In today’s gospel from Luke (Luke 4:14-21) we are shown Jesus as a devout Jew, worshipping
in the synagogue; but a devout Jew with a radical vision of transformation,
seeking to create a reform movement within Judaism, or more accurately, seeking
the complete transformation and repentance of the whole Jewish people within his lifetime. ‘Today this scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4:21). ‘Repent
and believe the gospel’ (Mark 1:15).
Geza Vermes, who among others has emphasized the
Jewishness of Jesus, calls the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels – that is, the
gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke – a ‘charismatic healer and teacher and
eschatological enthusiast’ (or, as we might say, an enthusiastic teacher of the
end times and the nature of the kingdom of God).
Remove what we call ‘the Old Testament’ and
you are left without any context for Jesus’ life and work. Today we remember
Holocaust Memorial Day, on the date that Auschwitz was liberated in 1945 (27
January): the true answer to the Nazis, who sought to eliminate the Jews, and
to remove from the New Testament all traces of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus’
Jewish origins, is to reaffirm that Jewishness of Jesus.
Yes, a break between the two faiths occurred
not long after the death of Jesus. Yes, there is a historic bitterness between
Judaism and Christianity which has still not entirely been resolved. But there
is no reason now, in the 21st century of the common era, why any
longer we need to ‘pussy foot’ around and fail to call Jesus what he was: we
believe him to have been the son of God; but the son of God was born, educated
and lived his life and ministry not as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant but as a
Jew in Palestine.
The unprecedented evil of the Holocaust
– the systematic attempted genocide of the Jewish people in Europe with the
intention of suppressing the Jewish faith and cultural traditions – not
surprisingly led to a profound reassessment of Christianity’s stance towards
the other world religions. The issue has been complex with regard to Judaism,
because of specific issues such as the pre-1955 Good Friday liturgy with its reference
to the conversion of ‘faithless’ Jews (perfidis Judaeis). The Roman Catholic church
has changed the prayer several times, but not to the satisfaction of Jews. The
Anglican Church has also had a collect in the 1662 prayer book for the
conversion of ‘all Jews, Turks,
Infidels, and Heretics’ that they may be saved ‘among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be
made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord’. None of this was sorted out in the Alternative Service Book (ASB) of
1980, and it was not until Common Worship in 2000 that we have had two prayers of reconciliation:
Let us pray for God’s ancient people,
the Jews, the first to hear his word: for greater understanding between
Christian and Jew, for the removal of our blindness and bitterness of heart, that
God will grant us grace to be faithful to his covenant and to grow in the love
of his name.
Lord God of Abraham, bless the children of your covenant, both Jew and
Christian; take from us all blindness and bitterness of heart, and hasten the
coming of your kingdom, when the Gentiles shall be gathered in, all Israel
shall be saved, and we shall dwell together in mutual love and peace under the
one God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
As the collect in the 1662 prayer book makes clear, more generally the
problem has been Christian ‘exclusivism’, that is to say, the view that the
Christian truth claim is superior to that of any other of the world’s religions.
The assertion is often said to rest on John 14:6: ‘Jesus answered, “I am the way and the
truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
In
September 2000, a thoughtful Jewish response to the issues posed by post-war
attempted reconciliation entitled Dabru
Emet or Speak the Truth was
published in the New York Times. It itemized eight areas of potential agreement: Jews
and Christians worship the same God; Jews and Christians seek authority from
the same book – the Bible (what Jews call Tanakh
and Christians call the ‘Old Testament’); Christians can respect the claim of
the Jewish people upon the land of Israel (though this is controversial because
of Jewish settlements and opposition to the ‘two state’ solution for
Palestine); Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah; Nazism
was not a Christian phenomenon (though Christians, or self-designated
Christians were involved in the Nazi movement); the humanly irreconcilable
difference between Jews and Christians will not be settled until God redeems
the entire world as promised in Scripture; a new relationship between Jews and
Christians will not weaken Jewish practice; and finally Jews and Christians
must work together for justice and peace.
In the last point, over 220 Jewish theologians who signed Dabru Emet envisaged a moral partnership
between Judaism and Christianity: ‘Jews and Christians,
each in their own way, recognize the unredeemed state of the world as reflected
in the persistence of persecution, poverty, and human degradation and misery.
Although justice and peace are finally God’s, our joint efforts, together with
those of other faith communities, will help bring the kingdom of God for which
we hope and long. Separately and together, we must work to bring justice and
peace to our world.’
The concept of the ‘Kingdom of God’, which Jesus variously proclaimed in
the gospel of Luke to be ‘near’ or ‘at hand’, and which was to be worked
towards as a matter of urgency, is in origin a Jewish concept, as the document
produced by the Jewish theologians implies. But for us, today, the concept of
the Kingdom of God is also more than a Jewish concept. If offers us the goal
for the Christian life: those who follow the example and teachings of Jesus
will be vindicated when the Kingdom of God comes and will reign with Christ
forever.
The reader of the synoptic gospels is often left to wonder whether the
disciples will ever truly come to understand the nature of the kingdom. It
takes the death and resurrection of Jesus to bring them to a more complete
insight of the nature of the kingdom of God, which has at its heart the story
of the crucified Son of God who is betrayed by his disciples, in spite of all
their promises. There are many setbacks on the way: the contrast is between the
whirlwind ministry of Jesus and the tortoise-like progress of the disciples,
who even after the crucifixion deny him.
Archbishop
Donald Coggan spoke these words on Jewish-Christian dialogue in a lecture
delivered at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1985:
‘We have, I trust, moved from
suspicion of one another, from mere toleration of one another, to a sense of
appreciation of and enrichment by one another, to a sense of responsibility for
one another. Now, has not the time come when, without risk of misunderstanding,
Christian may issue to Jew an invitation – to pilgrimage together (for truth is
found on the road rather than on the balcony of mere observation); to
exploration, not only through a study of the Scriptures but also through an
entering into the religious experience of Christians; and, if he will, to join
us on the road?’
Courtesy and friendly
debate with members of the other world religions is both a delight and a
necessity. But we should avoid the dangers of religious syncretism, of assuming
that basically all the religions are somehow the same because they serve the
same purpose. Both Judaism and Christianity have exclusive truth claims. As
David Novak says, ‘the
highest form of worship of the Lord God of Israel is either by the Torah and
the tradition of the Jewish people or by Christ and the tradition of the church’: you cannot
easily have both. We would do well to remember at all times that for us at
Christians there has been only one ‘once for all revelation’ of the true hope
for the world – that is, the life, ministry, death and resurrection of our Lord
Jesus Christ: Jesus the Jew, who spoke Aramaic, who lived and walked about
among us; a man whose practical ministry was in healing and exorcism; whose
teaching to us has never been surpassed; nor yet has been properly put into
action by us in building a true replica of the Kingdom of God here on earth.
