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Sermon preached
at Bradford Cathedral
Trinity 11: Sunday Holy Communion 3rd August 2008 Romans 9.1-5 |
I was phoned up some years ago by a national journalist who writes for a daily newspaper, to ask about a group I took to the Holy Land. I didn’t know that she had a particular agenda, being rather naïve about the media, so I was horrified to find some of what I said, subtly misquoted and misrepresented, in a national journal under the headline ‘Christians who Hate the Jews’. And despite a two-way correspondence with her about what she’d got wrong, she later reproduced it in her book on terrorism in Britain. Why did she do that? There were a number of reasons, I suspect; among them that she couldn’t find enough evidence for what she wanted to be true, so she created some instead. But some of her article had its roots in this morning’s reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul writes his letter to a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles who are Christians in Rome. The Jews look down on the Gentiles; so Paul wants to emphasise their unity in Christ, that they all need salvation through faith in Jesus, and that being a good Jew is not enough to bring salvation. And he is deeply troubled that his own Jewish people, to whom God has made a deep commitment and covenant, haven’t responded as a whole to Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah. How is Paul to explain the lack of response of his own godly people to the revelation of God? He does it in various ways. He says that Jews by physical descent may not have genuine faith; he says that God is sovereign over who responds and who does not; he uses the Old Testament idea of the faithful remnant to indicate that only some will be saved, and that the Jewish people have always had a rebellious streak against God; he appeals to God’s commitment to Israel to indicate that in the future they will return to God. In all this there’s a tension in Paul, which comes out elsewhere in his letters, a tension reflected in the Church since it began: how does the Church regard the Jewish people? On the one hand there is a view which says that, because God is irrevocably committed to the Jewish people, the original covenants with Abraham and Moses still stand, and the Jewish people can still follow God with integrity through the Law. It’s the sort of approach advocated by the Council for Christians and Jews, an approach of dialogue and mutual respect, and repentance for the anti-Semitism of the past. On the other hand, there is the view, called supercessionism or replacement theology, that the Church has superseded or replaced Israel as God’s chosen people, based on faith not on physical descent, and therefore there is nothing special about the Jews at all any more. There have been extreme examples throughout history of this, but it’s been part of normal Christian currency through the ages: the Pope recently caused a breakdown in Catholic-Jewish relations by reissuing the old Latin Mass including a prayer for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. The extreme anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany was the logical conclusion of replacement theology, and it’s been at the root of many evils in Christian history. If you want to know what being on the receiving end of this point of view feels like, just read or listen to strong Muslim views that Christianity is wrong and a distortion of the truth and that Muslims have the real truth about God and Jesus. It’s painful to be told that by people who won’t listen to what you really think. That’s how Christians can make Jewish people feel. I think that the journalist who stung me was trying to get at some of this concern by writing what she did. But she also confuses such anti-Jewish views with opposition to the unjust occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli Government, and makes criticism of the state of Israel into anti-Semitism, which it most certainly isn’t. I think that uncritical support for the state of Israel by so many Christians is absolutely wrong, and many Jewish people agree with that view too, believing that the occupation is deeply harmful to Jewish society and its future. So what are we to think about what Paul struggles with? I believe we need to start by accepting God’s ongoing commitment to the Jewish people. It’s amazing that the Jews have survived as a people for so long, and it’s a matter of God’s grace that they have done so. Jewish faith as we know it today has been much influenced by Christianity in any case; and our role in relation to the Jewish people is to love them, to grow together with them in the knowledge of God, and to humbly share with them our experience of the living Christ who comes not to destroy but to complete the Jewish faith. We’re not trying to make Jews into Christians, but to enable them, despite all that Christians have done to them, to know the certainty that God loves them in and through Jesus Christ, the Jew whom we follow and want to share, and whom many Jewish people have embraced in the past and the present. And to share that good news with them requires humility and repentance for sins of the past, as well as the burning love for others which Paul expresses in today’s reading. So what does this all mean for us? Let’s support the Jewish people, and their right to exist, against the politically motivated anti-Semitism of many in our society – we need to confront hostility to Jew¬ish people in our own society and city. Let’s also join in confronting the Israeli government where its policies deny the right of the Palestinians to exist too, with the critical support of true friends, strengthening the voices of Jewish people who oppose the injustices of that government. And let’s pray for Jewish and Arab Christians in Pales¬tine and Israel, that they may draw together in Christ, and so offer a means of making peace, as Paul wished: drawing Gentiles & Jews together. The Lambeth Conference ends today: Bishops representing Christians in churches around the world have shared fellowship together – like the early Christians in Rome; and we too share in this service of communion with Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, from around the world; that the Jesus who fed 5000 people with almost nothing in the wilderness might bring together all his people in this foretaste of the heavenly banquet where all peoples will come and eat together with Christ in peace with one another.
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