Once far enough removed, everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen.” (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This [McClelland & Stewart, 2025], 25).
El Akkad writes a sentence designed to simultaneously stop us in our tracks and to make us leap ahead to consider the future as one of lament.
That sentence carries further what El Akkad originally tweeted on October 25, 2023, just after the eruption of fresh violence and hostage-takings by Hamas against Israelis on October 7, and in the beginnings of the razing (erasing) of Gaza that has been under way ever since. At the time El Akkad tweeted: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
In El Akkad’s words is the recognition of the desire we have as human beings to keep to safe ground – the desire for self-preservation, to negate what is really happening when it is in fact happening – and to do so for the sake of preserving the system that keeps us safe, even if others are very much not safe at the hands of that same system. El Akkad makes an argument here that chases us to ask ourselves about our core commitments as human beings and as nations. It is a prophetic book in prophetic voice. It is intended to, and does, shake the foundations in its ‘speaking truth to power,’ which includes speaking against our very trust in power.
We have heard a great number of prophetic voices through the Season after Pentecost. The Season after Pentecost names the season in which the Spirit of God is at work – perhaps nowhere in particular, perhaps everywhere all at once, but perhaps most importantly and always in the voices that have been preserved through history in and from the midst of crisis and oppression.
Such voices are the Spirit’s reminder of what matters most:
Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land . . . (Amos 8)
Cease to do evil; learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord. (Isaiah 1)
Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me, ‘Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.’ (Jeremiah 1)
The critique is ageless – and it is “over nations and over kingdoms” because it is the Spirit that transcends the human desire for self-preservation and calls us again and again to return to the core of God’s call to carry God’s image in this world at all times, to be properly aghast in the now, and to hear and to speak with prophetic voice on behalf of those who are being crushed.
Such voices aim to gain a foothold in the present, in the midst of what keeps happening, in the very teeth of systems and structures that have been built up for self-protection, but that like the Tower of Babel, might need to be scattered to the four winds so that there is once more space for those who have been trampled underfoot to breathe again. The prophetic voice – the biblical prophetic voice – holds the heart of the matter high – and the heart of the matter is with those who are in the lowest place.
So at the culmination of the season, we will mark the Reign of Christ, in which we are reminded that God’s intent is peace – that wars would “cease to the end of the earth” (Psalm 46:9), that it is not in ourselves but in Christ that “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17) and that the demand to “save yourself” (Luke 23:35) was/is not the way of the cross.
Primate calls for action on
“obscene violence” in Gaza
https://www.anglican.ca/news/primate-calls-for-action-on-obscene-violence-in-gaza/30048752/
“I will encourage the more than 1.3 million Canadians who identify as Anglican to regularly communicate with their elected officials, asking them to work toward an immediate, comprehensive, two-way arms embargo.”
