The Hope of the Believer . . .

ACCEPTING OUR JEWISH ROOTS 

Salvation is of the Jews. — Jn. 4:22

One of my old Harvard profs wrote a book on the peril of modernizing Jesus. His point was that when we take Jesus out of his first-century, Jewish context and interpret him in the light of our own culture we do it at the peril of missing the real Jesus. He gave one amusing example of what he meant. Someone took Jesus' statement, "I must be about my father's business," and pictured Jesus as a modern business man, pin-striped suit and all! It doesn't help matters any to note that the word "business" is not even in the original.

There is similar peril when Christians neglect to give proper place to their Jewish roots. It is something like one supposing he can understand American history while ignoring its European heritage. It is not too much to suggest that we must be consistently aware of the Jewishness of Christian origins and of the Scriptures if we are to make a faithful response to them. Because of an anti-Semitic bent ingrained in our "Gentile" culture it may be difficult for us to do this, but we must discipline ourselves to think boldly if we are to understand who we really are as Christians.

We must start by accepting the Jewishness of Jesus. He was as Jewish as Moses, Maimonides, or Mendelsohn ever were. He was born of Jewish parents (Mt. 1:16), and circumcised on the eighth day according to Jewish law (Lk. 2:21). He grew up going to school at the nearby synagogue, celebrating the passover feast with his family, and discussing the nature of religion with the scribes at the temple. When he began his teaching ministry it was in the synagogues ((Lk. 4:16). Even his teaching was within the tradition of Judaism. It is estimated that 90% of what Jesus taught can be found in the rabbinic literature of his time. However much we may esteem "the Lord's Prayer" as Christian, its petitions can be found in one form or another in the writings of the rabbis.

And Jesus' statement that "Salvation is of the Jews" (Jn. 4:21) is hardly a familiar passage to the modern Gentile church, nor is its truth appreciated. It at least means that when the God of heaven in his mercy resolved to redeem a remnant from lost humanity that he did so by raising up a people, through which "salvation history" would unfold, and that people are the Jews. Philosophy may be of the Greeks and law and order of the Romans, but salvation (religion) is of the Jews.

Our Lord's followers were Jews and thought like Jews. He taught them and itinerated with them not unlike a Jewish teacher of his day would do. He drew his materials from Jewish tradition, from the Scriptures, and from the simple beauties of nature - all consistent with Jewish custom. It wasn't so much what he taught that eventually set him apart from other rabbis, but who he was. And he taught with an authority different from that of the scribes. But even though different in this respect he was never accused of being non-Jewish. While it was mainly the common people who followed him, there were some leaders who believed on him (Jn. 12:42). But they were all Jews.

Jesus' mission was to the Jews, Jews only apparently, the ones he called "the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Mt. 15:24). The first church was born in Jerusalem, the city of David, and was made up exclusively of Jews, except that the term "church" would have been meaningless to them. They were at first simply synagogues, called Messianists, and known as another Jewish sect, of which there were many, such as "the sect of the Nazarenes" (Acts 24:4) or simply "the Way" (Acts 22:4). "Church" is misleading, suggestive of institutional structure. The ecclesia (assembly) was simply a believing community, an assembly of Jews who had one thing in common: they believed Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Son of God and the risen Lord.

The greatest day in the history of this community was a Jewish feast day called Shabu'ot (Pentecost), the Feast of Weeks, which came fifty days after passover and was held in Jerusalem. Everyone there was a Jew or a proselyte to the Jewish faith. It was a pilgrim festival, which meant that there were thousands there from many nations, "from every nation under heaven," according to Acts 2:5. A strange series of events led to the 'first proclamation of the gospel by the apostle Peter. He addressed his hearers as "men of Judea" and "men of Israel." Everything was Jewish on that Pentecost. Even the Holy Spirit that came as a rushing mighty wind and in tongues of fire was good Judaism, even if unusual.

The Scriptures used by Jesus and the early Christians were Jewish, which were primarily what we call the Old Testament. Christians and Jews alike spoke of "our father Abraham," drawing from the only Bible they had. When the New Testament Scriptures were finally written and accepted as part of the canon of Scripture, there was not a single document that was not written by a Jew, with the exception of the author of Luke-Acts, and even he may have been a proselyte. When the Bible was eventually a one-volume affair it was a Jewish book through and through. This is another reason why Jesus would say that salvation is of the Jews, because the Scriptures are of the Jews.

The context of the early church was so Jewish that the first crucial issue it faced was whether Gentiles, when they began to accept the gospel, had to first become Jews by being circumcised. before they could become Christians. This issue was debated and resolved in Acts 15 in the negative: the Gentile believers did not have to be circumcised, but there were several very Jewish things that were required of them, such as eating only kosher butchered meat (Acts 15:29). We might ask in passing, especially if we suppose that the New Testament is a fixed norm for the church today, if that apostolic command to "eat nothing strangled" applies to us? Here is a good example of why we need to be acquainted with our Jewish roots, for there is here a Jewish-Gentile cultural problem that called for measures that would not have universal application in the ongoing life of the church. But it does teach us to be generous and forbearing toward others in their conscientious scruples, and to avoid offending them.

The victory at the Jerusalem conference meant that the Christian faith would not and could not be limited to a Jewish sect or remain forever within the bosom of Judaism. And so in time it became catholic or universal. The hero in all this was Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, who, while he always preached to some Jews along the way, gave his life to evangelizing the Gentiles. Other apostles, such as James, preached only to the Jews and probably never to a Gentile. Paul says in Gal. 2:9 that "those who seemed to be pillars," namely James, Peter, and John, agreed that he would go to the Gentiles while they would go to the Jews. While Peter was now and again called upon to preach to Gentiles, it didn't come easy for him. Such was the depth of his Jewishness.

What is remarkable in this is that Paul, however open he was to the Gentiles, appears to be no less Jewish, even in particular rituals, than James, Peter, and John. Once when Paul had returned from one of his missions to the Gentiles, he was urgently put upon by James and the elders, who reminded him how many Jews had accepted the faith, "who were zealous for the law," but who had heard that Paul in his work among the Gentiles had been teaching the Jews to forsake Moses and the law, not to circumcise their children and to ignore Jewish customs (Acts 21:20-21).

To assure the Jewish Christians that Paul was, after all, a faithful Jew who was also zealous for the law, James and the elders had a plan. They had four men who had taken vows which required certain purification rights in the temple. These were "Christians" we are to understand, Jewish believers, who were still practicing things of the Jewish law. The "somewhats" in the Jerusalem church tell Paul (they don't simply suggest it!) to "be purified with the four men." He was even to pay their expenses for the ritual. Paul did as he was told. He took the four brethren to the temple where their heads were shaved and a sacrifice was offered for each of them, at Paul's expense and with his apparent approval. It did what James said it should do; it showed that Paul too "kept the law" (Acts 21:24).

It is not the kind of thing you would expect a Presbyterian pastor to do or a Church of Christ minister!

It is so foreign to our thinking as Gentile believers that we are embarrassed at Paul's conduct and suppose we have to make some defense of his action. This illustrates how we have distanced ourselves from our Jewish roots. There is nothing threatening about Paul's conduct when we realize that he was willing "to become all things to all men" so that he might win some of them. This included "those who are under the law, as under the law" that he might win those under the law (1 Cor. 9:20). What is important is that Paul would never have compromised the principle of justification by faith in Christ apart from the works of the law, "not for a moment" as he put it. Nor would he ever have allowed a Gentile believer to be imposed upon with demands of the law.

Our Gentilism leads us to speak of the "conversion" of Paul, as if he left Judaism to become a Christian. At no point in his life did Paul leave Judaism. He did not change religions. As a faithful Jew he received a call from God to accept Jesus as the Messiah and to proclaim God's message to the Gentiles. Paul saw in Christ the fulfillment of the Jewish law, and in following Christ he was being a faithful Jew.

Our Gentilism also leads us to suppose that the Jews must be "converted" in a way similar to what the Jews believed about the Gentile believers in the first century: that the Jews must become Gentiles (such as a Baptist or Church of Christ) in order to become a Christian.

Understanding our Jewish roots will make us more appreciative of things Jewish and draw us closer to the Jewish people. And if we believe that the Jews will one day accept Christ as a people, as Paul appears to argue in Romans 9-11, we will be better prepared for such a glorious unfolding of events if we are in tune with our roots.

It is furthermore humbling, a humility we need, to realize how dependent we are upon our roots. To guard against Gentile Christians boasting in a kind of triumphalism, Paul wrote these sobering words: "Do not boast against the branches. But if you boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you. (Rom. 11:18).