Sie sind auf Seite 1von 5

Ingroups (and outgroups) 9th Sunday after Pentecost: 14 August 2011-08-15 Genesis 45.1-15 | Romans 11.

1-2a, 29-32 | Matthew 15.21-28 Rev. Praic Ramonn If you only knew the power of the dark side. This is what Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker as they are duelling with light sabres in The Empire Strikes Back: If you only knew the power of the dark side. This morning I want to look at the dark side of Christian and Jewish history. * Before Paul was the apostle to the gentiles, he was Saul the Pharisee. In his letter to the Galatians, he describes his earlier life: He was a precocious young man, advancing in Judaism beyond many of his peers and zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. As a result, he was violently persecuting the church of God and trying to destroy it (Gal 1.1314). Saul, it seems, was a particular kind of Pharisee, what we nowadays would call a religious radical or militant. For militants like Saul, the Jews were Gods people, and Israel was Gods land. Gods law demanded that the people and land be free from the Roman yoke, calling no one but God master. And God, Saul believed, would act to bring this about, to punish the gentiles and renegade Jews who did not follow Gods law as he understood it, and to save his people. Meanwhile, it was Sauls job to hasten that day by compelling other Jews to keep the law, by force if necessary. * Look quickly at todays gospel, and it seems at first sight as though Jesus agrees with Saul. When a gentile woman pesters him to cure her daughter, he says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. When she kneels in front of him pleading for help, he says, It isnt right to take the childrens food and throw it to the dogs. The children are the Jews, Gods children, the gentiles are the dogs. Read sermons on this text, and you can see the preachers squirm. On the lips of Jesus, this is shocking stuff. To make sense of it, we need to ask what Jesus is up to. Matthew sums up his message in the words: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Here, we need to notice two things: First, what Jesus understands by the kingdom of heaven is very different from what Saul and his fellow radicals understand by it and, second, the exhortation to repent isnt addressed to all and sundry, its addressed precisely to his fellow Jews. Jesus believed that God was acting decisively in his day so that Gods will would be done on earth as it is in heaven this is what he means by the kingdom. But for that to happen, Jesus thought, Gods people needed to repent, to return to the purpose for which God had chosen them to be Gods faithful people through whom all the peoples of the earth would be blessed. When Israel repented, then the gentiles would come in.

2 And so it was to the lost sheep of Israel Gods flock that had gone astray that he was sent. It took him a while, I think, to realize that the faithfulness through which God would fulfil his purpose of bringing in the kingdom would be in the first place his own faithfulness, faithful even to death on a cross. It was through his death and resurrection that the gentiles began to come in. This is the point Saul the Pharisee finally got when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus. Saul had been understanding the kingdom all wrong, and now he finally understood it the right way. * So far, so good. But what about the children and the dogs? Isnt this just racist? Here, I suspect, I may have an advantage. I frequently say outrageous things in the hope of provoking the right kind of reaction. And Jesus did this too, perhaps more often than we realize. Read his parables. What kind of preacher is it that tells his hearers to keep on pestering God until God gets off his butt and does something? I dont imagine this gentile woman ever heard the parable of the unjust judge, but she rises to the provocation anyway. She replies in terms that Jesus cannot deny. The dogs may eat the scraps from their masters table: the grace of God is not confined to a chosen few. Filled with the same single-minded love for her sick child that God has for all of us his sick children she keeps on pestering Jesus until he gets off his butt and heals her daughter. * Fast forward to Easter and Pentecost and the preaching of his followers, and we find Israel renewed around Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, and redefined to include both Jews and gentiles. What we now call church is nothing other than the community of those ready to live in the people of God, gathered by Jesus and sanctified by his death (Gerhard Lohfink). This is the point Paul never ceases to emphasize: the church is for everyone. His problem is that his fellow Jews seems less than enthusiastic. Does this mean that God has rejected his people? By no means! The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Rom 11.1, 29). Pauls solution is to argue that God, like an eccentric gardener, has temporarily cut most of his fellow Jews out of the olive tree that is Gods planting, in order to graft in the wild olive shoots that are the gentiles I suppose wild olive shoot is a less offensive term than dog but in Gods own good time, the Jews will be grafted back in (Rom 11.1724). * Fast forward a century or two, to a church now almost entirely gentile, and we find Pauls successors arguing a very different case. Only once in his letters in 1 Corinthians 10 does Paul speak of the church as a third entity alongside the Jews and gentiles: Whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God. Give no offence to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God (1 Cor 10.31f.)

3 But this way of speaking becomes commonplace in the later church. Christians are neither Jews nor pagans but a third race. As for the Jews who have rejected the Messiah of Israel, God has rejected them. The irony is staggering. The letter to the Ephesians says that at one time, the gentiles thats us, or most of us, anyway were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise. But in Jesus the Messiah we who were once far off have been brought near. For he is our peace. He has made Jews and gentiles one and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us (Eph 2.12-14). But now we find the church making Jews and Christians two and erecting a new dividing wall of hostility. The church is doing what Saul the radical Pharisee did before he saw the light: defining the chosen people, now understood as the church, as the people whom alone God wills to save, and defining all others as rejected by God and outside the scope of Gods love. And so begins the long and sorry story of Christian anti-Judaism in which the church says the most hateful things about Jews and is not slow to use the power of the state to persecute them. Christian anti-Judaism is simply deplorable; and worse than that, centuries of Christian anti-Judaism prepared a seedbed for the modern European antisemitism that climaxed in the Nazi Holocaust. * But that brings us to our second irony. The Nazis sought to form a pure Aryan master race to rule the world. Jews had no part in this plan: six million of them were exterminated. Two years after the second world war, the UN proposed to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state; in 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state of Israel. Holocaust guilt and a desire to make restitution prompted many, especially in Europe, to support the move. And this was still true a decade later when I was growing up in Ireland. In 1958, Leon Uris published his novel Exodus, later made into a blockbuster movie starring Paul Newman. As a piece of propaganda, Ben-Gurion said, its the greatest thing ever written about Israel. The following year, The Diary of Anne Frank was also turned into a movie. It told the story of Jewish refugees hiding in an attic in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the hope of avoiding the concentration camps, and the film turned it into one of the most widely read books in the world. It took many years for the world to wake up to the reality what had been done and is still being done in Palestine. The movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine did not begin with the Holocaust. The first Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, was inspired by the ideas of Theodor Herzl, who was himself inspired by the ethnic nationalism prevalent in much of Europe. The Jews, he argued, were an ethnic people, one people, and were entitled to a state of their own an ethnic state.

4 After the congress, the Jewish community in Vienna sent two representatives to investigate the suitability of Palestine for a Jewish state. They cabled back, The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man. The land was already home to another, Arab people. From the beginning, Zionism proposed to set up an ethnically defined state by excluding another people from the land on which they lived. Without the Holocaust, this perverse project would probably never have succeeded. In 1948, the new state of Israel seized 78 per cent of Palestine, expelling three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes and villages, their shops and farms. They have never been allowed to return. In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 per cent, in the West Bank and Gaza. For over forty years it has been building illegal settlements in these occupied territories: Over half a million Israeli Jews live in these settlements. We European Christians are doubly complicit in this story. First, in that, as I say, Christian anti-Judaism prepared a seedbed for the Holocaust. Second, in that Holocaust guilt has prompted too many of us to keep silent while Israel persists in a strategy of dispossessing the indigenous population of Palestine that continues to this day grabbing their land, demolishing their houses, stealing their water, uprooting their olives trees, and killing them. Lenora is a Canadian woman serving with the ecumenical accompaniment programme in Hebron, the most contested city in the occupied West Bank. She wondered why peace in Palestine was so difficult to reach, and one day she asked an Israeli woman. Yes, said the woman, I want peace, but real peace. Lenora asked her what real peace meant to her. Palestinians must leave this land, the woman replied: God gave it to us. * Is the dark side stronger? This is the question Luke Skywalker asks his tiny Jedi master Yoda earlier in The Empire Strikes Back: Is the dark side stronger? No, no, no, says Yoda. Quicker, easier, more seductive. Its a paraphrase of what Jesus tells us in Matthew 7: Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it (Matt 7.13). Our difficulty as humans, our difficulty as Christians or Jews, is that we can often go a long way down the road to destruction before the destination becomes clear. Perhaps there are two lessons we can learn from what weve heard this morning. The first is that we cannot safely criticize others without first examining our own conscience. As Jesus asks us, Why do you see the speck of sawdust in your neighbour's eye, but dont notice the log in your own? (Matt 7.3). To argue about whose eye has the speck and whose the log is, of course, to miss the point. If Israel needs to open its eyes and recognize the injustice it still inflicts on a whole people, we Christians need to open our eyes and recognize the injustice we have inflicted

5 down through the centuries not just on Jews but on many others too. And then we need to change. The second is constantly to remind ourselves why God chooses a chosen people. The great Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple once said, The Church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members. We may quarrel with the word only. It smacks, perhaps, of just the exclusivism we need to reject. May we not say the same, in different ways, of the synagogue and mosque and other faiths as well? But Temples point is well taken. We are not to think that God cares only for Christians. We are not to hate those outside our doors but to love them: to love them by witnessing to the gospel of Gods love and by standing up in a world of wickedness for what is just and right. Sources Jill Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel: Britain, the First World War and the Jews in the Holy City (Stroud, GL: Sutton, 2004) Joachim Jeremias, Jesus Promise to the Nations (London: SCM, 1958) Ghada Karmi, Married to Another Man: Israels Dilemma in Palestine (London: Pluto, 2007) Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith (London: SPCK, 1985) EP Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (London: SCM, 1985) Phyllis Trible and Letty M Russell, eds, Hagar, Sarah and their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006) Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1, Chapters 1-15 (London: SPCK, 2002) Tom Wright, What St Paul Really Said (Oxford: Lion, 1997)

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen