Preached at Christ Church, Worton; St Mary’s, Potterne; and Christ Church, Bulkington
Romans 9.1–5; Matthew 14.13–21
“…I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people…”
Dusk behind the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City from the Ecce Homo Pilgrim House. © Gerry Lynch, 18 November 2022.
Last April, a French nun was attacked near the Old City in Jerusalem, attacked from behind and shoved to the ground by a man whom she had done nothing to provoke and couldn’t even see. It’s increasingly common for Christians in Jerusalem, whether foreigners or local Palestinians, to be verbally abused, spat at, or even beaten up by Jewish extremists. But this incident was caught on camera. The next day the Israeli authorities charged the man with religiously aggravated assault. The case has not yet come to trial.
This incident came to mind when I read this morning’s Epistle reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans. You see, St Paul hadn’t started as one of Christ’s followers, but as someone who constantly persecuted them. His worst moment was when he stirred up a lynch mob that stoned poor St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. By the time he wrote today’s first reading, about fifteen years later, he had been on quite a journey. Whenever I see one of those extremist leaders of the West Bank settlers being interviewed on TV, I can’t help thinking of Paul, back in the days when he was still Saul. Indeed, the place where St Stephen was probably stoned is no more than a mile from where the nun was attacked last April.
None of us emerges into the world as an island. We all have a backstory – family, ancestors, nation, perhaps even more than one nation. These backstories are all complicated. Our family stories all have their dark moments – the relation nobody wants to talk about, the cousins who studiously avoid one another at weddings. Of course, every country has episodes of shame in its history as well as episodes of glory. The story of the Church is one containing much wickedness as well as good – when we encounter members of other faiths, we need to remember that.
Christianity emerged into the world from Judaism. Except for Luke and Acts, the entire New Testament was written by people who, like Christ Himself, lived and died as Jews – Jews who happened to come to faith that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. But none of them ever thought of themselves as being anything other than Jewish, and indeed there was quite a battle in the first two decades or so of the Church about whether Gentiles – in other words, people who weren’t Jews – could become Christians at all unless they became Jews first. St Paul argued that they needn’t do so, and Paul won the argument in the end, but we can hear echoes of it throughout his writing.
This passage of Romans has a sort of double-edgedness. St Paul, although arguing fiercely for the inclusion of people of all backgrounds in the Church, still definitely sees himself as Jewish, and reminds his readers that God gave much to the human race through the Jews – the covenant with Abraham and the law of Moses, the prophets and Christ Himself. Yet he is sad and troubled because most of the Jews have rejected Christ as the Messiah. He would give anything, even his own salvation, for the Jews to come to faith.
There are two false responses to this as we read it today – one is antisemitism. Antisemitism is reprehensible, and actually it’s pretty crazy to be a Christian antisemite when Jesus Himself was a Jew. The other false response is to pretend there is no meaningful difference between Christianity and Judaism, that they are just variants of the same religion. We hear the term “Judaeo-Christian” used a lot these days.
It’s really a very modern term, which came to prominence as Cold War America sought to create a common front against Communism involving both Christians and Jews; then it started being used by the sort of Christian extremists who wanted Old Testament law to be the civil law; then in the last couple of decades it became a banner of hostility to Islam.
The thing is that Judaism and Christianity are very different religions. The difference is Jesus Christ – not just that we Christians believe Him to be the Messiah long promised to the Jewish people, and indeed the whole human race, but that we Christians believe Him to be the Son of God, and God Himself. This is a seriously offensive idea in Judaism, considered not in keeping with the idea that there is only one God – as it is in Islam.
Many Jewish scholars over the centuries have also found Christian Churches problematic because of the tradition of using religious images and icons, which we Anglicans share, if not quite as enthusiastically as our Roman Catholic and Orthodox siblings. That’s another aspect of Christianity that Muslims find equally difficult.
There’s an important point here for our diverse society. We are often made to feel guilty if we point out the ways in which we disagree with people of other faiths, or of no faith, as if we’re getting in the way of everyone getting along. But the challenge of the world today isn’t for everyone to agree on everything – because that can never happen in a world of eight billion people, two hundred independent countries, thousands of unique cultures. Surely, what the world needs is for people to learn to co-exist harmoniously even when they disagree on the most difficult matters?
Paul’s heart breaks for his people, but Christ feeds His own people and the whole human race. In Matthew’s Gospel, the Feeding of the Five Thousand is set directly after the beheading of John the Baptist. Jesus “withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place” to get some space because cousin had just been brutally murdered. But crowds followed Him anyway, getting themselves stuck in a remote place without even having brought enough to eat. In the middle of His own grief, Christ fed them, and there’s no sign that He checked their credentials – and they were almost certainly nearly all local Galilean Jews, for what it’s worth – to see who was worthy of help. In fact, He fed them so well there were basketfuls of leftovers.
God seeks to feed us more generously than we imagine we deserve. So, we should turn to Him when our material needs are not being met, and when our souls are hungry too. Recent years, the Turbulent Twenties, have left many of us feeling spiritually famished, full of fear, full of the realisation that we have not escaped the dark side of human nature which has caused so much misery in the past. The man-made institutions we put in place after the Second World War to try to prevent such a horror happening again seem to be failing.
When the problems of this world seem beyond human capacity to fix, turn to God. Ask Him to end the wars that human beings seem determined to perpetuate. Ask Him, above all, to send peace upon the Holy Land. Ask Him to prevent enmity between Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
Our job is never to hide or deny our faith that Christ is the Messiah – but it is also never to spread hatred, or to judge people when their faith is different from ours – for then we’re muscling in on the job of judging the world, which is Jesus Christ’s and Jesus Christ’s alone.
It is Christ and Christ alone who will bring peace to the world, but in God’s time, not ours. Until then, turn to Christ, who will feed us, in body and soul, more generously than we would dare to ask.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.
