In the Sunday readings the prophet Isaiah calls on God to comfort the people and speak tenderly to Jerusalem, which “has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.” NATO and the U.S. military are hoping to achieve reconciliation with the Pakistani people after a NATO airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers over the weekend. So far, however, they can take little comfort from Pakistan’s scathing criticism.

The rhetoric following the errant strike has been heated, and on Wednesday the U.S.' top military officer strongly rejected accusations from Pakistan that NATO deliberately killed the Pakistani soldiers.

"The one thing I will say publicly and categorically is that this was not a deliberate attack," said General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff. In comments widely published in Pakistani media, Pakistan's director general of military operations, Major General Ishfaq Nadeem, had described the NATO cross-border attack as a deliberate, blatant act of aggression.

The incident has plunged U.S.-Pakistan ties into crisis and threatens to set back peace efforts in neighboring Afghanistan, where the U.S. is gradually withdrawing troops after a decade of war. Pakistan has pulled out of an international conference in Germany next week on Afghanistan's future. It has also blocked ground supply routes through Pakistan to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and ordered the U.S. to vacate a remote air base in Pakistan used for drone flights.

"Business as usual will not be there," Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said when asked if ties with the U.S. would continue. "We have to have something bigger so as to satisfy my nation."

Sources: Articles by Phil Stewart, Qasim Nauman, and Chris Allbritton for Reuters and Omar Waraich for TIME