Fourth Sunday of Lent 1998

If we confess this failure

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Readings Jos. 5.9a, 10-12; 2 Cor. 5.17-21; Lk. 15. 1-3, 11-32

The readings today begin as a process of clarification. Here is clarified something that is absolutely essential to what lent and the whole Christian thing is all about: namely, the reconciliation of all of us to each other and to God. And the issue, of course, is that forgiveness without forgiven reconciliation is impossible. Community is impossible. Of course, this is the whole point of all this stuff from Paul. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

We have this wonderful, wonderful familiar parable of the prodigal son to lead us into that. Forgiveness is at the heart of the parable: the father's forgiveness of the younger son, the older son's unwillingness to forgive and very likely to be forgiven. And so the key line in this whole thing is this statement of the father, at the very end, to the elder son, "All that is mine is yours." It is the awakening of the younger son to that, as his father embraces him, kisses him and throws this large party for him, that he can really ask for forgiveness. It is precisely the absence of that awareness in the elder son that keeps him from being able to forgive, and as I said, very likely from being able to be forgiven as well. There is a crucial thing that is at stake here. But I would like to come at it from a somewhat odd angle, and that is the matter of Anti-Semitism. What put me in mind of this was, of course, this remarkable event: the Vatican releasing a 12 page document, which apparently they said they had spent 10 years studying and working on, the point of which was to indicate that during the Nazi regime, in which half the Jews in the world were massacred, some Catholics were involved. But what was most interesting was not said in that document. Two points in particular, I think, are notable. The first was that no apology was made to the Jews, and secondly, it was treated as if this was a kind of incidental sort of thing going on in which the church, the official church in particular, had no particular role. Fascinating!

Anti-Semitism is rightly been called the longest hatred. And it is literally true. For 2000 years Anti-Semitism has been in place. But we have to be really careful here. The Jews in the Roman Empire were considered atheist because they did not buy into the state religion. Therefore, they were considered odd, and in a sense there was some sort of antagonism there. But it took the emergence of this Jewish reform movement that became Christianity, for real anti-Semitism to appear. This means that you use a religious bias not just a political or social bias, to condemn Jews, to warrant the hatred of Jews. This is what makes that Vatican statement so odd. Because it would seem to assume that the Nazi regime was a fluke, some sort of strange accident, as if you could not point to 2000 years of violent persecution of Jews by the Jews' younger siblings, Christians. So I'd like to take a couple of minutes to point this out.

It was a long time before Christians were even called Christians and knew themselves as anything other than a different kind of Jew. In the year 54 of our era, the emperor Claudius kicked all the Jews out of Rome. Why? Because they were having some kind of internal squabble over somebody that they called the Christ. It is very clear that here was one sect of Jews opposing another sect of Jews and they were disturbing public order. And so the Romans, who were very big on law and order, said, "All of you, get out of here." The point is, of course, that it was Jew against Jew. The mutual antagonism grew sharper, and sharper, and reached a notable plateau, when the Emperor Constantine in 313 declared Christianity legitimate and soon after made it the official religion of the empire. From then on, full scale persecution of the Jews followed. You can read some of the sermons of some of the earliest preachers of the church: "burn their Torahs, tear down their synagogues, get rid of them." You can read instance after instance, after instance. 1492 was not only famous because Columbus sailed off, but because Queen Isabella and her husband Ferdinand kicked all the Jews out of Spain. And again, there wasn't a gap between the 2^nd century to the 15^th century with Isabella, because you can fill in all of the gaps with Christian anti-Semitism, up until, and including, our time.

And then we come to the Nazi era. Hitler ruled a country that was half Catholic and half Lutheran. As far as I know, there was not a single public statement from the church made about the extermination of Jews, except in Holland, of what was happening in Rome itself, in France, in Spain, Italy. 6,000,000 Jews were murdered out of a total world population of 12,000,000 Jews and little was said. The odd priest here and there would make mention of this. We as a group, as a community, said nothing. And the rationale of course, was: well, it's really diplomacy. And if you said something that the Germans didn't like, maybe it would make it worse for the Jews. But if you were a Jew, how could it be worse, for God's sake?

And meanwhile, is it possible that the violence, the official violence, was simply a way to do what every institution does, mainly preserve itself? Diplomacy, diplomacy. How diplomatic was Jesus? I mean it seems to me, we should have said something in the name of the suffering people if we are going to maintain any kind of integrity. Jesus lived by his word, dying in consequence of his undiplomatic words. On the other hand, not so long ago, the French church, not the universal church, but the French church, the bishop of France, issued a public declaration of their own guilt and tendered an apology, even spoke particularly of the silence of the clergy. Did the church at large do that? That is the issue. And why is all this stuff important? Because we need to see how forgiveness is related to guilt. Forgiveness has to be built out of awareness of our own guilt. This is only possible over against our belief that God is ultimately for us. Yet, we don't have that courage, which such faith should engender. We still are unable to say we failed, that we failed God. We failed God's suffering people. We need to learn from that failure, not just as an institution. We need to learn about ourselves and how we can come to forgiveness, how we can build the world that God is supposedly reconciling in Christ. I think the problem ultimately is a question of failure, not of nerve, but a failure of faith. To quote Paul again in a different passage, "neither life, nor things present, nor nothing to come" no one can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. The church refused to make a simple admission that the Germans had no business massacring half of the Jews of Europe. Only if we confess this failure can we really profess our faith to the world, a faith not in diplomacy, but in God.

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