That Jew Died For You: a reflection

A video produced by Jews for Jesus hit the national headlines yesterday. It shows Jewish holocaust victims being transported by rail to the gates of Auschwitz. Here the infamous selection takes place. Some go to the right - the ones spared to work. Others go to the left - to the showers (i.e. as the film helpfully explains in parentheses, to be gassed).

It is all tastefully done in black and white. The effect, enhanced by the musical score, recalls Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List. That film, unforgettably, has a single person depicted in colour, the little girl in the red coat. Here too, Jews for Jesus offer hommage. But this time, the figure in colour is a man who has taken his place in the line. He carries a cross. There is a momentary pause as he comes up to the selection guards. Then he too goes to the left - voluntarily. 'Just another Jew.' The video ends with a quotation from Isaiah 53 and the strap line: 'That Jew Died For You'.

I watched it with a growing sense of unease. Surely no-one would use the Holocaust as an evangelistic tool? Perhaps I hadn't grasped what Jews for Jesus were trying to do. As I tweeted yesterday, I was trying to understand my bafflement, still wondering if the vociferous denunciation of it in the media was a trifle hysterical. But as I went on thinking about it, as a person of Jewish descent myself, I began to see it more clearly for what it is. Here are three points to consider.

First, it seems to me that the video tramples heavily over holy ground where we ought to take off our shoes and tremble. To many, it simply lacks sensitivity to the victims of the Holocaust. This place of awe demands a particular kind of silence. Words should only be spoken, if at all, with the utmost reverence and carefulness. To colonise and exploit the suffering of so many millions in this way is extraordinary. You are surprised to see it done at all, especially by people who claim the title 'Jew'. 

Secondly, the film is theologically flawed. I don't argue with the words 'That Jew Died for You', even with their calculated offensiveness: as a Christian, the belief that (however I understand this greatest of mysteries) Jesus' death was 'for me' is basic to my faith. But the idea that the Father exacts wrath on his beloved Son is one which, if I accepted it once, I can no longer make sense of, still less subscribe to. What is more, if the doctrine requires Jesus to be 'punished', the implication is that the gas chamber where he goes with his cross is a 'punishment' on all its victims, an idea which once stated is patently offensive, for it colludes in precisely the distorted mentality of the oppressor for whom Jews are punished simply for being Jews. If the film had simply intended to show that in solidarity with the pain of humanity, Christ continues to bear the marks of crucifixion in his own body, it would have been different. But the assertion of a doctrine of atonement at the gates of Auschwitz is understandably perceived as dishonouring the memory of those who perished there. To the religious instinct, it's not the statement of a doctrinal formula but articulating questions like 'Where is God in all this?' 'How can we speak any more about God's justice and love?' that demonstrate spiritual empathy and that mature faith, like the Book of Job, stays and wrestles with.

Finally, and this isn't a point I've seen discussed, there is plenty of New Testament evidence about how the first Jewish converts shared their new-found faith in Jesus. St Paul is especially articulate. He knew how his own Jewish people had suffered a couple of centuries before in an era of fierce perscution under the Hellenising Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes. During the 2nd century BCE Jewry underwent a holocaust that is vividly recorded in the books of the Maccabees and testified to in apocalyptic works like Daniel. Many Jews suffered terribly for their faithfulness to the Covenant. Yet although Paul can place Jesus in the line of Jewish martyrs or 'witnesses' who suffered for the covenant, he does not elide its meaning with suffering from a different era whose own integrity must be honoured. He does not place Jesus among the Maccabean martyrs and say 'whatever was the reason they died, that Jew died for you'. His belief in the historical as well as the theological uniqueness of Jesus' crucifixion makes him careful not to overstate the precedents. We should learn from his reticence, always the mark of a responsible theologian.

So I wish those who made this film had thought better of it. Intelligent Jewish-Christian dialogue has never been more needed than now, not least in relation to the Holocaust. I can't see that this video, however well-meant, will help foster friendship and respect among the Abrahamic faiths. Neither Jews nor Jesus have been well served. 

Love so Amazing: Thoughts on Good Friday Evening

At the end of the Good Friday service at the Cathedral, we sang Isaac Watts’ great hymn ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. When we got to the last verse, ‘Love so amazing, so divine / demands my life, my soul, my all’, there was an unexpected sunburst over the great cross that had been processed in and set up at the front of the nave. Until then, it had been one of those bleak, grey days we have endured for most of March. So this unexpected light felt like a transfiguration, an epiphany. Nature imitated liturgy in the words of another passion hymn we had sung: ‘Tree of glory, tree of light’.

You can have Jesus’ last words from the cross bleak and agonised as in St Matthew and Mark.  You can have them peaceful and serene as in St Luke. You can have them victorious and triumphant, as in St John’s ‘It is accomplished’. All these are valid ways of reading the cross. Golgotha means many different things. But on Good Friday, the liturgy chooses the passion according to St John. His gospel tells of a man destined for a victorious throne where he is ‘lifted up’. It is nothing less than the cross where he finishes in triumph the work he has come to do: the work of love.

Love. For me there was another, more important, epiphany earlier in the service. The preacher was speaking about the cross as the eternal sign of God’s love. In the course of a powerful sermon he said that the problem with ‘punishment’ theories of the atonement is that they are experienced not so much as focused on divine love as on my own sin, my guilt, my shame. In this we are self-concerned, driven by the need to placate angry gods who deal only with forensic transactions without which there can’t be forgiveness or reconciliation. This sinful idée fixe subverts the very idea of love freely given.  

Let me go on in my own words. This is not to deny the central place that forgiveness and reconciliation have in the gospel. Far from it. ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ says Jesus in St John. It’s a question of how we understand love. If we see it in punitive terms, God exacting a penalty in his own Son for the sins of the world, we miss the fundamental point about the nature of love. Its categories are not legal or ceremonial but personal.  It is self-forgetting, self-giving, self-emptying. There is no higher category with which to define it. Love is simply what it is. He loves us because he loves us. It costs everything and gives everything. William Vanstone puts it like this in words we also sang, drawn from his profound book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense:

Love that gives, gives ever more,

Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

I have lived too long with punitive theories of the atonement. I don’t deny that they have a long pedigree in the church (though I do dispute the view of an online conversation partner today that substitutionary atonement is ‘orthodox’: there's never been an orthodox definition of atonement as the preacher pointed out). Nor do I deny that the New Testament draws on legal and ritual categories, nor that it affirms the idea of a victim freeing another person by standing in his/her place. I have defended the place of this imagery in some of my writings. But the point is precisely that these are ways of speaking: imagery, analogy, metaphor. They are not the heart of the person-person relationship which is where in human life we learn everything we know about the character of love.

At the Archbishop’s enthronement at Canterbury last week, we were invited to sing a song that contains the line ‘the wrath of God was satisfied’. I am not alone in questioning whether it can be right to speak about a Son who placates an angry Father. It drives a wedge right through the Trinity. It collapses God’s love into an impersonal transaction. Anyone who has ever loved knows that this is not how love is. It is more costly, more risky and more generous than that. 

The cross shows us what it means to love to the end. As Vanstone’s hymn has it:

Therefore he who shows us God

Helpless hangs upon the tree;
And the nails and crown of thorns
Tell of what God’s love must be.

On Good Friday, the darkness is transfigured and the sun breaks through the clouds. We recognise love enthroned on the cross and say 'yes' to it with all our hearts in the hope, the conviction, that one day it will be enthroned in all the globe. For amor vincit omnia.  Love overcomes in the end. 'Love so amazing, so divine.'