On October 2^nd, 2023, Ezzideen Shehab, a 28-year old Palestinian man, returned to his home in Gaza City, after studying medicine abroad for almost a decade – returned to his home with the great achievement, the great honour, of having become a doctor. That Friday night, the night of October 6^th, 2023, his father prepared a feast. Writing about this joyous family gathering two years later, Dr Shehab remarked,

“We gathered as one family, laughing, speaking over one another, breaking bread with careless joy, pouring juice into glasses as though it were the wine of peace itself… My father’s hands moved as Christ’s once did, blessing the bread, dividing it among those he loved.”

In rapidly acquired hindsight, it was, of course, a fateful evening, and – precisely two years later, in October 2025, he recalled that “…somewhere, though no one could name it, there hung in the air that same fragile foreboding that filled the upper room in Jerusalem, when love spoke its last words before betrayal…”

For the very next morning, as we all know, the Middle East changed, as the world woke up to the horrific news of the Hamas attack on Israel that left over 1,100 people dead and some 250 more taken hostage. And that hideous betrayal of humanity was followed by nearly 700 days of military conflict – some two years of very unequal warfare during which another 1,700 Israelis and some 72,000 Gazans lost their lives, as the Gaza Strip was reduced to little more than rubble. Humans created in the image of God betrayed other humans created in the image of God, and love seemed to have been utterly vanquished from the stage.

It was not the context in which our young medical graduate had imagined that he would minister as a doctor. And over the next two years, his medical skills found themselves augmented by a spiritual – indeed, a theological – inner life, that led, three months ago, to the publication of the Diary of a Young Doctor – a record of his experiences and insights as he sought to live out his vocation in ever more desperate circumstances.

This profound reflection on living through what many have now termed a genocide contains many – too many – poignant encounters, such as the one he had on 27^th May, 2025:

This morning, they came, two sisters. The elder, a girl, the youngest still a child. Nineteen and fifteen. They stood before me like two broken icons, hollow-eyed, limbs too light to hold the soul in place. I listened to their lungs wheeze and watched their hearts labour against emptiness. I gave them what I had: medicine, supplements – a gesture that felt almost obscene. Then the youngest, with her cracked voice, asked, “Doctor, how can we take medicine without food?”

I say this with tears on the page: I did not answer. Because what answer is there? … What is this world where children must beg for bread to take with their antibiotics?

And yet, as we hear this morning’s gospel ring in our ears, it is not hard to imagine those two emaciated sisters saying to Jesus, “How can we not worry about what we are to eat and drink?”… We seem to hear Dr Shehab saying to Jesus, “Look at this genocidal death and destruction – we are not of more value than the birds of the air…”

But, therefore… says Jesus… therefore, do not worry about your life…

It sounds a tall order – an improbably, perhaps impossibly tall order. If you read the doctor’s diary, you will realize that not a day passed in which he did not face his own mortality and vulnerability, as around him friends, family members and colleagues were killed and wounded indiscriminately.

And if it sounds a tall order to tell the quietly heroic Dr Shehab that he shouldn’t worry about his life, it feels, I suspect, an even taller order for us to contemplate, in the safety and comfort of the city of York, where most of us take for granted so many aspects of a secure life, the sudden deprivation of which would probably leave us extremely worried. But unless or until that happens, we may find it hard to hear or to understand Jesus looking us in the eye, and saying, therefore… therefore, do not worry about your life.

And it’s not the only thing which Jesus has been saying. Since last Sunday, when we heard the start of the Sermon on the Mount, in the well-known text we call the Beatitudes, Jesus has been fleshing out some of the implications of what it might actually mean to live out the values of the kingdom of heaven in the midst of the broken kingdoms of this world. And if we bother to take his teaching seriously, we cannot fail to be shocked and discomforted by the counter-cultural call to love and to give unconditionally, to work out where your treasure really is to be found, to forgive those who wrong us, to pray and to work for God’s will (not human will) to be ‘done’  – done right here on earth, and not just in heaven on a ‘pie in the sky when you die’ basis.

And – this morning – these counter-cultural teachings come to head in the verse immediately preceding what we just heard read, when Jesus says bluntly and clearly:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

“It’s simple,” says Jesus: “you have a choice… and therefore… therefore, make the right choice… and don’t worry about your life…”

And only a few years later, Paul, known to his Jewish friends as Saul, made the right choice. Indeed, you might say that for him, the choice became blindingly obvious, as he journeyed to Damascus on an errand that would have been emphatically the wrong choice. But newly commissioned by his extraordinary encounter with the risen Christ, Paul sets off across much of what was then the ‘known world’, manifestly not worrying about his own life.

And boy if he had been the worrying type, he’d have given up pretty quickly. Go look at some of his letters, and you can get a vivid sense of what it means not to worry about your life if you are intent on building the kingdom. In one particularly noteworthy passage, he says:

I am talking like a madman…with far greater labours, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.

That is why, in our first reading, Paul speaks of creation being ‘subjected to futility’ – that is why he knows that the ‘glory of the children of God’ is a work in progress, yet to be fully realised, as we endure the groaning of the labour pains of a broken world that is only held together – that is only saved by hope… by the hope that in Christ (and only in Christ) can we be set free from ‘the bondage of decay’.

For Paul knew that the living out of such a hope can only be done in solidarity with the crucified one. Because one thing is utterly certain – there is no resurrection – there is no hope of resurrection – where there has been no crucifixion. And crucifixion is ubiquitous, as Dr Shehab realized when he encountered those two sisters in the ruins and rubble of Gaza:  I tell you this. This is not war. This is crucifixion.

But it is the encounter with crucifixion, as the young doctor discovered, that we fully and properly learn to make the right choice:

I tell you: our humanity is not in question. It is crucified. And I, a doctor in Gaza, am merely one of many still clinging to the faith. Not because I believe will save me, but because I believe that suffering beside the innocent is the last honest thing a man can do.

On that fateful evening before the horrors of Hamas’ evil attack on Israel and all that followed, on that fateful evening, Ezzideen Shehab experienced the profound joys of a celebratory meal, gathered ‘as one family’, breaking bread ‘with careless joy’, recalling Christ’s own actions sharing broken bread and the ‘wine of peace’ ‘among those he loved’.

As we share in Christ’s celebration around that altar in a few moments, we are called to do so with an equally careless joy… but a joy that connects us with a saviour whose scars tell us of the cost of making the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven:

“…if God still watches, let Him bear witness. For if He is silent now, then one day He must speak. And when He does, He will whisper not in Hebrew, nor Arabic, nor English, but in suffering. The only language that was ever real.”

Which is why, if we truly seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, if we are serious about praying the prayer which Jesus taught us, then, in fellowship with that young doctor, in fellowship with Paul, and with all who have followed the Crucified One, it’s time to stop worrying about our life.

Amen.

Dr Shehab still runs the Al-Rahma Medical Clinic in northern Gaza, offering medical care without cost, treating the best part of 500 people each week. If you wish to support his work, you can do so at https://chuffed.org/project/117739-dr-ezzideen-shehab