Earlier this week you may have seen reports on the news of Israeli settlers surrounding Palestinian homes, cutting off their utilities, the IDF (Israeli Defence Force being called to defend the Palestinian residents) only for the soldiers to pray with the settlers and then declare that the Palestinians should move out for their safety. The Israeli ministerial spokesperson saw no injustice here and declared that Israel had a ‘biblical, historical and legal right’ to the land. My blood boils: I don’t know about yours. A few weeks ago, General Synod (led by our Bishops) voted to ‘hear’ the voices of Palestinian Christians as presented in a document called Kairos II, and to challenge the Jewish community here in the UK and in Israel to distance themselves from the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. The vote caused a spat between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi and Jewish Board of Deputies.
Christianity and Judaism have a difficult and unfortunate shared history. Any reading of the gospels will show that Jesus challenged his hearers repeatedly over some of the most treasured aspects of their faith. By the mid first century the new Christian sect was finding it hard to maintain its relationship with Jewish authorities. The gospels record Jesus’ predictions of his followers being cast out of the synagogue, division within families and the possibility of violent persecution. The seeds of these predictions were laid in the 3 years of Jesus ministry but it is not unreasonable to imagine the gospel writers working their lived experience back into their retelling of the Christian story. We know from the Book of Acts that life in Jerusalem became intolerable for Christians who were scattered by persecution: you may remember stories of Peter’s arrest and imprisonment, of the death of Stephen and the martyrdom of James.
Alongside this tension between our two faiths we can set the expansion of the church beyond the confines of the Holy Land. Again, this was foreshadowed in Jesus’ ministry, but the events of Easter and Pentecost saw the good news being preached across the Roman Empire: so much so that we have spent the last few weeks reading through Paul’s letter to the Romans…and Rome is a fair way from Jerusalem. A cosmopolitan city Rome contained Jews, Jewish Christian believers and followers of any number of other religions and cults. The Christian church (or churches) will have held people of different backgrounds, colours and social classes. There were those who knew what we call the Old Testament and others for whom the message about Jesus as Messiah, Lord and Saviour arrived ‘neat’, without the background of Israel’s story.
There are many different expressions of Christianity and many different ways in which people practice Judaism but one thing that Christian faith holds onto wherever you find it is its relationship to Judaism. For all that Jesus met with the Samaritan woman and healed the centurion’s slave he focussed his ministry on Israel. Paul fought for Israel’s place in the story of salvation: as we see in this morning’s epistle, he devoted time to it within this Book of Romans. Paul saw the challenge, the possibility, that Christians might cut themselves loose from their Jewish moorings and he argued strongly against this ever happening.
For a total break, an irreparable break with Judaism, could easily have happened as Christianity spread across the Mediterranean. It would have been all too easy for our Christian ancestors in Greece and Rome to believe that God had washed his hands of the first covenant people of God -the word is ‘successionism’. There is much in the New Testament that might have encouraged this. Just think. What were the key features of Judaism in Jesus’ day?
• The Sabbath: Jesus repeatedly ‘broke’ (inverted commas) the Sabbath with his healings.
• The dietary laws: Jesus told his followers that it was ‘what came out of a person that defiled them not what went in’ (their food).
• The temple: ‘destroy this temple and in 3 days I will raise it back up’ said Jesus. He saw the temple as his body. Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple precincts that occurred in AD 67: faith could survive without a building…and there not being sacrifices made in that building!
• What else? The Law. A refrain on Jesus’ lips was ‘The law says this but I say to you…’: He drove the religious leaders to distraction by claiming a higher authority for himself than Torah.
• Circumcision? Jesus doesn’t mention it but Paul does. Along with other Jewish prophets and teachers before his time he seeks ‘a circumcision of the heart’ rather than of the body. We have already read in Romans of how all those who believe in Jesus become Abraham’s descendants.
• ‘The land?’: a contentious issue for those of us who hear Old Testament passages referring to the land and struggle to reconcile these with modern day politics and religious fundamentalism within Christianity and Judaism. Jesus (to me at least) follows in the prophetic tradition that imagined God’s kingdom enveloping the whole world. The people of God, a new Israel, will continue. The land’s significance reduced as God’s presence is known in all times and places.
Oh yes. It would have been easy for the first Christian believers to say ‘good riddance’ to their Jewish forbears. But Paul’s argument in today’s reading is that this must never be. Why? Because, God is faithful. He had made promises to the Jews…more, he had struck a covenant with the people of Israel. For all that the definition of this people (Israel) had been widened to make room for those adopted as God’s children, God’s faithfulness to Himself (his own character of undying love) could not exclude those who had been called to be his chosen people. The logic in our reading is clear. There aren’t ‘first- and second-class’ Covenant people (Jewish and Christian). We are all in the same boat: part of one big family. As Paul had said right at the beginning of his letter we have all fallen short of God’s glory…but God’s love embraces us all with His loving kindness. As far as ‘the Jews’ are concerned the key phrase in our reading is this: the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable, there is an honoured place for God’s first covenant people in His Kingdom.
That perhaps feels both wonderful and uncomfortable at the same time. We might wonder at God’s faithfulness but also have difficulties with modern day Israel – not least in relation to its neighbours and the people of Palestine. We might possibly attempt to disentangle interpretations of sacred history, of meanings associated with words like ‘Judaism’, Jewish, Israel and Israeli and struggle because everything in this Holy Land is contested.
What we are not allowed to do however is to draw a sharp dividing line between the Old and the New Testaments: for they leach into one another. Some Christians down the centuries have attempted to do just that: to lose the Old Testament. Others have attempted to lose ‘the Jews’: think of mediaeval anti semiticism, the expulsion of Jewish Communities from this land, the pogroms of the East, and the holocaust. Some Christians lazily speak as if there were two Gods: a fierce God in the Old Testament and a loving one in the New, a divide between Law and Spirit. But none of this is right. Jesus was Jewish. His ministry makes no sense without Israel’s back story. We cannot lose the Old Testament even if we read it through the lens of its fulfilment in Christ Jesus. The prophets and the patriarchs are ours too. The Old Testament stories of faith (and faithlessness) speak to our experience. Jews and Christians share the same hope – that one day all things in heaven and on earth will be reconciled to God. Christians see that hope being fulfilled in Jesus and, with Paul, would wish that our Jewish brothers and sisters might see this too.
No. Like a broken family we might not be able to see how its members might be reconciled (Christian and Jew), our relationships might well be tense but they cannot be broken or dismissed out of hand. We have the same Heavenly Father even when we are not speaking to one another.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us in this awkward, broken place in relation to Judaism. It leaves us knowing that things are not as they should be. Our two great faiths facing one another with so much in common and yet so much that divides us. It leaves us trying to understand where our Jewish brothers and sisters are coming from, whilst recognising that not all Jews or Israelis support what is taking place in the Middle East now. Perhaps it leaves us grateful that we are still speaking. That through our separation and division we can still respectfully disagree. And finally it leaves us mindful to pray: we use these words on Good Friday
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.
All Amen.
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