Mennonite Central Committee

The Everlasting Supper?

by Roy Hange, MCC Syria

In the Christian Quarter of Old Damascus, 20 yards from the street called "Straight," thirteen of us gathered around the long table in the vaulted dining room of the Syrian Orthodox Seminary. Our simple, evening meal began with the prayer Jesus taught chanted in a dialect of the language Jesus spoke, Syriac. The Lord's Prayer was lead by the spiritual director of the seminary, a gentle and wise monk named Father Issa. The English equivalent of his name is Jesus. Father "Jesus" sat at the head of the table which happened to include 12 others that evening. The dining room was framed by two pictures of the Lord's Supper.

The twelve "disciples" that evening came from five nations: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and the United States. There were four Christian Iraqis who had defected from the Iraqi army either during or after the Gulf War and were temporarily living at the seminary. There were a number of Lebanese and Syrian monks studying at the seminary along with Father Issa, who was Turkish, and myself an American placed there by Mennonite Central Committee to teach English and studying Syriac. The one visitor that evening was also a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church and had just returned from being a soldier in one of the multi-national forces stationed in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.

After the prayer, our conversation emerged from the midst of our diversity as we shared accounts of our lives during the Gulf War. As our discussion deepened, we soon discovered we were as much a fellowship of death as we were brothers in Christ. In the midst of the visitor's stories about life with the multi-national forces in Saudi Arabia, a monk observed that the visitor and the former Iraqi foot soldier sitting across the table from him could have shot each other.

I commented that my government had dropped bombs on the heads of those sitting around me, bombs which became the shrapnel the doctors I was sitting across from pulled out of the bodies of their fellow countrymen. One of the former Iraqi ground soldiers sitting beside me had spent 20 days shaking fearfully in an underground bunker pummeled by the bombs from B-52's. I had once asked him what would have happened if one of the bombs would have hit too close. He simply made an upward, waving motion with his hand and said "Casper the friendly ghost." He said, "I didn't want to be a part of the war, so one day I just dropped my gun and started walking."

Two of those present were former Iraqi military doctors who had helped the victims of the war. One was stationed on the front sending bodies back to Baghdad and the other was in a Baghdad hospital treating both military and civilian casualties. A few nights before, we had spoken about what doing triage was like for the many wounded bodies that were trucked back to Baghdad from the front.

The main air base used by allied planes in eastern Turkey was near the home town of one of the monks. A smart bomb from one of those planes hit a large, warehouse like building in the northern city of Mosul. The structure happened to be a Syrian Orthodox Church and parsonage where the wife and three children of a priest were killed.

The conversation raged on like a battle of our consciences against the reality we all had participated in until uneasy silence settled around our table.

Some one broke the silence with a question to Father Issa: "Will I go to hell?" More questions and excuses started flying out of the reflective silence. "Will we be judged for this?" One of the Iraqi doctors said, "I never carried a gun in all my years in the military. I had no choice but to be there." Other Iraqis said they had no choice, "Either I fought, or was shot on the spot." One of the doctors had been assigned to witness the execution of deserters in front of their families during the Iraq-Iran war. Someone said, "I would have never shot a Christian," but the responses came back, "How would you have known whether they were Christian or not, you can't see a cross around their neck from 200 meters?"

We had gathered that evening to break bread together even as we, through our national loyalties, had been prepared to break each others bones a few months before. We were mortal enemies on the terms of the powers of this age, while brothers in the kingdom of Christ. The loyalties to the demands of those kingdoms clashed in our conversation that evening as they had in our lives few months before.

The pictures of the Lord's Supper still framed our gathering as a silent reminder of the meaning of our meeting. Near the end of our meal I remembered Jesus' disciples during that "Last Supper." They included a former tax collector and zealots, who were enemies, sitting by one who would betray and another who would deny among the rest who would flee in silence. As I looked at the pictures once again, I imagined Jesus thinking in their midst 1970 years ago, and in our midst that evening, what he would later say on the cross in the hands of his enemies, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." The good shepherd still prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies so that our eyes would be opened to see and know another way in this world.