Resurrection and Holocaust
- From: "Deckard" <deckardmort@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 29 Apr 2006 21:38:01 -0700
Resurrection and Holocaust
Sermon at University Church
Jay A. Wilcoxen, April 23, 2006
Scripture: Acts 3:1-19
As the book of Acts presents it, the disciples of Jesus in the early
days
after the resurrection stayed in Jerusalem in order to give public
testimony to the resurrection of Jesus. The mission of the apostles,
after
Pentecost, was to keep bearing witness to the resurrection. That public
witness of the disciples was the beginning of the word which would soon
spread from Jerusalem to Rome, gaining believers in city after city,
region after region, obviously on its way to encompassing all peoples,
as
the book of Acts sees it. Testify to the resurrection of Jesus. That
was
their assignment, and that's what gives us our text for today.
Peter's speech in our reading is such a testimony to Jesus'
resurrection.
It declares that it was by the name of the risen Jesus that the
disabled
man now walks. But the speech also does more. It was delivered inside
the
Jerusalem temple, at the Portico of Solomon, and therefore to an
audience
made up of properly purified and observant Jews. The speech addresses
the
Jewish hearers as if they had been in the mob at the time of Jesus'
condemnation by Pilate. "...Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in
the presence of Pilate." And as the speech goes on, the accusation gets
more severe. "...you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from
the
dead."
That is to say, our speech seems to be one of the New Testament
passages
that is pretty heavily anti-Jewish. That's the reason I wanted to speak
on
this text. Tuesday, day after tomorrow, is Yom Ha-Shoah in the Jewish
religious calendar, the day of memorial of the Holocaust. It is the
memorial of that great crime of the twentieth century. The Holocaust --
a
crime whose motive was two thousand years of anti-Semitism; a crime
whose
means was the full force and authority of the Third Reich; a crime
whose
opportunity was the Nazi conquests during the Second World War, giving
them access to all the Polish and Russian Jews. A crime that consisted
of
the attempt to eradicate a people from the earth, simply because of who
they were.
It is appropriate -- perhaps even imperative -- that Christians share
in
the memory of the Holocaust. Of that two thousand years of
anti-Semitism,
of hatred for Jewish people, most of it was sheltered by, if not
directly
sponsored by, Christians, usually with some violent religious
hate-slogan.
It is true that Christians have not had a monopoly on anti-Judaism.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, secular, pseudo-scientific and
racist, forms of anti-Semitism began to flourish, and these strongly
fed
the Nazi ideology. The resulting dilemma for the Jews has been
described
in a famous quotation from Raul Hilberg, first major historian of the
Holocaust.
"Since the fourth century after Christ, there have been three
anti-Jewish
policies: conversion, expulsion, and annihilation.... The missionaries
of
Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as
Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right
to
live among us. The German Nazi at last decreed: You have no right to
live." [Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1st ed. of
1961, pp. 3-4. Emphasis added.] Thus Christian anti-Judaism has
contributed through the ages to the motivation of the Holocaust. And
many
have pointed out that that anti-Judaism begins in the New Testament
itself.
Let me relate our speech of Peter to that heavy burden. The speech
seems
to emphasize two things: the resurrection of Jesus and the guilt of the
Jewish audience. Could the message of the resurrection lead to a guilt
trip and ultimately hate crimes?
The passage itself speaks of a healing, of shouting and leaping for joy
because of good health, shalom. The reason Peter speaks of what the
people
did a few weeks ago is to identify firmly and certainly who was raised
from the dead. It was that same Jesus that you howled at the other day
--
it is he, now restored to life and exercising heavenly power for good,
he
is the cause of the joy you now see. What you did two months ago before
Pilate has been totally reversed, and we are the witnesses to the
living
Jesus, we who bring this good news to you.
Back in the 1960's, Marcus Barth, son of Karl Barth the famous Swiss
theologian, taught New Testament at the Divinity School. I spent time
with
him as a student and colleague and I usually attended his regular
Thursday
night open houses. One of Marcus Barth's deeply felt themes was about
resurrection as canceling guilt. He used to say, suppose you have
someone
on trial for murder. The judge is presiding and the prosecution has
proceeded and has proven its case. But when it is the turn of the
defense,
they make their case by bringing in the alleged murdered man himself.
He
has been raised from the dead. What is then the situation for the
court?
Do they condemn the murderer on previous evidence? Probably not. What
they
do is declare the so-called murderer acquitted by reason of
resurrection!!
While there is some playfulness here, Barth's point is that the true
New
Testament message is that Jesus' resurrection changed the whole
situation,
and there is no longer room for any guilt because of his death.
Peter's speech is about resurrection and a new beginning, not about
guilt.
Repentance -- which is required from all, not just people who were
around
on Good Friday -- repentance is available, that "your sins may be wiped
out." "Wiped out," as in no longer weighing on our lives, individually
or
in common. Wiping out the burden of the past is the effect of Jesus'
resurrection. To repeat, the message of the resurrection is about new
life, not about guilt!
While this was certainly the meaning of the passage in Luke's own time,
this passage and others in the New Testament have been developed
differently in later ages. The interpretation of the New Testament came
to
be permeated very deeply by an anti-Judaism that scholars did not often
recognize in themselves. Even in the nineteenth century, when
enlightened
Christian scholars developed historical and critical readings of all
the
New Testament writings, there was often a built-in anti-Judaic bias to
their viewpoints. Perhaps the most important aspect of this Christian
bias
turned on the fact that Jesus was a Jew. Liberal Christian scholars,
using
modern historical methods, made progress in freeing the historical
Jesus
from the great load of dogmatic formulas that later centuries piled on
him. However, in order to lift up Jesus' uniqueness and religious
genius,
scholars have constantly set him over against the Judaism that they saw
him as rising above.
This has been driven home by the New Testament scholar Paula
Fredriksen,
who writes in the new introduction to her book From Jesus to Christ,
In too many [scholarly] "reconstructions," Judaism functions as Jesus'
contrasting backdrop; his contemporaries, as some sort of moral inverse
of
Jesus himself. Thus: Jesus was egalitarian; his contemporaries affirmed
hierarchy. Jesus was kind to women, the poor, and the ill; his
contemporaries scorned them. Jesus focused on ethics; they, on ritual.
He
preached and lived a politics of compassion; they practiced and
enforced a
politics of purity. Jesus taught a love of neighbor that extended
naturally across ethnic or racial or national boundaries; they were
consumed with nationalism and a concern for racial purity. No wonder he
taught against them; no wonder they wanted him dead.
Some scholars soften such descriptions of Jesus' Jewish contemporaries
by
insisting that they [the scholars] intend no value judgment by them.
One
group was simply hierarchical, oppressive, patriarchal, exclusionary,
and
sexist; the other, egalitarian, inclusive, and compassionate: Nothing
pejorative intended! ...In effect if not in intent, such descriptions
perpetuate the long Christian tradition of scholarly anti-Judaism.
[From
Jesus to Christ, 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2000, p. xxvi.] Ms.
Fredriksen's point is that New Testament scholars attempting to recover
the Jesus of history must recognize that Jesus himself was a part of
the
Judaism of his time and not simply a contrast to it.
This point is also emphasized by the British scholar James D.G. Dunn,
who
has recently published a massive book on the historical Jesus, Jesus
Remembered. In discussing the viability of a "third" quest for the
historical Jesus, which has been underway in recent years, Dunn says,
What distinguishes this 'third quest of the historical Jesus' is the
conviction that any attempt to build up a historical picture of Jesus
of
Nazareth should and must begin with the fact that he was a
first-century
Jew operating in a first-century milieu. ...It remained fairly
commonplace
in German theology even after the Second World War to describe Second
Temple Judaism as Spatjudentum (late Judaism) -- [as if] Judaism ceased
to
have significance [after Jesus]! ...what has proved decisive in the new
shift of perspective has been the growing groundswell of reaction, in
NT
scholarship as in Christian scholarship generally, against the
denigration
of Judaism. ...The repentance and penitence required by the
Shoah/Holocaust ...have still to be fully worked through at this point.
[Jesus Remembered, "Christianity in the Making," Vol. I (Eerdmans,
2003),
pp. 85-88.] The challenge to Christian thought and devotion is how to
shape speech about the resurrection -- and the whole gospel that
radiates
from it -- without contributing in subtle, unconscious ways to
anti-Judaism.
I do not want to leave this remembrance of Holocaust without a word of
caution. The recognition of the gross, overall facts that add up to the
horror of the Holocaust as an historical event only gradually emerged
in
public consciousness, especially during the 1960's. From the beginning
there have been those who have denied the reality of the Holocaust. In
recent times they have been labeled "Holocaust deniers," and there is a
sizeable literature by them and about them. This has remained a small
minority movement, but often it has substantial right-wing money. There
have been various exposes of the Holocaust deniers' writings and
sources
of money. I will mention only two recent ones: Richard J. Evans, Lying
About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (Basic
Books,
2001), and Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, published by
Modern Library in 2003 [original 2001].
Let me make two points about this literature. First, this Holocaust
denying literature (both published and on websites) is anti-Semitic,
sometimes very blatantly, sometimes more covertly. Unfortunately there
still survives in this literature the two-thousand-year long hatred for
the Jews that has so marred Western history.
Secondly, the Holocaust-denying propaganda shows up repeatedly in
current
Near Eastern politics, along with other classic anti-Semitic lore like
The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. We should be clear that honoring the
memory of the Holocaust is not, as such, an endorsement of the policies
of
the current state of Israel. The rise of the state of Israel is a major
drama of post World War II history, but it was the aftermath of the
Holocaust, not itself a part of that European horror. Christians may
mourn
the Holocaust and repent of their subtle anti-Judaic attitudes without
endorsing Israeli land policies or their treatment of Palestinians.
What shall we say then? As Christians we hear the message of the
resurrection of Jesus the Christ. We hear it as a message of new life,
of
hope and of healing, and not of guilt. We pray that the guilt of mass
murder may be wiped out -- not from our memories, but from the ways of
people with people in a chastened world. Amen.
--
Russ T. Nale
http://grace.break.at
God is still speaking
http://www.stillspeaking.com
.
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