12/28/58

Scripture: (Read Hebrews 2)

The hymn which we have just sung was written by Ozora Davis nearly 50 years ago in the early years of this century. It reflects an eager, optimistic feeling that human relations were improving, and were going to continue to improve greatly. The shepherds’ song of peace and good will was on the way to be realized. The barriers of race and clan and caste and creed were crumbling; and brotherhood, under God, was to become a reality in fact as well as in ideal.

The feeling was consistent with the notion that the progress of the human race was to be steadily onward and upward. There would soon appear the missionary slogan that the whole world might be converted to effective Christianity in one generation.

And the goals of the time did appear to be attainable! The ideals of that time are still valid guides in human relations. But the attainment of the goals has become a far more difficult feat than was then supposed. For mankind has witnessed, and to a large extent participated in, a resurgence of nationalism, clan discrimination, race division, and vicious persecution.

Significant advances have been made in drawing church groups together in closer understanding and cooperation. There is a creditable amount of work done in promoting, and practicing brotherhood in many lives. But the depravity of man in his selfish concern for his own prejudiced safety and well-being, and that of his group, makes the going hard. Some areas are particularly thorny.

The Christmas season is a good time to take a backward look into history in order to make a better appraisal of the present scene. One of the touchy spots in human relations in our time is the relation between Gentile and Jew, between Christian and Hebrew. Thirty years after Ozora Davis had written his hymn, there appeared one of the most extensive and horrible massacres of Jews that the world has ever seen. With Hitler’s rise to power in Europe, the systematic and methodical extermination of six million Jews began -- a third of the entire Jewish people. Much of our world is still covered with shame that such atrocious behavior could have occurred anywhere in the human race. We do well to examine ourselves, our environment and our history, to understand better how to cope with a prejudice that becomes murderous at times.

In this nation of the world, the whole culture is dominated by a Judeo-Christian religious background. We seldom realize to what extent our whole way of life is determined by the teachings of Christianity, including Old Testament, or Jewish, concepts of what is right. Because a major portion of our population are affiliated with Christian churches, Christian festivals, such as Christmas and Easter, dominate the scene in their season.

We have just been going through the Christmas season of 1958. In a sense, it began before Thanksgiving Day and it continues to the New Year. For more than a month we have celebrated Advent and Christmas. And there are some things about Christmas that Christians forget. We often forget that Christmas was not celebrated by the earliest Christians -- the first Christians celebrated the death of Jesus and Christ’s resurrection, but not his birth. It was after there had appeared a significant number of Christians, with a significant body of belief and doctrine, that the celebration of the birth of Jesus began. Much of the Christmas observance was very early combined with pagan celebrations, for better or for worse. The first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine, decreed, in the 4th century, that the pagan festival of the winter solstice should be combined with the church’s celebration of her Lord’s nativity. Much of the celebration of Christmas since then has been and still is pagan, or non-religious, in character. At times there has been rebellion against this fact, such as that of the Puritan fathers of this land who refused to celebrate Christmas at all.

Another thing that is hard for many of us to realize is that our Jewish neighbors and friends are caught, for a month or more, in a community movement which is not theirs in belief or practice. The Christians sing Christmas carols which reflect their beliefs, but not those of the Hebrew folk. Jewish people can not avoid Christmas. And yet most of them feel that they can not enter into it, either, and so many of them have to set themselves to endure it!

Some of the Christians are impatient with Jews at this point and on other counts. And often there appears the assumption that the Jews are a rejected people anyway. Jesus was born into a Jewish home. He came to the Jewish people, and “his own received him not.”

But the idea that the Jews are a rejected people, because they were not all converted to Christianity, does not hold up. Some of us may reject them, but God does not. St. Paul makes it clear, in the book of Romans, that the Jewish people are “beloved for the sake of their forefathers.”

When any of us gentiles despise an entire group of people (Jews or anybody else), we serve an unchristian cause and betray an illness of heart growing from the evil of our own ways. This is one of those disturbing things that sometimes appear in sermons. For sermons can, and should be, comforting at times, and disturbing at times. When we consider our Christian relationship to Hebrews, we need to be disturbed until there is an amendment of life.

Prejudice against the Jews, on the part of Christian folk, appears through long centuries of history, and in many places. A seventeenth century writer, Pascal, a man of notable Christian discernment, reasoned that Jewish suffering was a sort of necessity. “It is a wonderful thing,” wrote Pascal, “and worthy of particular attention, to see this Jewish people existing so many years in perpetual misery, it being necessary as a proof of Jesus Christ, both that they should exist to prove Him, and that they should be miserable because they crucified Him; and though to be miserable and to exist are contradictory, they nevertheless still exist in spite of their misery.”

I do not follow the reasoning of Pascal, or reasoning in similar vein. It offends my sense of fairness for Christian adherents to call Jews “Christ-killers” or to assume that it was the Jews as a whole group that crucified Our Lord, and that therefore they properly suffer all sorts of abuse, indignity, exclusion, or worse because of this guilt. It is true that some Jews did desire and plot Jesus’ crucifixion. It is also true that some Jews were his followers, and that He himself was born into a Jewish home, of long Jewish lineage. It is further true that the actual execution of sentence against Jesus was carried out by Roman soldiers who were neither Jew nor Christian but pagan.

Further still, if we are true to the theological beliefs professed in most of our Christian churches, it is no one group of people who bear responsibility for Jesus’ suffering and death, but the sinful nature of us all that crucified Him and still crucifies Him! This in no way justifies the “scape-goat” treatment accorded the Hebrew people by so many non-Jews.

One finds the prejudice against Jews at almost any point in history. Begin, for instance, with the first emperor to become Christian -- Constantine. He first placed Christianity on a basis of equality with other religions. But before he died, Christianity was made official, and there was begun the slow process of depriving other religious groups of their freedom in worship. It always becomes a cause for concern to all others when one religion, or one church, becomes the established, or official, religion of a state.

Look further along to the 7th century when the Council of Toledo passed a law that became all to typical of a lot of history. By that law, all Jews were ordered to present themselves for baptism. If they failed to do so, they were to be punished with a hundred strokes of the lash, have their hair pulled out, their property confiscated and then be expelled from the country.

See the usual temper of many countries of the Middle Ages. Jews could not change their residence without permission. They were forbidden to own land or to engage in any of the professions that brought them in contact with gentiles, except for banking. Christians were not then supposed to lend money to each other at interest; and this forced an opening for Jews to become their capitalists.

There were locations in the Middle Ages where Jews were forbidden to marry, and where the children of Jews were legally kidnapped so that they might be baptized and raised Christian.

One could review the Crusades wherein crusaders, off to rescue the holy land from infidels, stopped off along the way to give Jews the alternative between baptism or death.

Has it ever been convincing to Jews, or to anyone who is not blinded by his own selfish determination, to believe that Jesus is the Christ, while those who have heard the message of “peace to men of good will” hold a knife to one’s throat demanding: “Be baptized or die!” Could the Jews of that day, or of any other time, really believe that Christianity is a religion of brotherly love when they have seen their villages plundered and their people massacred? There are Jewish historians who hold that the Muslims have always treated Jews better than have the Christians.

In our own time, even the right to die a martyr’s death was denied the Hebrews as Hitlerites systematically exterminated all Jews who could be reached in the time Hitler was in power. Faith ceased to be a factor. If one were a Christian, a son of a Christian and the grandson of a Christian, but had a Jewess as a grandmother, he died as a Jew -- not for his faith but for a fractional trait in his ancestry.

Too many non-Jews were silent for too long when men, women, children and infants were destroyed for no other reason than that they were Jewish. Is there any thing more wicked than to say that any group of people created by God, has no right to live, and no place upon the earth? Both those who perpetrated the massacre, and those of us who made no protest or testimony, have to answer. How have Jews been able to survive through the centuries at all? They must be a people with some destiny under God. At least we can see in that destiny the form of a young Jew only 33 years old hanging on a cross, dying there in innocence for our sins.

The real reasons for attempts in history to extirpate the Jews from the face of the earth lie in mass depravity. It is a matter of the human heart, though we dislike to give this as a reason. Historians tell us that Jews were persecuted because they did not conform to basic cultural patterns. Much of western history assumed that the religion of the ruler would be the religion of the people. For Jews, or anyone else, to hold religious beliefs differing from those of the ruler, was interpreted as political disloyalty and therefore seriously suspect.

The Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans, found that the Jews would not merge into the dominant culture and be assimilated. Suppose that the Jewish people had been assimilated into the culture of those who overwhelmed them after the fall of Jerusalem. Would we have had our Bible and the faith that is made understandable to us in Biblical light? May we not respect the integrity that has, at times, been willing to face death as the price of its stand? Christian apostles have faced that choice at times!

Surely Jesus could be proud of a faith in the ancestors of his people that would accept martyrdom because those folk came from a heritage where death was not too great a price to pay for integrity!

Jews have been accused of self-enrichment at the expense of others. In much of history, the Jew was forced into commerce and banking because other means of livelihood were denied to him. But, after all, it is hardly any worse for a human being to be a Jewish Rothschild than to be a Baptist Rockefeller, or a Carnegie or a Morgan.

Jews have been criticized for being social radicals. And it is asserted that the intellectual founder of communism, Karl Marx, was a Jew. We may remember that some of his ancestors were Jewish. And we ought also to remember that he had been a baptized Christian!

Some have suggested that the Jews have had no homeland and therefore are never really patriotic. This suggestion does not stand up, for they have, in their due proportion, fought with the forces of their own nations. In our own country’s history, there were Jews on both sides of the civil war between the states.

The Jew has been criticized as a member of some race that is different from all other races. Hitler, for instance, put in contrast the Aryan and the Semitic races. But he was a poor anthropologist, and his contention would never stand up. He himself was a poor example of the tall blond with blue eyes who was supposed to be the true Aryan. Jews do not conform to any particular race.

Jews have been accused of being basically inferior people. This is completely ridiculous. They have contributed excellent leaders in the arts, sciences, professions, business and labor. And their record of low incidence of juvenile delinquency and crime is most enviable. As far as excellence in any given field is concerned, the handicaps which Jews have suffered in the competitive field have driven many of them to extra effort to excel.

Some have held that the Jews are an accursed people and should be anathematized for having crucified Christ. We have already touched on this matter. But as for a curse to rest, even upon those individuals who said, “His blood be upon us,” the matter of bearing a curse is something for God to decide, and not for us to direct. If Jesus, on his cross, could say, “Father, forgive them” [Luke 23: 34]-- Jewish leaders, Romans, others as well; we too have an obligation to forgive. Those folk needed forgiveness not because they were Jews, or Romans, or anyone else, but individuals who perpetrated or permitted a cruel wrong.

The basic problem of human nature is not whether one is a Jew or a Gentile; a Christian, a Buddhist or a Muslim. These are irrelevant in the light of the question: are we good or bad? benevolent or evil? The problem is the imperfection of each one of us! And those of us who are an in-group, the majority, and who have a power that the minorities do not have, must know that our sins are more consequential because of our power.

The Christian who feels frustrated that all Jews were not converted to Christianity long ago, and concludes that Jews are stiff-necked folk who could not, after all, be God’s chosen people, needs to reappraise his conclusion.

You and I do not believe that all religions are equally good. As a Christian, I believe in my Savior, I find this faith meaningful, and I want to share it. I would like to see it accepted and adopted and lived by all people. But to be tolerant toward a different religious group only with the objective of conversion is basically a wrong motivation. I must respect their rights, and their freedom of choice and worship. For religious commitment comes only out of a situation of freedom. Without freedom and commitment, there can hardly be a genuine religion. This conviction must have control over our relations with other religious and cultural groups.

Many years ago Jesus, our Lord, was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the Inn. Today, let there be no rejection of the people among whom he was born just because they are Jews, lest we find ourselves rejecting Jesus again!

Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus, heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” [Acts 9: 4]. It may be that the same voice asks the same question of each of us today who assents to the persecution of any of God’s children. How will we answer?

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 28, 1958.