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This is of a truth that Prophet that should come into the world.
John 6:14

             One of the purposes of Pope John Paul II’s historic trip to the Holy Land in the year 2000 was to attempt to atone for the scandalous history of Christian persecution of Jews, which culminated in the tragedy of the Holocaust. 
            The religious hatred of Jews by Christians has been fanned over the centuries by the false charge that the Jews killed Christ.  But the origin of the hatred lies in the acrimonious  rivalry between two Jewish sects.  For that is how the Christian church began, as a Jewish sect called “the Nazarenes.” 
            All religious rivalry is fueled by the principle of “either-or:”  if I am right in my religious conviction, then you must be wrong.  We encounter this way of thinking in our own church in the antagonism between supporters of the BAS and the BCP.  The trouble is that in religious matters there is rarely an objective criterion for the truth or falsity of belief. 
            Our epistle today (Galatians 4:26-5:1) comes out of the ancient sectarian conflict to which I have referred.  Paul is warning the Galatians against the Judaizers, who insisted, on the basis of scripture itself, that only through circumcision could one enter God’s covenant with Abraham.  In this controversial epistle the principle of “either-or” is very evident: either Jerusalem or Sinai, either Isaac or Ishmael, either the flesh or the spirit, either the bond woman or the free woman.  No wonder that the persecution of Christian Jews by non-Christian Jews, which is alluded to in this epistle, led to the much longer persecution of Jews by Christians. 
            One particularly insidious variation of the “either-or” principle is the view that one religion supercedes another.  Just as Christians used to think that their faith had superceded Judaism, so now Islam claims to have superceded Christianity.  A religion which has been superceded has no further reason to exist, and the dark consequence of this is only too apparent. 
            It will take more than one high-profile trip to undo the hatred and suspicion of centuries.  Indeed, just as the Pope was about to leave for the Holy Land, a high Vatican official, in an interview with the CBC, repeated the old slander.  “It is a historical fact,” he asserted, “that the Jews killed Christ.” 
            Moreover, words alone can never heal past wrongs.  For me the most moving part of the Pope’s visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem was not what he said but his encounter with a Holocaust survivor whom he had rescued fifty-five years before they met again in Jerusalem, when the14 year old girl, recently liberated from a Nazi work camp, was about to die of exhaustion on her way to Krakow. 
            When Christian hostility to Jews is replaced by deeds of love and compassion, then Jews can reclaim Jesus of Nazareth as part of their own history.  The experience of the risen Christ is something for which there is no place in present-day Judaism.  But Jews can see in Jersus a persecuted prophet, like so many others in Israelite history.  Today Jews can echo the words of those who had just witnessed the miracle in today’s gospel: “This is of a truth that Prophet that should come into the world.”

March 2, 2008

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