Talk Two: Beginnings
How can
Christians respond to the rise of antisemitism that we are witnessing at the
present time? How can we avoid being
complicit in it as, to our shame, we were during the dark days of the third
Reich? How are we to avoid a repeat of
the Shoah, the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered in
concentration camps such as Auschwitz, while many endured unbearable pain and
suffering?
Others are
more competent than I am to describe the causes and events that led to the
Holocaust. The Yad Vashem website has
many helpful resources for any who wish to know more. Hopefully though, as a Christian leader, I am
in a position to talk about the history of Christianity, and at least to
express an opinion on how we should react to antisemitism today. In what follows, then, I speak unashamedly as
a Christian. I am not a Jew, and I
realize that my Jewish friends will not agree with some of what I have to
say. What I hope is that they will be
able to see that in speaking about my faith, I am not speaking against
theirs. And, from the outset, I wish to
distance myself as far as possible from the attitudes towards Judaism that have
characterized many Christians in the past.
Ask most
Christians to give a potted history of Christianity and they will, as likely as
not, begin with Jesus’ baptism and his ministry in Galilee. This is not unreasonable. It is how St Mark, the first to write an
account of Jesus’ life, begins his Gospel.
Others will perhaps go back to the appearance of the Angel Gabriel to
the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the announcement to her that she is to give
birth. Again, it is not an unreasonable
place to begin. However, it is the
Blessed Virgin Mary herself who gives us a clue as to where we should
begin. In giving thanks to God for what
has happened to her, she says:
‘He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his
descendants forever.’
These words
are part of what has become known as the Magnificat, a hymn which is said or
sung in Church services all over the world as part of Christian daily
worship. We listen to many famous
musical settings of it by the great composers here on Radio 4. Of course, Christianity centres on
Christ. The clue is in the name. But it doesn’t begin with Christ, at least
not in the sense that this is normally understood. Its specific earthly history at least begins
with God’s promise to Abraham and with his dealings with Israel.
This,
indeed, is how St Matthew explains it in his Gospel. St Matthew’s opening words are: ‘An
account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of
Abraham.’ He identifies Jesus using a
Jewish title that comes from the great King of Israel, David, and traces Jesus’
ancestry back to the father of the Jewish people, Abraham.
Once Summer is over, we will start to look forward
to Christmas. Christians believe that in
the history of the Jewish people as recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures, there
is a looking forward to the coming of Christ.
This is why readings from the Hebrew Scriptures feature so prominently
both in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ birth and in the services that
will take place in a few months’ time.
[Music:
Gideon Klein, Divertimento: Tempo di marcia]
The Christian name for the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanakh,
is the Old Testament. Most Bibles are
divided using this title. Fair
enough. Christians believe that God did
something new when Christ came. But old
can also be understood in the sense of being no longer relevant, out of date,
or even wrong. That is not how the first
Christians thought of these writings.
These were their Scriptures, they were all Jews themselves after
all. They believed that what God was
doing in their midst, through the person in whom they believed, could only be
understood by studying and learning from these Scriptures.
Christians can only hope to understand their
history by going back to where it all began in what we may call the Old
Testament, but which remains strangely new and relevant to us today.
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