestine for almost a century.
This is not clearly spelled out in the Gospels. But the background is crucial. Because when Jesus is called “the Lord“ and “the Son of God,” the original readers of the story knew that this was scandalous, in both a religious and political sense.
In that context, the Roman emperor was the Lord and Son of God. The first followers of Jesus refused to pledge allegiance to the occupier. They put their hopes and dreams in Something Else.
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In 1769, when Europeans started occupying Acjachemen land, my ancestors were scattered abroad, living in little villages the size of Al-Eizariya in places now called Ireland, Wales and Germany. They were living on land occupied by Europeans too.
My deep ancestors resisted occupation. In the 16th century, Queen Mary I occupied County Laois in Ireland and tried to build plantations around military fortifications. The O’Moores were my people. They retreated to the hills and bogs and fought a local insurgency against the illegal settlement for four decades. Most of them were massacred after they were invited to “peace talks” by the British.
In 1769, the land of Palestine was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, which basically allowed Palestinians to do their thing. Muslims and Christians were living on that land. Some Arab Jews too. The Ottomans helped Palestinians build the al-Uzair Mosque in Al-Eizariya just outside the cave of Lazarus. Christians were invited to worship in this mosque and they did for about a century. They eventually stopped. Because it was frowned upon by European church authorities.
In the early 20th century, European Jews ramped up their occupation project in Palestine. These Zionists bought a lot of land and worked tirelessly to get support from American and British leaders. They armed themselves to the teeth, and in 1948, they forced 750,000 Palestinians off their land and wiped out dozens of Palestinian villages. Twenty years later, the European Jews occupied Al-Eizariya and Abu Dis, after launching a pre-emptive attack on the surrounding Arab countries.
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Get out your bible.
Get out on the trail.
Get out your family tree.
Europeans occupy all these sacred texts.
Get serious and ask: what is wrong with the God-forsaken Europeans?
I say it is this: the Europeans have forsaken God.
They took the power of Love that penetrates every living being and turned it into the Main Man on a throne with a bone to pick.
They twisted the Sacred into a supremacy story – and everyone is susceptible to getting sucked right in.
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Right in the middle of the summer of 1863, riots broke out in New York City. Irish-Americans lynched Black people and burned down their homes. Why? Because the Irish were mad that they were getting drafted to go down South and fight for the freedom of enslaved Africans. The Irish became “white” after they fled the potato famine genocide and immigrated to America.
My Irish ancestors went from resisting European occupation to becoming the Europeans. Just like Jews from Europe would do a century later in Palestine.
We are dealing with a deep spiritual crisis.
Supremacy does its dirty work by attaching to all our unprocessed grief and trauma, especially all that pain passed down from previous generations. It hooks on and hinges us to a hierarchy of value that counterfeits what St. Paul called “the peace that transcends all understanding.”
The same Europeans who crucified Jesus - and colonized the Acjachemen and the Palestinians and every other dark-skinned people on the planet – are also occupying the psyches of Westerners.
We cannot get free without intentional practices of healing and recovery rooted in the embodied Indigenous spirituality of our ancestors who lived and loved abundantly, interdependently, sustainably, holistically with their thoughts and feelings, intimately connected to the soil, the plants, the animals, the water - and to the source of Love that sustains everything.
Something Else is calling us to “come out” of the cold, dark European cave of supremacy.
So we can unbind ourselves, snort like an angry horse, and end the occupation - from Panhe to Palestine.
