Would Jesus Support Netanyahu's Israel?

“Flevit super illam (“He wept over it”), was painted in 1892 by Enrique Simonet, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Many of my Christian friends see the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of God's covenant promise to bless all the nations of the world through the descendants of Abraham. Based on that premise they support any and all military actions taken to ensure its survival.

But would the Prophet, King, and Suffering Servant Jesus take a different position today than when he led a royal  procession into Jerusalem on a donkey's back nearly 2000 years ago?

It was on the eve of Passover, a celebration of the descendants of Israel's deliverance thirteen centuries earlier from Egyptian oppression, that an enthusiastic crowd welcomed Jesus into the city, believing him to be the fulfillment of their dream of having their Roman occupiers overthrown and Jerusalem restored to its former glory. King Solomon had been been greeted in a similar way as he rode a beast of burden belonging to his father David on his way to his coronation in 970 BCE. 

Sadly, in spite of Solomon's many accomplishments, like building a beautiful temple and an even more elaborate palace, this Son of David's reign ended in a divided kingdom and the eventual end of Israel's political dominance in the region.

The first century citizens of Jerusalem would have also been thinking of the Maccabean revolution just over a hundred years prior, when Israel's enemies were overthrown by force, the Jerusalem temple was rededicated and Israel was for some decades once again an independent nation. But was Jesus to be another Judas Maccabee (the Hammer), or a different kind of world ruler and redeemer altogether?

Sometime before Jesus entered Jerusalem he had sternly rebuked two of his his disciples, James and John, for wanting to order fire from heaven to destroy their Samaritan (Palestinian?) enemies (Luke 9:51-55). In line with the prophets before him, Jesus proclaimed a reign of God in which wolves lie down with lambs, swords are reshaped into plowshares, and nations no longer make war against each other. In keeping with the words of the Torah and the prophets, God's promises of land and other blessings were seen as based on God's people being faithful to their part of the covenant, which included doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God. This meant being hospitable to strangers and aliens among them, a command repeated more often in scripture than even the observance of Sabbath.

So surely Jesus would never support having the children of Abraham, so often the victim of oppression themselves, becoming violent oppressors like their Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek and Roman conquerors. As a devout Jew, Jesus loved his people deeply and because of that wept over Jerusalem as he lamented, "If you only knew today what is needed for peace! But now you cannot see it."

I join Jesus in that love and that lament.