An ongoing conversation about America, the Middle East, and Jesus

As a general rule fearful people do not act well.

At 12 years of age, Hamburg resident Peter Perls was inexplicably swept up in the wave of fear that gripped the German people and resulted in the genocidal fury of the Third Reich. It is impossible for us to even imagine the fear this young man faced when he was removed from his home on Weidenstieg Strasse and forced to board a train to Auschwitz. This small plaque, like hundreds of others lining the streets of Hamburg, is his final memorial which casts a dark shadow on this otherwise beautiful harbor city.

Though we know so little about this young boy, we know that his life is representative of the millions who lost their lives in the horror of Nazi, Rwandan, Soviet and Serbian genocides that dashed the dreams of a brave new 20th Century world.

The horrors of the past century have caused many in the modern world to conclude that, like Peter Perls, God died in Auschwitz. Though the West has responded to the Jewish Holocaust with memorials, museums and a Jewish Homeland, little has been done to heal the deep and unimaginable wound that still exists in the Jewish soul. As I survey the physical and emotional carnage scattered across the Holy Land, I too often wonder if God indeed died at Auschwitz. Was God silent or was it his people who failed to raise their voices?

And then I must ask, who can heal these wounds?

The answer was presented some two thousand years ago by an Arab man of Jewish decent who walked among us and declared that revenge was no longer the rule of the day and that henceforth we were to love our enemies. Though he was killed by the empire of his age, now some 2.1 billion people profess devotion to this itinerant Palestinian teacher who gave his life so that we might know and see the power of God.

One must then ponder how fear infected this theologically sound Christian nation, allowing itself to be drawn in and actively participate in the systematic murder of some six million of their friends and neighbors scattered throughout the European continent. Perhaps it is because, although we profess faith and devotion in this man who came to turn all our notions of power on their head, we in fact pity him. He came to show us true power and all we saw was weakness. In response to this perceived weakness, the celebrated Palestinian poet Khalil Gibran described Jesus of Nazareth as a “raging tempest,” and it is this raging tempest of love that was nothing less than the inauguration of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Lord, grant us mercy and reveal your strength in us that we might respond to the kind of evil that fell Peter Perls with the raging tempest of love you have deposited in us.

“There is no love in fear, for perfect love casts out fear…” 1 John 4:18

These markers were conceived by the sculptor Gunter Deming from Cologne as part of a Holocaust memorial. He has placed thousands of these plaques in over 30 different German citites.