One of the high points of St John’s Gospel comes near the end, in chapter 20, in the confrontation between Jesus and the disciple Thomas. Jesus, crucified but now risen from the dead, has already appeared to his disciples as a group, sending them out as the Father had sent him, and breathing out the Holy Spirit upon them (20: 19 — 23). But on that occasion Thomas was not there. When the others tell him: ‘We have seen the Lord’, he will not believe them. ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe’ (v 25). Now, eight days later, Jesus appears to them all again, and this time Thomas is with them. Jesus takes up the challenge made by Thomas to the other disciples: ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing’. Thomas answers: ‘My Lord and my God’, and Jesus finishes the encounter with the words: ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ (vv 26-29).

One of the reasons, and perhaps the most obvious one, why St John tells this story is to provide some help for Christians who, living years after the events of Easter, and never having seen the risen Lord, have difficulty in believing that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

In everyday parlance, the term “reconciliation” is used in at least two distinct senses. Think of someone saying: “They were reconciled with each other after all those years”. The picture which comes to mind is the establishment of some kind of peace or harmony after years of disagreement. “Reconciliation” in this sense is seen as eminently good and well worth striving for by active means. In religious terms, when one talks of reconciliation, one tends to think of an almost eschatological situation, when all human beings are consciously reconciled in Christ, and God is “all-in-all”. There is, however, another, more ambiguous sense of the term, although it is not as common, and does not spring as readily to mind as the unambiguously positive usage of the term. Consider hearing someone say: “They have reconciled themselves to the probability of being made redundant next week”, or something of the sort. Here, the term “reconciliation” is used in a manner not unlike “resignation”. “They are now resigned to their situation.” It is not necessarily positive, and implies a passive and perhaps grudging acceptance. It is worth bearing both of these senses of the term in mind, since different models of the tensions created in the Middle East by the existence and behaviour of the State of Israel use different senses of “reconciliation” in positing ways in which the conflict could be brought to a resolution.

My brief is to talk about “reconciliation in the Middle East”. It is my intention not to talk about the Middle East in general, but rather to focus upon Israel, to examine those things which demand reconciliation, the actors in the Israeli situation, and factors making for reconciliation.

The Emmaus story, Luke 24:13-35, is a bifocal narrative. It pivots on two moments of disclosure and the puzzle is how they relate. The first is on the road, when Jesus interprets the Scriptures: ‘“Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and so enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v 26). The second is in Emmaus, when they recognise him in the breaking of bread, but Luke cleverly links it with the first by having the disciples immediately remember what happened on the road: “And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts bum within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures’” (v 3 If). Finally, the two climaxes of the story are brought together in the last line of the pericope, when they report back to the disciples in Jerusalem: “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v 35). The first moment of insight is in the perception of the necessity of Christ’s death; the second is in the repetition of the gesture of the Last Supper, Jesus’ free appropriation of that death in the breaking of bread.