Israel

On Thursday, pastor Jeremy Swem led the young adults' Bible study on the state of Israel. And I do mean state in both senses of the word. Both its condition, and the political state with real borders and all that. A funny thing is that we, as Christians, in the eyes of many people, are supposed to support Israel as it is now. In many ways, some people think that the seriousness of your faith, and your salvation, depend almost exclusively on how you view the modern state of Israel. Do you support it in what it does, or not? And if not, are you prepared to stand before the lord your God and defend that choice, that you rejected his chosen people?

Well, Tim had a good point. He asked, reasonably enough, didn't Israel do what it was supposed to do already? Ah yes. The idea that there is a chosen people out there who are protected by God based on where they live or who their parents are is a thorny one for we as Christians. It unsettles us, because we feel as though God shouldn't play favorites in the capricious way that we do. We feel as though God should be above this sort of petty nonsense. If he's God of everyone, then why are some people more equal than others?

This idea of a holy place, some place on earth that is holier than any other, also makes us feel uncomfortable, because Christianity is one of the few faiths, aside from Kopimism, that can claim a true global reach. It doesn't require you to learn a new language, to face a certain direction, to change your name, or to eat different foods, or even to wear different clothes. Your culture can remain intact, even if your faith changes. If we begin to believe that there is a chosen nation on earth, be it Israel, the United States, or Uganda, then we have to believe also that there exists a chosen people, a people who are to be imitated, and then Christ is no longer Lord of all.

It all ties back to the picture that I'm not exactly keen on. This one. This picture that has Jesus looking pretty much like a white guy, which has been used for a long time to present Christianity as a sort of white man's religion, as though Jesus was God of the Europeans. Which he isn't. He's Lord of all. Our feeling about how Jesus came to the whole world is beautifully encapsulated in what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, when he said in John 20:19-26
'Sir' the woman said 'I can see that you are a prophet.Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is Jerusalem.'
Jesus declared 'Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.'
The woman said 'I know that Messiah (called Christ) is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.'
Jesus declared 'I, who speak to you, am he.' (NIV)

Did you get all that? Not only is Jesus saying that Jerusalem is not going to be where God is rightly to be worshipped only, that he can be worshipped anywhere, but also that salvation is from the Jews. How do we make those two things work? Well, it has to do with what Tim was talking about earlier. Israel, Jerusalem, it did what it was supposed to do. CS Lewis talks about this in Mere Christianity, when he says that Israel existed then primarily to bring forth the savior.

He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was---that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews then suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else: And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sin. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is “humble and meek” and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

That's what we mean when we say that Salvation is from the Jews. Anyone else would have missed it. Polytheism was everywhere, all the time, and if Christ was born into a polytheistic society, they would have seen him as a god, but not as Lord and God. It took a group of people who had heard for millennia that there was only one God, to see him as the manifestation of that same God. Not as another God, not as a great teacher, but Lord and God. And now we are the new Israel, grafted into the history of Salvation (Romans 11:11-24). We have been attached to salvation not based on where we were born, but on what we believe. So what do we do with Israel as Christians now? The same as we do for any other nation. We praise them when they do well, and we admonish them when they do evil. They are sinners like everyone else, and don't get a free pass based on an accident of birth, just like the rest of us. The temple is gone, the sacrificial altar is gone. The once and for all sacrifice has been accomplished. Where do we worship God now? In spirit and in truth.

PJ.