Heretofore unrevealed antisemitic and racist comments from former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright received prominent play on Thursday night. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, convincing me that tonight, I needed to react and analyze Wright’s various pronouncements from one Christian’s perspective:
[Antisemitic] talk like this has no place in Christian discourse. In the most famous passage in the New Testament, Jesus told Nicodemus that God so “love the world,” that’s everybody. (The universality of God’s love does not mean that God accepts all human behaviors. God calls us to repent for our sin, to turn from it. If we want to hold onto our sin, with no intention of turning from it and embracing dependence on Christ alone, we cannot enter Christ’s kingdom…)
Furthermore, I’ve never understood how Christians could be antisemitic. The Savior we follow, Who we believe was both God and human, was Jewish. The Jewish people were the womb and cradle of our Lord. The first Christians were all Jews.
In the past, a disturbing lie developed among Christians, one embodied in certain Roman Catholic liturgies and in the antisemitic rhetoric of the founder of the Lutheran movement of which I am a part, Martin Luther, blaming Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus…But anyone who looks at the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ execution and the early Church’s reflections on this event will conclude that the entire known world of Jesus’ day–Jewish, through its leaders, and Gentile, through the Roman Empire–repudiated Jesus and called for His death. We all are responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion. We all are culpable. The sins of us all are the reason that Jesus died. This point is well-underscored in the words of the hymn, Ah, Holy Jesus, which our congregation sang one week ago, on Good Friday:
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon Thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone Thee.
’Twas I, Lord, Jesus, I it was denied Thee!
I crucified Thee.
Just a few weeks ago, in an adult Sunday School class at the congregation I’m privileged to pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, I was asked why so much hatred has been directed at the Jews through the centuries. There can be no rational explanation except to say that human beings never tire of finding scapegoats. It’s pathetic and tragic, but even in 2008, the stain of Antisemitism remains.