Start Date: May 24, 2025
LAMB OF GOD
Jesus Christ. Believed by Christians to be the Jewish Messiah, not a king on Earth, but the Lamb of God who is crucified for our sins
His apostles, Jewish followers. All but John were martyred, along with many who followed.
Centuries later the Roman Empire adopted, or perhaps co-opted, the Church and imposed their culture. The language of the rites was Latin. The church became Roman. The Pantheon of Gods gone. In their place a panoply of saints, venerated not worshiped.
A present day Messianic Jew once commented that DaVinci’s portrayal of “The Last Supper”, painted near 1500, gives us a Jesus who is represented as “a good Catholic”, eating fish on Friday with puffy bread, instead of a Jew celebrating the Passover seder with lamb and unleavened bread.
In the process the Jewishness of Jesus was slowly erased. We were told that the Jews killed him, ignoring that he, Yeshua, his mother, Miriam, and the the others, before being given Greek names, were Jews who lived the life of first century rabbinical Judaism.
A professor teaching about the apostle Paul, formerly Saul, once said that Christians didn’t invent antisemitism, but they perfected it. To be fair this was decades before ISIS et al. One element was the Roman Catholic Church’s condemnation of usury, which is the loaning of money for unreasonable interest.
Not all lenders are loan sharks. Yet the result was that Christians were disinclined to be involved in the roles of finance. But without loans society would remain in some form of feudalism. So it was Jewish families such as the Rothschilds who filled the void.
There is some innate instinct to hate those who have loaned us money and expect to be paid back. Very few movies highlight the banker as the hero. Shakespeare embodied this conflict in Shylock, a Jewish moneylender in his play The Merchant of Venice. Western culture became a world where the Jews were represented as greedy and evil.
Centuries later Jewish immigrants found themselves in America, often because of persecution in Europe. Their culture, like Asian culture, emphasized respect for family, and accomplishment by way of higher education. Eventually they began engendering further resentment because of over-representation in elite colleges, and in high paying and powerful professions such as medicine and law.
I won’t get into the history of the Middle East. Not the 6000 years. Not the WWI era Balfour declaration or the post WWII 1948 formation of modern Israel. I would guess that I have read a little more than the average person, but that is not 1% of what would be needed.
The singular fact of 20th century Jewish life is that Jewish communities were victims of pogroms in Poland, Germany, and even Ireland, followed by roughly 6 million non-combatant Jews being killed in Nazi Germany’s Holocaust.
As bad as European antisemitism was, the Holocaust was not openly discussed by Nazi leaders. Perhaps they knew that, even for Germans, it may have seemed a bridge too far. After the war there was a genuine effort to acknowledge the evil of their crime. When a Palestinian terrorist group kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich the world knew that it was an immoral act. Germany was particularly humiliated, having worked hard to purge the sins of the Holocaust, only thirty years past.
Now it has been over fifty years since that incident and things have gone backward. Some of it is demographic and economic issues. Europe is again unsafe and has a very small Jewish population.
Then the unimaginable.
On October 7, 2023 a massacre of extreme inhuman savagery took place. The numbers, for a small country, are astronomical. The acts barbarian. Babies beheaded. Live people set on fire. Limbs cut off. Girls dragged from cars and gang raped. Naked bodies deformed and desecrated and dragged through the streets for little Palestinian boys to spit on. Hostages taken. The old. The infirm. Infants, later strangled to death. Torture.
Hitler tried to deny his atrocities. Hamas videotaped theirs. The people who did this must have been born human. But somewhere their humanity was lost.
It must have been easy to ask “Where is God?” But I ask, “Where is the church?” A Catholic actress, Patricia Heaton, helped form the October 7 Coalition, in part from frustration over the lack of response from Christian churches. The intent is to help churches develop ways of making Jews feel welcome in their communities.
Good luck here. No I am not in Kansas. I am in California. Home to UCLA and threats to Jewish students attempting to go to class and the library. Good luck in NYC where Columbia was taken over by Hamas supporters who advanced their cause by holding Hispanic janitors hostage. An odd way to display concern for oppression. Through all of this what have you heard at church? Maybe a murmured prayer for “peace in the Middle East.” More likely some pleas for “social justice”
Now the inevitable
In D.C. a 26 year old Jewish American girl and a 30 year old multi-faith Israeli man, working on peace efforts, were shot down dead in the street when leaving an event at a Jewish museum. Their assassin is a Hispanic man from Chicago.
Shortly after I attended a morning service at a local Christian church. We celebrated the Jewish Messiah who died for our sins and were reminded of the martyrdom of his Jewish apostles. The priest spoke of ongoing persecution of Christians in many countries.
All this took place next door to a Jewish Chabad, reasonably locked up like a fort.
Yet we heard not a word about the assassination of a young girl and her Israeli boyfriend, about to be engaged in Jerusalem.
Christians often like to ask WWJD, or, “What Would Jesus Do?”
I surely doubt that he would be pleased by The Silence of the Lambs.