Address to the Middle East Peace Initiative conference

Jerusalem, Israel, May 18, 2003

The essence of love is to reach out without hesitation or reservation to embrace one another despite our religious beliefs and traditions, despite the current conflicts to somehow transcend ideology and religion, and become the people that God, Yahweh, Allah has called us to be.

We have to seek repentance in relation to each other, but more importantly we have to seek repentance in relation to our God for not truly being the people, the children that He has called us to be. We must forgive one another, we must be bold enough and big enough to forgive each other. In the Hebrew scriptures, Genesis 1:26, God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." We have been made in the image and after the likeness of God, whether we be Jew, Christian, or Muslim. We have to be restored back to that original position where we can see one another as God made us.

We need religion not to separate us, not to define us, but to help us find our way back to the same God. As Jacob saw the face of God in Esau, we must seek the face of God on all of humanity. We must all repent because we have hurt each other. And sometimes we have hurt each other in the name of God, as if somehow one of us has more of God than the other. Deuteronomy 6:5 says, "love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." And Leviticus 19:18 says, "love thy neighbor as thyself."

We have become entrapped in the symbols, in the signs, and not in the substance. The real substance of all of our faiths is God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God never changes.

I have to ask forgiveness on the part of my Jewish brothers. I have to show the deepest sense of humility, as well as profound gratitude for you being the ones to whom Yahweh has entrusted the faith. He has used you as the foundation to build a great family of God. God chose you in order to lead us back to Him. That’s why He chose you. He chose you from among all people on the face of the earth to be the foundation for the return of Yeshua. He desired that you would recognize him Nx receive him when he came. He chose you.

But we as Christians have persecuted you. We have not understood your calling. In our desire for dominance, we persecuted you. The holocaust of World War II is a clear indication of man’s inhumanity toward man. We are sorry and we seek your forgiveness because it was wrong. Even at the highest levels, Catholicism somehow played a role in humanity’s ungodliness, and we seek your forgiveness.

Even as Christians, we put a chain to Jesus, to Yeshua. We thought he came just to die—to be rejected, to be misunderstood—and we saw the cross as being the preordained will of God for Yeshua. But we realized that we were wrong, that God the Father sent His only son to restore all things, to bring us back to Him, to restore us to our original position.

We said the cross was the path that God desired. We Christians must repent for saying that God sent His son primarily for that purpose. He sent His son to reconcile us, to redeem, to restore all things. We repent because we have wanted to blame the Jews for his crucifixion. We have to blame ourselves because we have glorified the cross.

I am not ashamed to say that I am a brother to the Jew. I’m not afraid to say I’m a brother to the Muslim. God will not say to me when I face Him, "George, were you a good Catholic?" He will not say to me, "Did you cling to your icons?" He will say, "Did you love one another? Did you look beyond their faults to see their needs?" All of us together will be right when we stand together under the one God.

Thank you for coming here today, holding hands, one to another, saying to the world that we have one God and we will serve that one God and we will destroy everything that separates and divides us from one another for we are one family of God.