Living in Italy and inundated with Italian media there’s not much I agreed with Pope Francis (1936-2025) on. Bergoglio often floated in doctrinal ambiguity, a product of his Jesuit formation. But when it came to that little piece of land with ‘hostages’, he did what nearly every evangelical leader—especially those tethered to donor pipelines and Holy Land beholden eschatologies—refused to do: he called it what it is. Yet playing all sides is part and parcel of his system.
Still He said the word: genocide — and called his churches in Gaza everyday since Oct. 7th 2023
Furthermore his doctrinal ambiguity was in a sense a clever ploy — allowing him to maintain unity among diverse factions, appeal to both traditionalists and progressives, and preserve plausible deniability. In that sense, it’s less about clarity and more about maneuverability.
Meanwhile, the Lausanne Movement—a historic banner for global evangelical unity—tiptoed around the crisis. A prayer statement here, a humanitarian concern there. But no prophetic cry.
No Matthew 25 urgency. Just silence—or worse, sanitized complicity.
And that’s the real scandal.
Jesus said He would judge the nations.
Not by doctrinal test scores.
Not by end-times charts.
But by how we treated the least of these.
The hungry. The naked. The displaced.
The bombed-out child.
The sheep didn’t recognize they were serving Jesus. They just loved the wounded. The goats? They had good theology, but they walked past the rubble.
So here we are.
When a pope dies who spoke out in more biblically way about the image of G-d in that part of the world than the evangelical industrial complex with its compromised connections, it’s time to reassess much. Maybe everything.
Maybe we’re the ones who need a new theology of our heavenly destination—one that matches the heart of the Shepherd-King, not the political maps of the land beholden prophetic industry’s dreams or our Western evangelical Edom status in regards to abstract revelation and mission.
Because on Judgment Day, Jesus won’t ask which side of the land dispute we were on or if our systematic theology was sound.
He’ll ask if we saw Him in the faces of the crushed.
