Friday, 14th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 22:1-22

Morning Prayer

It’s easy to read this part of Acts with a sense of hopelessness. Paul can speak to them in their language; he can trot out all his credentials. But say the one word, “Gentiles,” and the crowd loses all perspective: So, you are preaching to the Gentiles. Now we know that all the charges are true, that you want to destroy all that makes us Jewish, God’s chosen people. Read the 5th chapter of Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians, and you’ll see how hard he tried to make his Gentile protégés more Jewish. But his listeners are incapable of accepting anything Paul says about his mission to the Gentiles. They only want to believe the worst, and are incapable of having their minds changed by anything as inconvenient as facts.

Paul is speaking to a righteous people with centuries of grievances and resentments against the world which has either ignored them or oppressed them. They are so sure of their righteousness, and the Gentiles’ unrighteousness, that salvation can only mean vindication for themselves and punishment of the Gentiles. But even worse than this has been the shoe on the other foot for nearly 2,000 years. How many mobs of “Christians” have Jews had to face, culminating in the Holocaust. True, it was anti-Christian Nazis who perpetrated that atrocity. But they had centuries of anti-Jewish Christian polemic as a foundation for their policy of isolation, and eventual extermination of the Jews.

The painting to the left is by Marc Chagall, and is entitled, “The White Crucifixion.” Jesus is wearing the Jewish prayer shawl, and he is surrounded by the images of persecution, many of which Chagall saw as he grew up in Russia. Surrounding Jesus are the pogroms where local Jews saw their houses and synagogues burned, were forced to leave their homes. And when the Russian Czar was overthrown, the Communists with their blood-red flags simply continued the persecution. Christians also viewed redemption as a game of vindicated and punished, of winners and losers, with the Jews as the losers. But God is not interested in picking winners and losers. Salvation, as I said yesterday, is not a zero-sum game. If Paul, the ultimate enemy of Christianity, could become its greatest champion, then we all should see our enemies as potential friends.