Saturday November 11 2023
JESUS IS A JEW.
When we visited one of our three daughters, who lived near Beverly Hills, we stayed at a hotel next to a Messianic Synagogue, and on the Sabbath my wife and I attended the service there: very impressive, fully conforming to the rabbinic tradition, me wearing a yarmulka, a skullcap, observing the unfolding and reciting of the law, observing a cantor – an opera singer – chanting the required verses, but the preaching was from Corinthians.
Is Jesus a Jew?
Is Jesus a Jew? Of course, Jesus is a Jew. He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly attended the Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish text of the Hebrew Bible. He celebrated the Jewish festivals. He went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem where he was under the authority of priests…. He was born, lived, died, taught as a Jew. This is obvious to any casual reader of the gospel text. What’s striking is not so much that he was a Jew but that the gospels make no pretense that he wasn’t.
Yes, Jesus was born a Jew, a true descendant of the House of David, hence born on Bethlehem, David’s home base. Jesus died a Jew, and he was raised from the dead, still being a Jew. When he returns, soon I believe, he will be visibly recognized as a Jew, just as I will be a blue-eyed white person – then a visible minority – in the New Creation, as black and brown or whatever, will dominate then.
Being a Jew is something special.
By all accounts, Abraham was the first Jew, a man of great faith and wisdom, a man who left the security of his tribe and followed God’s instructions blindly, fully trusting the divine ordinances. He was the start of a great people, an epithet that has endured throughout the millennia. Much of the mental attributes of the modern world is of Jewish origin. Yet they were – and still are – the quintessential ‘strangers and sojourners’, the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity.
In my youth I witnessed how, during the 1940-45 occupation, Jewish families were torn apart, the German Polizei arresting first the little children, then, days later, hauled away the father, leaving for a while an agonizing mother: satanic cruelty!
“Jews are just like everyone else, only more so,” somebody once said. True: it gave us a John, the Baptizer; it gave us also a Judas, the betrayer; it gave us an Einstein, but also an Epstein.
The Final Phase.
We now are in history’s final phase. A 4,000 years old vendetta is in its end-game: Sarai versus Hagar, Isaac versus Ishmael, Jew versus Arab, Israel versus its surrounding neighbours.
And where does Jesus fit in, the eternal Jew?
Jesus called himself, not a Jew, but “The Son of Man”. When, in that famous chapter, John 3, Nicodemus, a distinctive Jewish teacher, came to him at night, Jesus told him that he ought to be ‘born again’, a phrase this Jewish professor had never heard before. What Jesus meant was that he had to shed his religious, Old Testament, Jewishness, the laws and ordinances connected with his belief, and become a New Testament person, ruled not by regulations and ordinances, but by ‘love’, by total all-comprehensive love: ”Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and your neighbor as yourself – a re-birth into all of God’s creative acts”.
Jesus called himself the Son of Man, or as I translate it Humanity Personified. Jesus was and is a Jew, but his physical appearance is just the outward shell. In his totality, Jesus represents all Jews, all Arabs, all races and colors and appearances, all the good, the ill, the defunct, the injured, the disadvantaged, the maimed and crippled, the entirety of all human experiences: that’s what I think, ‘the Son of Man’ depicts, perhaps better depicted as “Humanity personified”, because he is the savior not only for the Jews, but for all human beings.
Another misunderstanding.
Jesus did not start a religion: his last act, before he died on the cross, was to shred the curtain in the Jerusalem temple separating the Holy from the Holy of Holies, that unique place where only the High Priest, once a year, was allowed to enter. With this act, Jesus forever abolished all formal religion; forever abolished church and Bible. Instead, as John 10: 10 attests: Jesus came to bring LIFE and that to the FULL. That’s why John did not see a temple in the city, (the new Creation) because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. (Revelation 21: 22.)