The Witness: Good News of Peace for Jews and Gentiles

Lectionary Reflections | The Middle East

Good News of Peace for Jews and Gentiles
By Grant Gallup
Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Lectionary Reflections for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (B)

Readings for Proper 10, July 23, 2006

2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 23

AND

Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

The world seems to clamor briefly and insistently at the Church's doors in these exciting days, with cascading floods of electronic mail, especially as the General Convention descends like a Mother Ship for its triennial visitation amongst us. It is always a wonderfully varied circus and distracting carnival, with its specialty banquets, jamborees, sentimental reunions, parliamentary procedures, cloakroom intrigues, love affairs, hissy fits, and committee boredom. We are grateful that somehow it seems always to bubble and squeak in the Church's guts rather than catch fire and explode or tear apart the Body limb from limb. Once more, we are especially mindful of threats by some to jump our church's welcoming ship to swim for a distant homophobic shore. In spite of threats to leave, every sideshow freak always shows up at Convention, and in a Church such as ours, rather than a sect such as the one they envision, we have learned to be roomy, to accomodate, to show hospitality, to live in uneasy peace, to make Eucharist together. Some will always walk or more likely slither away. Adios, y que te vaya bien. Goodbye, and go well!

In 1988, just before I went to the General Convention in Detroit, I got a letter from a layman in a Chicago church who identified himself as a member of a group called Jews For Jesus. It's a group of fundamentalist Christian proselytes from Judaism who keep their Jewish identity and believe they are called to evangelize Jews to become Christians so that they can be "saved." They think all Jews must accept Jesus as their personal Savior or they will go to hell. My correspondent pointed out that there would be some legislation at General Convention concerning Jewish-Christian relations, and that he hoped I would be in favor of a strong program of evangelizing the Jews. His name was Mendelsohn, the great name in music that one is predisposed to honor, but I never met him or heard him play the piano. The Convention did in fact adopt some sensible rules for our Church's relationship with the Jewish community, but did just the opposite of what the correspondent wanted, for it called for mutual respect, and for the church to learn from its Jewish roots and to respect our sisters and brothers of the Mother Faith, who share with us the Biblical covenants and the promise and hope for the Reign of God in history and who like us, and like the Muslims as well, wait for the Messianic age, the Day of Resurrection, and the Light of Dawn. Not a word about converting the Jews to Jesus.

... our liberating myths must revise themselves to share a vision of Promised Land for all, and not merely an artificial Eretz Israel for a Diaspora gone two thousand years ago.

The New Testament doesn't tell us to convert Jews to creedal faith in Christ Jesus. In fact it says the opposite: it says that it is we who have already been changed, who have been brought into the messianic covenants, and that our separation has been ended: Remember that at one time you Gentiles were separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our eirene, our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility. To claim that Jews now need to be "converted" is to build a new wall of hostility, like the one the Zionist state has itself put up around the trespass of their settlements in the West Bank. Jesus, our Jewish Friend, our Jewish brother, our Jewish Lord, our Jewish Liberator, has opened up the way for all of us "peoples" -- Africans and African Americans, Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Irish, Lithuanians, Italians, to become fellow citizens with the saints, and members of the household of God. But our liberating myths must revise themselves to share a vision of Promised Land for all, and not merely an artificial Eretz Israel for a Diaspora gone two thousand years ago.

The Church early on made some treacherous deals with the Roman Empire, to the shame of its teachers and at the expense of our Jewish sisters and brothers in the Covenants and the Promises. As early as its "New Testament" writings it began to blame Jews for the death of the Jewish Jesus, to ingratiate itself with the Roman government, which in fact had executed his capital punishment "under Pontius Pilate." The imperial authorities preferred to hear the anti-Jewish version rather than to hear the earliest testimony of Mark's gospel, that Jesus had been crucified by the Empire as a revolutionary. The Church was henceforth privileged, the Jews henceforth demonized: historically, this is in broad strokes what happened, and it led to the establishment of the Church by the Emperor Constantine, who took its cross and made it a sign of imperial conquest. In Hoc Signo Vinces. For Jews, the Way of this Cross led by swastika-crooked paths to Auschwitz. Treblinka, Buchenwald, and the Holocaust of six million in Europe sixty years ago.

It is especially important for Christians to learn the truth of our Church's complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, which ought to be for us as horrible a realization as our imperial Gentile murder of Jesus, the Messiah of us all. With the rise of the militarist mentality of the Zionist State of the Israelis, and the phenomenon of these formerly oppressed peoples of the Diaspora gathered into a vengeful and land-grabbing political system to oust the people of Palestine, the world is aghast at the horrible irony of these things. The oppressed have become oppressors, and so the world is in convulsions that threaten now the survival of civilizations who cite Scripture as we slay our spiritual siblings. As we have learned to distinguish between the Nazis and the German people (except for Silvio Berlusconi, the short Italian with the short memory), and we have learned to distinguish between the Japanese people and the politics of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," so we read history wrongly if we do not see imperialism at work now in the eagerness of the U.S. to have Japanese troops come to occupy Iraq in the name of unwanted Yankee hegemony there.

... while there are successive feedings, there is the same Lord, the same food, the same abundance.

If our myths are to continue to be salvific for us, if they are to have power to shape and give a healthy and wholesome and holy direction to our common life, they must first of all be read honestly. The New Testament teaching about the Church's relationship with the Jewish covenant is quite simply that we are, because of Jesus our Jew, allowed into that mythic structure, which the writer to the Ephesians calls a "holy temple" -- we are joined together and grow together into a Holy Temple in the common Lord. "Temple" was a Jewish place of worship, and in Jesus the Jew we are mystically grafted into it, pasted into it, to be a real dwelling place of God. Paul elsewhere uses the metaphor of grafts into a tree, to describe Church and Covenant.

Peace, or Shalom, is the gift that Isaiah speaks of when he speaks of building up the community, and the promise of God's spirit is to all who are contrite and humble, says Isaiah. "Peace to the far off and the near": "the far off" means us Gentiles, and the "near" means the Jews. We are all covenanted with God in spite of our faithlessness. So there are two feedings of the multitudes in Mark's gospel: the one we have today, for our gospel reading, in which just after the execution of the Baptist, the apostles rejoin Jesus and meet with thousands from Jewish villages, and their five loaves and two fishes are enough for all, with twelve baskets full left, one for each of all the tribes of Israel, and five thousand are fed. Two chapters later Jesus is in Gentile territory, the Decapolis -- the Ten Gentile Towns -- and there's another setting of the table. Here Jesus does not say "they are like sheep without a shepherd" for that was a Jewish metaphor for a Jewish king, a Jewish messiah, needed there. Here with Gentiles, he says, "I feel sorry ... they are hungry and will collapse on their way." A different message for a different context. And Jesus now is asked "how is anybody going to eat in such a deserted place?" That deserted place is of course the Gentile world, our own world, which Jesus comes to visit from Judaism, and says, "How many loaves have you?" Seven, we say. Seven is the number of the Gentiles, as Twelve is the number of the Jews. "Seven," they say, and Jesus takes the seven loaves and thanks God for them and when it's over there are seven baskets full. Just as at the first feeding there were twelve, enough for all the tribes, so now in this second sitting at the banquet, we Gentiles are fed after the people of the covenants and promises. And we too get to eat as much as we want and still there are seven baskets full of broken pieces left over for us to feed all the Gentiles that shall ever be. And it is four thousand who are fed. So while there are successive feedings, there is the same Lord, the same food, the same abundance, and the numerology is a way of telling us what the context also tells us.

Now and again, public television presents Shoah, the long movie of interviews with Holocaust survivors and with German and Polish people who were still alive and wanted to talk about their part in the death camps in the 1940s. These almost weekly TV reminders of the Holocaust and of the crimes against Judaism and Jews must keep us vigilant as well to see how wrong Israel is now in its politics in Palestine, as we watched its subservient counterinsurgency role in the U.S.-sponsored mischief in Central America in earlier decades.

All of us -- Jewish, Christian, Muslim -- need to hear the gospel of peace, preached by Jewish prophets, Christian apostles, and the Muslim Prophet of Mecca: that God's project is new human being, a new humanity, so making peace and bringing hostility to an end.

The journalist Anthony Loewenstein writes that "Both Israelis and Palestinians have been guilty of unpardonable crimes against one another, but for the U.S., Palestinian acts are always 'terrorism,' while Israelis are 'conducting incursions' or 'rooting out militants.' This hypocrisy must end. A full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza should, hopefully, see the establishment of a vibrant, independent Palestinian state living in peace alongside a secure Israel." Vibrancy, independence, security, and peace, an increasing number of us believe, will not come to the Holy Land until the various dreamed-of projects for theocratic states and racist boundaries for Arab bantustans, gigantic U.S. budgets for ruling the world, are abandoned and swept into the dust-bin of history. One democratic state in Palestine, with citizenship, liberty, and justice for all, more closely approaches the commonwealth of God than two puppet national security states battling it out until the edge of doom.

The Word of God invites us into the Jewish faith and the Jewish hope, but it is not a 19th-century Zionist fantasy or a fundamentalist nightmare that will fullfill the hopes of Jews or the hopes of Gentiles. We need to be converted to the covenants and promises of God, and it is not our Jewish sisters and brothers who need to be converted to our short-sighted "Christian" plans to rule a new Christendom from Washington D.C., with a Zionist entity as our Middle East manager. All of us -- Jewish, Christian, Muslim -- need to hear the gospel of peace, preached by Jewish prophets, Christian apostles, and the Muslim Prophet of Mecca: that God's project is new human being, a new humanity, so making peace and bringing hostility to an end.

The Rev. Grant Gallup is host and caretaker of "Casa Ave Maria" in Managua, Nicaragua, a guest house for pilgrims from all around the world. An Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Chicago, he writes a series of reflections on the lectionary titled "Homily Grits" which is available online for sermon preparation and bible study. Grant may be reached by email at gallup@tmx.com.ni.