Bethlehem is about 300 miles southwest of Damascus, Syria.
The first city tends to occupy our hearts this time of the year, while the other made news recently for its historic liberation from the repressive autocratic Assad regime.
Bethlehem is the site of our dear Savior’s birth.
Damascus was the destination for Saul (Paul) when he had his conversion experience.
We will celebrate Bethlehem during December, and then it goes back into the Christmas storage box along with the tree and the decorations.
Damascus will make a few headlines and then be forgotten by most Americans while the Syrians sort things out after 54 years of living under oppressive rule, including 13 years of civil war that saw over half a million civilians killed and millions more displaced.
The baby born in a manger would grow up to be a man far more concerned about this part of the world than we are now. These were his people, very much his Middle Eastern heritage. Were Jesus walking and ministering today in the flesh, he would feel much more at home in Israel and Syria than in our communities with crosses on every corner.
Jesus’s sandals would be taking him through the rubble of what’s left of the buildings in Damascus and Aleppo.
Jesus would be comforting the families of political prisoners who were seized, imprisoned, and tortured for simply speaking out against Syria’s dictator.
Jesus would weep with the parents of children who suffered painful deaths during Assad’s sarin nerve gas attacks in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013.
Jesus would be searching for and consoling the surviving family members of Alan Kurdi, the little three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed ashore with his shoes still on his little feet after his family tried to flee the war in a raft in 2015.
Jesus would be washing the feet of the volunteer Syrian civilians who organized and helped pull people from homes and buildings, victims of Russian air attacks on behalf of Assad. And despite the government’s propaganda efforts against their work, Jesus would remind them that the truth of their work would set them free.
During his time on earth, Jesus never visited Damascus. But it was He who spoke to Saul on the road to this Syrian city. So powerful was the experience that Saul became Paul and the rest is history.
Events of the year demand we reconsider Jesus’s question to Saul on that dusty road. It was a true check-your-mirror moment because, with every fiber of his being, Saul thought he was doing God’s work. And yet Jesus asked… Why are you persecuting me? Today, are we doing the Lord’s work as Saul or as Paul?
The Star of Bethlehem and the road to Damascus hold the answers if we don’t blind ourselves.
Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West Texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.
