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exxar1 · 3 years

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Chapter 14 “The Miracle of Easter, Psalm 139

4/3/2021

Psalm 139: 13-16 (NKJV)

“For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.

My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

I honestly don’t remember exactly where, when or how I stumbled onto this psalm. It was sometime in the last couple weeks, and I remember being immediately captivated by David’s poetry of God’s perfect knowledge of mankind. Just a few verses before the passage I quoted above, David asks his creator where he can flee that God will not find him? Whether heaven or hell or the highest mountain or the uttermost parts of the sea, David marvels that God will always find him and be with him, no matter what. (This brought to mind that children’s book where a small child asks his mother if she will still be able to find him no matter what animal he becomes and where he hides. The mother answers that she will always find and love her precious son, no matter what.)

Then I read the four verses that I quoted above, and I had to stop short. I read them again and again, soaking in the words that were at once familiar and suddenly brand new. Somewhere in my early childhood I had memorized verses 13 and 14. Now, pairing them with verses 15 and 16 I was struck by David’s message, especially in verse 16. In the KJV translation, that verse reads, “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” This verse was new to me, but I had a pretty good idea of what David was saying. But, to get a better idea, I reached for my MacArthur study Bible which is published in the NKJV translation. As soon as I read verse 16 there, I smiled to myself. Yes, I was right.

For the last two weeks I have not been able to get this verse out of my head. God knew me before I was even conceived. He had numbered all my days, had written my whole life from beginning to end, before I was even born. I have been trying to wrap my puny, finite mind around this inconceivable, quantum-sized yet massively cosmological concept. How does a being that exists outside our known space and time, a being that has always been and always shall be, a being that knows my entire life’s story before it’s even begun, a being more vast and omnipresent than the universe He created, have any interest at all in the comparatively insignificant, finite, puny beings that He created but who then immediately disobeyed and rejected Him?

God could have started over. He had no obligation to Adam and Eve whatsoever. He could have wiped them from existence with a single, spoken word. And, in fact, a millennium or so later, He did wipe out all of the human race and started over with just Noah and his family. And even then, mankind has still behaved towards God with great rebellion and sin. In my own life, I declared a long time ago that God didn’t exist. I even said at one point to myself, in the deepest dark of my teenage despair that I hated God. I hated Him for the way He had made me.

And yet, according to Psalm 139:16, God knew every word, every action, every rebellious thought that I would hurl at Him before I was even born. He also knew the day I would raise my eyes to the night sky behind the neon streetlamps six months ago and whisper a sinner’s prayer of forgiveness and surrender. He knows the exact time and day of my death or if I’ll still be alive the day that His son returns in the clouds to rapture the believers home. He knows my every choice, my every thought, my every deed before I make any of them, and He has always kept me wrapped in His arms my whole life, patiently waiting until I was finally ready to wholly and completely surrender to Him.

I have been trying to understand not only the very existence and nature of God, but, more importantly, the depth and power of that kind of love. I have failed at both counts. Instead, I have only been able to quote verse 14 over and over. “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Your works, and that my soul knows very well.” My soul understands what my frail, limited mind cannot: that God, my Lord and Creator, my Great Savior, loves me in spite of my sin nature; in spite of all I have said and done against him; in spite of all my failures, both past and future.

He loved me enough to provide a way for my salvation.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday. It’s the day we who believe in God and what His son did for us on the cross celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and His victory over death. This is a Bible story that I have known my whole life. I have sat through countless sermons and Sunday School lessons and family devotionals, and I have listened to my parents, my teachers, and my pastor expound on the greatest truth found in God’s Holy Word. This is the foundation of our faith, the only reason and sole hope of our frail, finite human existence. I know the timeline, the major events starting with the last supper, to the Christ’s anguished, desperate prayer to His heavenly father in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the moment of death and the earthquake that tore the temple veil in two. I know that Peter denied his Lord three times, that the trial was a mockery, that Christ knew that Judas would betray Him, and that Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the matter after his wife told him she suffered a restless night of strange dreams about this particular Jewish rabbi.

I know about the crown of thorns, the beatings, the piercing of His side, the blood and vinegar that flowed from the wound, the nails that were driven into his hands and feet, the excruciating pain and extreme suffering that he endured while hanging there for many hours. I also know about the two thieves – one who acknowledged the lordship of Christ, and the other who stubbornly refused to believe in spite of the evidence right before his own eyes. I know that Christ finally gave up the ghost by raising His weary, bloodied head to the darkened sky and crying, “It is finished!”

I know that He was laid in the tomb after being wrapped carefully and reverently by his followers as they wept with great sorrow and grief. I know that on the morning of the third day, when Mary and Martha came to the tomb, and when they found the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body gone, that they were both afraid and thoroughly confused. I also know that the angel of the Lord asked them, “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, for he is risen as he promised! Go, and tell his disciples the good news!” And so they did.

I have known that story my whole life, every gory and heartbreaking detail. I have memorized many verses from the four gospels that speak of that great story. But, until this year, I have never known it in my heart and soul.

The God that David speaks of in Psalm 139 has known all my comings and goings, all of my thoughts and words, all my choices and heartbreaks, all my joys and accomplishments, all my times of deepest sorrows and despairs, before I was even conceived in my mother’s womb. He knows me from the very molecules of the protein strands of my DNA to every spiritual corner of my soul. His fingerprints are stamped into my genetic code, and He has loved me always.

I cannot fathom this, and my heart breaks as I contemplate the act of sacrifice that His son made on that cross on Golgotha’s Hill two millennia ago. Just writing those paragraphs describing the story of His death and resurrection has caused me to weep for what I did to send Him there. He bore the sin of ALL mankind – past, present and future – on that cross. That glorious, wonderous, terrible cross. He died for you, and He died for me.

Three months ago I started to expand my Apple music library with new albums and songs by current Christian singers and songwriters. One of them, Chris Tomlin, has a song called “The Wonderful Cross”. It’s his own arrangement of the hymn by Isaac Watts titled “When I Survey The Wonderous Cross.” I have been playing this song over and over during my daily commutes to work for the last few weeks.

When I survey the wonderous cross/On which the prince of glory died/My richest gain I count but loss/And pour contempt on all my pride

See from His head, His hands, His feet/Sorrow and love flow mingled down/Did e’er such love and sorrow meet/Or thorns compose so rich a crown

And now Chris’ own chorus:

Oh the wonderful cross/Oh the wonderful cross/Bids me come and die and find that I may truly live/Oh the wonderful cross/Oh the wonderful cross/All who gather here by grace draw near and bless Your name

This verse by Watts is what gets me every time:

Were the whole realm of nature mine/That were an offering far too small/Love so amazing, so divine/Demands my soul, my life, my all

I come before you, O Lord God, a sinner saved by grace. I recognize that I am not worthy of Your love, Your mercy, or Your forgiveness. But You loved me so greatly and so deeply that You sent Your only son to be born of a virgin, to live as one of us, and then to die by our filthy, vile hands so that we could all be washed beneath His pure blood. By this, you gave us a way to salvation, and all that I have to do is accept this gift by praying and believing in Your name. There is nothing that I could ever do on my own to attain this, and I promise you, O God, that for as long as I live, as long as You give me the ability to draw breath, that I will give You nothing less than my soul, my life, and my all.

Amen.

#easter #God #resurrection sunday #Christianity #the cross of calvary

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kenro199x · 6 years

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I’m just going to post the whole thing here as this will get archived will be behind a paywall when others in the future will run into this and want to read it.

NAGOYA, Japan — “Even a hunter cannot kill a bird that flies to him for refuge.” This Samurai maxim inspired one gifted and courageous man to save thousands of people in defiance of his government and at the cost of his career. On Friday I came to Nagoya at the invitation of the Japanese government to speak in honor of his memory.

The astonishing Chiune Sugihara raises again the questions: What shapes a moral hero? And how does someone choose to save people that others turn away?

Research on those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust shows that many exhibited a streak of independence from an early age. Sugihara was unconventional in a society known for prizing conformity. His father insisted that his son, a top student, become a doctor. But Sugihara wanted to study languages and travel and immerse himself in literature. Forced to sit for the medical exam, he left the entire answer sheet blank. The same willfulness was on display when he entered the diplomatic corps and, as vice minister of the Foreign Affairs Department for Japan in Manchuria in 1934, resigned in protest of the Japanese treatment of the Chinese.

A second characteristic of such heroes and heroines, as the psychologist Philip Zimbardo writes, is “that the very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds.” While the world around him disregarded the plight of the Jews, Sugihara was unable to ignore their desperation.

In 1939 Sugihara was sent to Lithuania, where he ran the consulate. There he was soon confronted with Jews fleeing from German-occupied Poland.

Three times Sugihara cabled his embassy asking for permission to issue visas to the refugees. The cable from K. Tanaka at the foreign ministry read: “Concerning transit visas requested previously stop advise absolutely not to be issued any traveler not holding firm end visa with guaranteed departure ex japan stop no exceptions stop no further inquires expected stop.”

Sugihara talked about the refusal with his wife, Yukiko, and his children and decided that despite the inevitable damage to his career, he would defy his government.

Mr. Zimbardo calls the capacity to act differently the “heroic imagination,” a focus on one’s duty to help and protect others. This ability is exceptional, but the people who have it are often understated. Years after the war, Sugihara spoke about his actions as natural: “We had thousands of people hanging around the windows of our residence,” he said in a 1977 interview. “There was no other way.”

On Friday I spoke at Sugihara’s old high school in Nagoya, during a ceremony unveiling a bronze statue of him handing visas to a refugee family. After the ceremony, in front of some 1,200 students, I spoke with his one remaining child, his son Nobuki, who arrived from Belgium to honor his father’s memory. He told me his father was “a very simple man. He was kind, loved reading, gardening and most of all children. He never thought what he did was notable or unusual.”

Most of the world saw throngs of desperate foreigners. Sugihara saw human beings and he knew he could save them through prosaic but essential action: “A lot of it was handwriting work,” he said.

Day and night he wrote visas. He issued as many visas in a day as would normally be issued in a month. His wife, Yukiko, massaged his hands at night, aching from the constant effort. When Japan finally closed down the embassy in September 1940, he took the stationery with him and continued to write visas that had no legal standing but worked because of the seal of the government and his name. At least 6,000 visas were issued for people to travel through Japan to other destinations, and in many cases entire families traveled on a single visa. It has been estimated that over 40,000 people are alive today because of this one man.

With the consulate closed, Sugihara had to leave. He gave the consulate stamp to a refugee to forge more visas, and he literally threw visas out of the train window to refugees on the platform.

After the war, Sugihara was dismissed from the foreign office. He and his wife lost a 7-year-old child and he worked at menial jobs. It was not until 1968 when a survivor, Yehoshua Nishri, found him that his contribution was recognized. Nishri had been a teenager in Poland saved by a Sugihara visa and was now at the Israeli embassy in Tokyo.

In the intervening years Sugihara never spoke about his wartime activities. Even many close to him had no idea that he was a hero.

Sugihara died in 1986. Nine years earlier he gave an interview and was asked why he did it: “I told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was a matter of humanity. I did not care if I lost my job. Anyone else would have done the same thing if they were in my place.”

Of course many were in his place — and very few acted like Sugihara. Moral courage is rare and moral greatness even rarer. It requires a mysterious and potent combination of empathy, will and deep conviction that social norms cannot shake.

How would Sugihara have responded to the refugee crisis we face today, and the response of so many leaders to bolt the gates of entry? There is no simple response adequate to the enormity of the situation. But we have to keep before us the image of a single man, overtaxed, isolated and inundated, who refused to close his eyes to the chaos outside his window. He understood the obligations common to us all and heard in the pleadings of an alien tongue the universal message of pain.

On Friday, I told the students that one day in each of their lives there would be a moment when they would have to decide whether to close the door or open their hearts. When that moment arrives, I implored them, remember that they came from the same school as a great man who when the birds flew to him for refuge, did not turn them away.

David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe) is the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of “David: The Divided Heart.”

#japan #new york times #chiune sugihara #moral heroism #jews #david wolpe #nazis #heroism #japanese

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englishchinesetranslations · 4 years

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In his classic Holocaust text, The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal recounts the following experience. As a concentration camp prisoner, the monotony of his work detail is suddenly broken when he is brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi. The German delineates the gruesome details of his career, describing how he participated in the murder and torture of hundreds of Jews. Exhibiting, or perhaps feigning, regret and remorse, he explains that he sought a Jew—any Jew—to whom to confess, and from whom to beseech forgiveness. Wiesenthal silently contemplates the wretched creature lying before him, and then, unable to comply but unable to condemn, walks out of the room. Tortured by his experience, wondering whether he did the right thing, Wiesenthal submitted this story as the subject of a symposium, including respondents of every religious stripe. An examination of the respective replies of Christians and Jews reveals a remarkable contrast. “When the first edition of The Sunflower was published,” writes Dennis Prager, “I was intrigued by the fact that all the Jewish respondents thought Simon Wiesenthal was right in not forgiving the repentant Nazi mass murderer, and that the Christians thought he was wrong.”Indeed, the Christian symposiasts did sound a more sympathetic note. “I can well understand Simon’s refusal [to forgive],” reflects Fr. Edward Flannery, “but I find it impossible to defend it.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu cites the crucifixion as his source. Arguing that the newly empowered South African blacks readily forgave their white tormentors, Tutu explains that they followed “the Jewish rabbi who, when he was crucified, said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” If we look only to retributive justice, argues Tutu, “then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”And yet, many Jews would respond to Tutu’s scriptural source by citing another verse, one that also describes a Jew strung up by his enemies, yet who responds to his enemies in a very different, perhaps less Christian, way:So the Philistines seized [Samson] and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze shackles. . . . They made him stand between the pillars. . . . Then Samson called to the Lord and said, “Lord God, remember me and strengthen me only this once, O God, so that with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes.” And Samson grasped the two middle pillars on which the house rested, . . . [and] then Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines.” He strained with all his might; and the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life.The symposiasts’ varying theological responses, Prager suggests, reflect “the nature of the Jewish and Christian responses to evil, which are related to their differing understandings of forgiveness.” Indeed, the contrast between the two Testaments indicates that this is the case: Jesus’ words could not be more different than Samson’s.Some might respond that the raging, vengeful Samson is the Bible’s sinful exception, rather than its rule; or, perhaps, that Samson acted in self-defense. Yet a further perusal indicates that the Hebrew prophets not only hated their enemies, but rather reveled in their suffering, finding in it a fitting justice. The great Samuel, having come upon the Amalekite king Agag, after Agag was already captured and the Amalekites exterminated, responds in righteous anger:Then Samuel said, “Bring Agag king of the Amalekites here to me.” And Agag came to him haltingly. Agag said, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” But Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so your mother shall be childless among women.” And Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.And lest one dismiss Samuel’s and Samson’s anger as exhibitions of male machismo, it bears mentioning that the prophetess Deborah appears to relish the gruesome death of her enemy, the Philistine Sisera, who had, fittingly, been executed by another woman. Every bloody detail is recounted in Deborah’s ebullient song:Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the KeniteOf tent-dwelling women most blessed.She put her hand to the tent peg and her right hand to the workmen’s mallet.She struck Sisera a blow, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple. He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet; At her feet he sank, he fell; there he sank, there he fell dead. . . . So perish all your enemies, O Lord!In his At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden , journalist Yossi Klein Halevi speaks with Johanna, a Catholic nun who is struck by the hatred Israelis bear for their enemies. Johanna tells of an Israeli Hebrew teacher “who was very close to us. She told us how her young son hates Saddam. . . . She said it with such enthusiasm. She was so proud of her son.” “I realized,” Johanna concluded, “that hatred is in the Jewish religion.” She was right. The Hebrew prophets spoke in the name of a God who, in Exodus’ articulation, may “forgive iniquity and transgression and sin,” but Who also “by no means exonerates [the guilty].” Likewise, in refusing to forgive their enemies, Jewish leaders sought not merely their defeat, but their disgrace. When Queen Esther had already visited defeat upon Haman—the Hitler of his time, attempted exterminator of the Jewish people—and had killed Haman’s supporters and sons, King Ahasuerus asks what more she could possible want:The king said to Queen Esther, “In the capital of Susa the Jews have killed also the ten sons of Haman. . . . Now what is your petition? It shall be granted you. And what further is your request? It shall be fulfilled.” Esther said, “If it pleases the king . . . let the ten sons of Haman be hanged on the gallows.”Interestingly, the most vivid response in Wiesenthal’s symposium was also written by a woman. The Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, reflecting on how Wiesenthal, in a moment of mercy, brushed a fly away from the Nazi’s broken body, concludes her essay in Deborah’s blunt but poetic manner:Let the SS man die unshriven. Let him go to hell. Sooner the fly to God than he.During my regular weekly coffees with my friend Fr. Jim White, an Episcopal priest, there was one issue to which our conversation would incessantly turn, and one on which we could never agree: Is an utterly evil man—Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden—deserving of a theist’s love? I could never stomach such a notion, while Fr. Jim would argue passionately in favor of the proposition. Judaism, I would argue, does demand love for our fellow human beings, but only to an extent. “Hate” is not always synonymous with the terribly sinful. While Moses commanded us “not to hate our brother in our hearts,” a man’s immoral actions can serve to sever the bonds of brotherhood between himself and humanity. Regarding a rasha, a Hebrew term for the hopelessly wicked, the Talmud clearly states: mitzvah lisnoso—one is obligated to hate him.Some would seek to minimize this difference between our faiths. Eva Fleischner, a Catholic interfaith specialist and another Sunflower symposiast, argues that “Christians—and non-Christians in their wake—have misread, and continue to misread, [Christian texts] interpreting Jesus’ teaching to mean that we are to forgive anyone and everyone. . . . The element that is lost sight of is that Jesus challenges me to forgive evil done to me. . . . Nowhere does he tell us to forgive the wrong done to another.” Perhaps. But even so, a theological chasm remains between the Jewish and Christian viewpoints on the matter. As we can see from Samson’s rage, Judaism believes that while forgiveness is often a virtue, hate can be virtuous when one is dealing with the frightfully wicked. Rather than forgive, we can wish ill; rather than hope for repentance, we can instead hope that our enemies experience the wrath of God.There is, in fact, no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous. Indeed, Christianity’s founder acknowledged his break with Jewish tradition on this matter from the very outset: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. . . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” God, Jesus argues, loves the wicked, and so must we. In disagreeing, Judaism does not deny the importance of imitating God; Jews hate the wicked because they believe that God despises the wicked as well.Among Orthodox Jews, there is an oft-used Hebrew phrase whose equivalent I have not found among Christians. The phrase is yemach shemo, which means, may his name be erased. It is used whenever a great enemy of the Jewish nation, of the past or present, is mentioned. For instance, one might very well say casually, in the course of conversation, “Thank God, my grandparents left Germany before Hitler, yemach shemo, came to power.” Or: “My parents were murdered by the Nazis, yemach shemam.” Can one imagine a Christian version of such a statement? Would anyone speak of the massacres wrought by “Pol Pot, may his name be erased”? Do any Christians speak in such a way? Has any seminary student ever attached a Latin equivalent of yemach shemo to the names “Pontius Pilate” or “Judas”? Surely not. Christians, I sense, would find the very notion repugnant, just as many Jews would gag upon reading the Catholic rosary: “O my Jesus . . . lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.”Why, then, this remarkable disagreement between faiths? Why do Jews and Christians respond so differently to wickedness? Why do Jews refuse at times to forgive? And if the Hebrew prophets and judges believed ardently in the “virtue of hate,” what about Christianity caused it to break with its Old Testament roots?“More than a decade of weekly dialogue with Christians and intimate conversation with Christian friends,” writes Prager, “has convinced me that, aside from the divinity of Jesus, the greatest—and even more important—difference between Judaism and Christianity, or perhaps only between most Christians and Jews, is their different understanding of forgiveness and, ultimately, how to react to evil.” Here Prager takes one theological step too many and commits, in this single statement, two errors. The first is to deem the issue of forgiveness more important than that of Jesus’s identity. Such a statement, to my mind, sullies the memory of thousands of Jews who died rather than proclaim Jesus Lord. Yet Prager also misses the fact that these two issues, that of approaching Jesus and that of approaching our enemies, are essentially one and the same: that the very question of how to approach our enemies depends on whether one believes that Jesus was merely a misguided mortal, or the Son of God. Let us examine how each faith’s outlook on Jesus provides the theological underpinnings for its respective approach to hate.The essence of a religion can be discovered by asking its adherents one question: What, to your mind, was the seminal moment in the history of the world? For Christians, the answer is easy: the passion of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice of the Lamb of God for the sins of the world. Or: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son” so that through his death the world would find salvation. Jews, on the other hand, see history’s focal moment as the Sinai revelation, the day the Decalogue was delivered. On this day, we believe, God formed an eternal covenant with the Jewish people and began to communicate to them His Torah, the Almighty’s moral and religious commandments. The most fascinating element of this event is that before forming this Covenant with the Hebrews, God first asked their permission to do so. England’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, describes the episode:Before stating the terms of the covenant, God told Moses to speak to the people and determine whether or not they agreed to become a nation under the sovereignty of God. Only when “all the people responded together, ‘We will do everything the Lord has said’” did the revelation proceed. . . . The first-ever democratic mandate takes place, the idea that there can be no valid rule without the agreement of all those who are affected by it.There is a wonderful bit of Jewish lore concerning the giving of God’s Torah, in which God is depicted as a merchant, proffering His Law to every nation on the planet. Each one considers God’s wares, and each then finds a flaw. One refuses to refrain from theft; another, from murder. Finally, God chances upon the Jewish people, who gravely agree to shoulder the responsibility of a moral life. The message of this midrash is that God’s covenant is one that anyone can join; God leaves it up to us.Consider for a moment the extraordinary contrast. For Christians, God acted on humanity’s behalf, without its knowledge and without its consent. The crucifixion is a story of a loving God seeking humanity’s salvation, though it never requested it, though it scarcely deserved it. Jews, on the other hand, believe that God’s covenant was formed by the free consent of His people. The giving of the Torah is a story of God seeking to provide humanity with the opportunity to make moral decisions. To my knowledge, not a single Jewish source asserts that God deeply desires to save all humanity, nor that He loves every member of the human race. Rather, many a Jewish source maintains that God affords every human being the opportunity to choose his or her moral fate, and will then judge him or her, and choose whether to love him or her, on the basis of that decision. Christianity’s focus is on love and salvation; Judaism’s on decision and action.The difference runs deeper. Both the Talmud and the New Testament have a great deal to say about the afterlife. Both ardently assert that it exists, and both assure the righteous that they will receive eternal reward and warn the wicked of the reality of damnation. Yet one striking distinction exists between these two affirmations of eternal life: only the Christian Testament deliberately and constantly links the promise of heaven with ethical exhortation, appealing to the hope of eternity as the incentive for righteous action. For Christians, every believer’s ultimate desire and goal must be to experience eternal salvation. Leading a righteous earthly existence is understood as a means towards attaining this goal. Jews, on the other hand, insist that performing sacred acts while alive on earth is our ultimate objective; heaven is merely where we receive our reward after our goal has been attained. The Talmud, in this regard, makes a statement that any Christian would find mind-boggling: “One hour obeying God’s commandments in this world is more glorious than an eternity in the World to Come.”This difference in emphasis can be seen most clearly by contrasting the central New Testament statement on ethics, the Sermon on the Mount, with Rabbinic writings. Here are some of Jesus’s ethical exhortations:Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.A traditional Jew studying Jesus’s style in delivering the Sermon on the Mount is instantly reminded of the Mishnaic tractate Ethics of the Fathers, a collection of rabbinical sayings that Jesus’s words appear to echo. Consider these parallel passages from the tractate:Fortunate is man, for he was created in the image of God. Fortunate are the Israelites, for they are called the children of God. Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion in pursuit of the will of your Father in heaven.While the common phrases used by Jesus—“fortunate are,” “Father in heaven”—are standard rabbinic utterances, Jesus’s repeated support for his statements—“for they will inherit the kingdom of heaven”—is his own. Such a phrase appears nowhere in the rabbinic ethical writings. Their focus is more on action than on salvation.The contrast extends to differing ways of celebrating holidays. In speaking to Fr. Jim about our respective faiths, I told him about the phenomenon of “Yom Kippur Jews.” Many of my nonobservant coreligionists, I said, show up in synagogue only on the Day of Atonement and so experience a Judaism that focuses only on judgment and repentance. They never experience Judaism at its most joyous moments: Passover, Hanukkah, Purim. “I have the opposite problem,” said Jim. “Some people show up in church for Easter only—Christianity at its most joyous. And so they never think about judgment and repentance.”Both rabbis and priests would appreciate regularly packed houses of worship; but the contrast between the central days of the Jewish and Christian calendars is instructive. Christians celebrate a day when, they believe, Jesus was given his place in heaven and so, at least potentially, was every member of humanity. Yom Kippur, in contrast, is not a day for celebration but for solemnity, a day for focusing not on salvation but on action. Jews recite, again and again, a long litany of sins that they might have committed; they pray for forgiveness, and conclude, time and again, with the sentence: “May it be Thy will, Lord our God, that I not sin again.” While the entire day is devoted to prayer, and to evaluation of past deeds, the concept of reward and punishment in the afterlife is not mentioned once. The only question of concern is whether, at the end of the day, God will consider us sufficiently repentant. Yom Kippur’s climax comes at sunset, during the neilah, or “closing” prayer. After begging once again for forgiveness, Jews the world over end the day with the recitation of “Our Father, Our King,” named thusly because of the first phrase in every sentence:Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You. Our Father, our King, we have no king but You. Our Father, our King, return us in wholehearted repentance before You.We ask God for mercy and for forgiveness, attributes of God that Judaism holds dear. But then our thoughts turn to the utterly evil and unrepentant. Towards the end of this prayer, one anguished, pain-filled sentence stands out: “Our Father, our King, avenge, before our eyes, the spilled blood of your servants.” After a day devoted to prayer, synagogues everywhere are filled with the cry of fasting, weary, exhausted Jews. They have spent the past twenty-five hours meditating upon their sins and asking for forgiveness. Now, they suddenly turn their attention to those who gave no thought to forgiveness, no thought to God, no thought to the dignity of the Jewish people. After focusing on their own actions, Jews turn to those of others, and their parched throats mouth this message: “Father, do not forgive them, for they know well what they do.”The essence of each religion is reflected in its attitude toward the sinner. The existence of hell should be a painful proposition for Christians, who profess to believe that Christ died to redeem the world. C. S. Lewis, in his The Problem of Pain, mournfully admits as much. Yet the doctrines of free will and divine justice compel him to admit that some will not be redeemed.There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specifically, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.The notion that someone may be eternally damned, Lewis writes, is one that he “detests” with all his heart; yet anyone who refuses to submit to salvation cannot ultimately be saved. Despite this, Lewis adds that even these wretches must be in our prayers. “Christian charity,” he stresses, “counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man: to prefer his conversion, at the peril of our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to his punishment; to prefer it infinitely.”Here Judaism strongly disagrees. For Jews deny that there ever was a “divine labor” to redeem the world; rather, God gave humanity the means for its own redemption, and its members will be judged by the choices they make. Christians may maintain that no human being is unloved by the God who died on his or her behalf, but Jews insist that while no human being is denied the chance to become worthy of God’s love, not every human being engages in actions so as to be worthy of that love, and those unworthy of divine love do not deserve our love either.This distinction between salvation and decision is evident in the fact that some Christians hold out hope for something that traditional Jews never even consider: that every human being will ultimately be saved. As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus notes, some verses in the New Testament have been said to assert this explicitly (“Will All Be Saved?” FT, Public Square, August/September 2001). Take, for example, 1 Corinthians: “For as all die in Adam, so will all be made alive in Jesus Christ.” Romans states it even more strongly: “For just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” Pope John Paul II has suggested that we cannot say with certainty that even Judas is in hell.Forget Judas, a Jew might respond. What about Hitler? Even here, Fr. Neuhaus refuses to relent: “Hitler may have repented, turning to the mercy of God, even as his finger pressed the trigger.” Maybe, Neuhaus suggests, Hitler and Mao spend thousands of years in purgatory. Or perhaps, he whimsically says, “Hitler in heaven will be forever a little dog to whom we will benignly condescend. But he will be grateful for being there, and for not having received what he deserved,” just as “we will all be grateful for being there and for not having received what we deserve.”The Mishnah’s view, set down approximately at the time Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans, could not be more different, explicitly singling out specific wicked men in biblical history who will never by saved. And unlike Lewis, the rabbis seem utterly unperturbed that some are eternally damned; for, unlike Neuhaus, the rabbis quite strongly believed that we go to heaven precisely because we deserve to be there. One of the most fascinating differences between Judaism and Christianity is that while both faiths believe in heaven, only Judaism speaks of one’s eternal reward as a chelek, a portion. For instance: “Jeroboam has no portion in the World to Come.” The rabbis saw the afterlife as a function of one’s spiritual savings account, in which the extent of one’s experience of the divine presence is determined by the value of the good deeds that he or she has accumulated in life.This does not mean that the rabbis believed that those with few virtues were eternally damned. The sages believed in a form of purgatory, where those with more sins than good deeds were sent. Damnation was reserved for the frightfully wicked.Jewish intolerance for the wicked is made most manifest in Maimonides’ interpretation of damnation. In his view souls are never eternally punished in hell: the presence of the truly wicked is so intolerable to the Almighty that they never even experience an afterlife. Rather, they are, in the words of the Bible, “cut off”: after death, they just . . . disappear.The Protestant theologian Harvey Cox, who is married to a Jew, wrote a book on his impressions of Jewish ritual. Cox describes the Jewish holiday of Purim, on which the defeat of Haman is celebrated by the reading of the book of Esther. Enamored with the biblical story, Cox enjoys the tale until the end, where, as noted above, Esther wreaks vengeance upon her enemies. Like Sr. Johanna, he is disturbed by Jewish hatred. It cannot be a coincidence, he argues, that precisely on Purim a Jew by the name of Baruch Goldstein murdered twenty innocent Muslims engaged in prayer in Hebron.There is something to Cox’s remarks. The danger inherent in hatred is that it must be very limited, directed only at the most evil and unrepentant. According to the Talmud, the angels began singing a song of triumph upon the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt until God interrupted them: “My creatures are drowning, and you wish to sing a song?” Yet the rabbis also state that God wreaked further vengeance upon Pharoah himself, ordering the sea to spit him out, so that he could return to Egypt alone, without his army. Apparently one must cross some terrible moral boundary in order to be a justified target of God’s hatred—and of ours. An Israeli mother is right to raise her child to hate Saddam Hussein, but she would fail as a parent if she taught him to despise every Arab. We who hate must be wary lest we, like Goldstein, become like those we are taught to despise.Another danger inherent in hate is that we may misdirect our odium at institutions in the present because of their past misdeeds. For instance, some of my coreligionists reserve special abhorrence for anything German, even though Germany is currently one of the most pro-Israel countries in Europe. Similarly, after centuries of suffering, many Jews have, in my own experience, continued to despise religious Christians, even though it is secularists and Islamists who threaten them today, and Christians should really be seen as their natural allies. Many Jewish intellectuals and others of influence still take every assertion of the truth of Christianity as an anti-Semitic attack. After the Catholic Church beatified Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Christianity, some prominent Jews asserted that the Church was attempting to cover up its role in causing the Holocaust. And then there is the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who essentially has asserted that any attempt by the Catholic Church to maintain that Christianity is the one true faith marks a continuation of the crimes of the Church in the past.Burning hatred, once kindled, is difficult to extinguish; but that is precisely what Jews must do when reassessing our relationship with contemporary Christianity. The crimes of popes of the past do not negate the fact that John Paul II is one of the righteous men of our generation. If Christians no longer hold us accountable for the crime of deicide, we cannot remain indifferent to such changes. Christians have every right to assert the truth of their beliefs. Modern anti-Christianity is no more excusable than ancient anti-Semitism.Yet neither does this mean that hate is always wrong, nor that Esther’s actions were unnecessary. The rabbis of the Talmud were bothered by a contradiction: the book of Kings describes Saul as killing every Amalekite, and yet Haman, according to his pedigree in the book of Esther, was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite king. The Talmud offers an instructive solution: after Saul had killed every Amalekite, he experienced a moment of mercy, and wrongly refrained from killing King Agag. This allowed Agag a window of opportunity; he had several minutes before he was killed by the angry Samuel. In those precious moments, Agag engaged in relations with a random woman, and his progeny lived on to threaten the Jews in the future. The message is that hate allows us to keep our guard up, to protect us. When we are facing those who seek nothing but our destruction, our hate reminds us who we are dealing with. When hate is appropriate, then it is not only virtuous, but essential for Jewish well-being.Archbishop Tutu, who, as indicated above, preaches the importance of forgiveness towards Nazis, has, of late, become one of Israel’s most vocal critics, demanding that other countries enact sanctions against the Jewish state. Perhaps he would have Israelis adopt an attitude of forgiveness towards those who have sworn to destroy the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet forgiveness is precisely what the Israeli government attempted ten years ago, when it argued that the time had come to forget the unspeakable actions of a particular individual, and to recognize him as the future leader of a Palestinian state. Many Jews, however, seething with hatred for this man, felt that it was the Israeli leaders who “knew not what they were doing.”At the time, my grandfather, a rabbi, joined those on the Israeli right in condemning the Oslo process, arguing that it would produce a terrorist state responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. As a rabbinical student, I could not understand my grandfather’s unremitting opposition. He was, I thought, so blinded by his hate that he was unable to comprehend the powerful potential of the peace process. Now, many hundreds of Jewish victims of suicide bombings later, and fifty years after the Holocaust, the importance and the necessity of Jewish hate has once again been demonstrated. Perhaps there will soon be peace in the Middle East, perhaps not. But one thing is certain: we will not soon forgive the actions of a man who, as he sent children to kill children, knew—all too well—just what he was doing. We will not—we cannot—ask God to have mercy upon him. Those Israeli parents whose boys and girls did not come home will pray for the destiny of his soul at the conclusion of their holiest day, but their prayer will be rather different from the rosary:Let the terrorist die unshriven. Let him go to hell. Sooner a fly to God than he.Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik is Resident Scholar at the Jewish Center in Manhattan and a Beren Fellow at Yeshiva University. He is currently studying philosophy of religion at Yale Divinity School.

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blackburnianmorning · 7 years

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As It Began to Dawn

Sermon Preached Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014

There’s a story making the rounds about a woman who looked out of her kitchen window one day to see her German shepherd shaking the life out of a neighbor's rabbit. Her family did not get along well with the people next door, so she knew this was going to be a disaster.

She managed to distract the dog with a broom until he dropped the now extremely dead rabbit. She panicked. She did not know what to do. So she grabbed the rabbit, took it inside, gave it a bath, blow dried it to its original fluffiness, combed it out until the rabbit was looking good, snuck into the neighbor's yard, and propped the dead rabbit back up in its cage. An hour later she heard screams coming from next door. She called over the fence, "What's wrong?" and the neighbor said, "Our rabbit! Our rabbit! He died a week ago. We buried him, and now he's back!"

People in the ancient world knew dead rabbits tend to stay dead. They also knew that dead rabbis tend to stay dead, too. The theologian N. T. Wright notes that there were many messianic movements in the first century. And in every case, the would-be Messiah got crucified by Rome just as Jesus did. But not in one, single other case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better."

That’s what makes our story different. It is so implausible that it has to be true…you couldn’t make it up! We know the end of the story of Jesus’s death on the cross. We’ve had the spoiler alert. And yet, we come back again and again…we LOVE the story of Easter.

On Good Friday, I got a facebook message from my friend Mary, sending all her colleagues in ministry a prayer. She prayed that we would just simply and faithfully tell the story: Of women in the dawn hush ...of men running half-believing ...of rolled stones and folded grave-clothes ...of a supposed gardener saying the name of a crying woman ...of sad walkers encountering a stranger on the road ...of an empty tomb and... of overflowing hearts. We’re here to hear the story again.

Many people go to extraordinary lengths to avoid hearing the end of a story — films they haven't seen yet or books they haven't read yet. They get very upset if they learn the ending. The famous movie reviewer Roger Ebert once warned his fellow critics that they don’t have the right to play the spoiler. But there was an interesting study a couple of years ago from two researchers at the University of California, San Diego. The study suggests that spoilers don't spoil stories. Instead, contrary to popular wisdom, they might even enhance our enjoyment of a story. The study ran three experiments based on 12 short stories. Each version of the story was read by at least 30 people. Surprisingly, the researchers found that the participants preferred the "spoiled" versions of suspenseful stories. For example, in one case, participants were told before reading the story that a condemned man's daring escape is all just a fantasy before the noose snaps around his neck. That spoiler alert helped people enjoy the story more.

One of the researchers had a theory about why people liked getting a spoiler alert. He said, "It could be that once you know how [the story] turns out … you're more comfortable processing the information and you can focus on a deeper understanding of the story."

We hear the Easter story, again and again every year. We love the story, and it doesn’t hurt at all that we know the ending…in fact I think it’s true: It helps us enjoy it more and maybe, if we allow it to, it might lead us to a deeper understanding.

Because that’s what I want to uncover this morning. I want to uncover what impact the Easter story has on your life. How does the resurrection shape and form the way you live? And do you really know the story for yourself? I wonder if we might just accept it as we’ve been told it, without really experiencing resurrection ourselves? I’ve been thinking about these things for some time now. And I found an image that I think captures the conundrum.

This is a painting by Frank Wesley. I found it in a book by Naomi Way called Exploring Faith with a Brush. I’ve seen two names attributed to the painting. On Frank Wesley’s website it’s called "The Two Marys and the Tomb." In the book, it’s called“As It Began to Dawn” - I like this second title much better. I came upon the image about six months ago while I was on retreat in TX and I was immediately drawn to it — I adopted it as my personal icon during the retreat and used it to guide my prayer time. When I came home, I made it the wall paper on my computer, so I’ve seen it hundreds of times. And every time I do, I find it to be a striking image. It’s a moment within that first verse of our reading from Matthew: “Early on Sunday morning, as the new day was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went out to see the tomb.” I believe the painting captures the precise moment, when, the tomb first comes in to view. It’s just barely getting light, perhaps misty fog was hanging in the air.

It’s a captivating and haunting image, all at once. The Mary in the foreground is the older woman. She is bent with grief; beyond consolation. Her gaze is blind, downward, she is not open to any other answer than what she knows in her pain. The other Mary, the younger woman, has her arm protectively around the older. She’s looking up, perhaps at something that surprises her. It is the moment when suddenly, there is a new possibility — that there may be a different ending to the story. Her faces registers confusion, but there’s a flash of hope there too.

Two Marys, and two very different ways of experiencing the moment of possibility. For me, they have merged into one person, representative of myself perhaps — two sides of the same person that lives and experiences life and faith in very different ways.

There are well-known theories in psychology that suggest we all hold differing images of ourselves. How you understand yourself or yourselves affects the way we live, make choices, and choose pathways for ourselves. The past decade has had an explosion of research into this from the fields of psychology, neuroscience and behavioral economics. The traditional model of how we make choices is centered around psychic conflict, warring parts of the mind, instinct vs. reason, id against ego, unconscious motivations avoiding conscious recognition that sort of thing. It sounds like a lot of psycho-babble if it weren’t also true to our experience. We have two-sides to ourselves. Maybe it’s the inward and outward self, maybe it’s the physical and spiritual self. If you dig deep enough, you’ll uncover this incongruity — where something doesn’t match up. The research paints a picture of human intellect or reason as fighting forces within us that lead us astray. But there has always been an optimism about overcoming these influences through self-awareness and discipline. I will add one more reason to have confidence that we can introduce the two sides of ourselves to each other, and in the process become a whole person. Easter is what gives me this hope.

Let me give you a very simple example. I have two selves that often butt heads in the morning. I sometimes have trouble getting myself to do the things I love to do, like taking an early morning walk. I love to walk, I really do. So why don’t I do it all the time? When I take a walk, I experience both ups and downs. I love the early morning before the sun comes up, it’s a great time for thinking and praying, this time of year the birds are singing – which is an added incentive. These are the reasons I love to walk. But there are also down-sides to taking a walk, like getting out of bed (I’ve been known to have a bad snooze button habit). I also get painful shin splints sometimes, and blisters on my feet and if I push myself into a jog as I know I should, I get really winded. So when I think of taking a walk, my two selves argue about it all the time. Which will win? The self who treasures life-giving, pleasurable activity of walking? Or the self that indulges the sleep-inducing, lethargic choice of staying in bed?

Now let’s be clear…I don’t think it’s supposed to be this way. It just is this way. It is a consequence of our human condition. Our fate was sealed back in the Garden of Eden – our two selves: the life receiver, obedient to God, and the death-receiver, the one who turns away from God to serve his own selfish desires. There are parts of ourselves that are glorious — we soar above the angels when we have it all together. Our best selves are creative, caring, vital and thankful — all the time. Our worst selves are full of doubt, driven by fear, stooped by pain and struggling just to put one foot in front of the other much of the time. Who wins for you most days? Is it your best self or your worst self? I think at best I’m usually trying to strike a balance between the two. But even that isn’t as God intends it. God intends that we be wholly and completely alive.

In his book, A New Harmony, John Philip Newell talks about this problem. The problem of our fragmented selves. He quotes the famous psychologist Karl Jung, who said that wholeness in a person is about “integration . . . but not perfection.” Newell goes on to say that wholeness is about bringing into relationship again the many parts of our lives, including our brokenness, in order to experience transformation. It is not about forgetting the wound or pretending it didn’t happen. It is about seeking a new beginning that grows inseparably out of the suffering. It is not about returning to Eden, an unblemished state of innocence within us or between us. It is about bringing our origin in Eden, the root that connects us still to the sacredness of our beginnings, into the depths of our exile from Eden, including all of the woundedness that false decisions and wrong turns have created within us and between us in our lives.

This painting tells the beginning of the story. The two women and the way they met the dawning of the new day. But after the earthquake, after the stone is rolled away, after the angels tells them the amazing news, Verse 8 says: " They left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” Their sorrow, their grief, their brokenness was made whole and turned to joy. They were transformed...the resurrection made them new.

If we are to take the Easter story and own it for ourselves, Christ’s resurrection means that new life is available to all. Easter is a dying and rebirth — a chance to move forward with a wholeness that has eluded us until now. Christ died so that all that is broken in us may die with him. Christ rose so that we might be wholly alive. Knowing the end of the story helps us to own it and take its meaning into our own lives.

That is our story, and when we live it and experience the resurrection with Jesus Christ, we truly own the good news ourselves. Allow that which is life-draining to die on the cross. Allow that which is new and life giving to be reborn from the empty tomb.

Because death is not the last word. Grief is not the last word. Brokenness is not the last word. Fear is not the last word. Violence is not the last word. Hate is not the last word. Betrayal and failure are not the last word. No: each of them are left like folded grave clothes in a tomb, and from that tomb, arises Christ, alive. May we arise this day with Him.

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