|
 |
 |
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
[Back to index of January articles] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith The church has an 'attic' where it stores bits of the Christian tradition that have gone out of fashion. When modernization is called for, things deemed out of date can be spirited away. Soon, it is almost as if they had never been. Sometimes it is good to go up to the church's attic, dust things off and ponder why they disappeared. Maybe some are hidden treasures, and the excuses for their banishment suspect. My meditation on New Year's Day will take me back to the attic to which the original feast day was banished at the time of the liturgical reforms a generation ago. When I first made my own way into the Anglican Church as a boy, I remember being strangely impressed that, according to the calendar of the Book of Common Prayer, the New Year began frankly with the Feast of the Circumcision. But before too long, the old commemoration was stowed away, and the liturgical reformers had us begin the year with the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. Now I find myself speculating on the motives behind this change. It is often said that there is absolutely no record of Jesus' physical appearance, but that can be said only by those who have blocked from consciousness the Gospel account of his circumcision - the sacred act that cut into his body the indelible sign of God's eternal covenant with his chosen people. And so many people have forgotten that sign, that it seems even tragic that 'modern reasoning' had seen to its elimination from the church's year. 'Tragic' seems overstated, but then I spend every working day at the Holocaust Museum and have to stare in the face the horrific consequences of the church's historic minimizing - or worse, virtual denial - of Jesus' Jewishness. Generation after generation was brought up to believe that Jesus was completely separated from the Jewish people, that Judaism was an alien culture whose survival was an obstinate hold-out against the new revelation. I used to imagine I was completely innocent of this attitude. After all, even as a boy, I could see through the bias in the depictions of Jesus as a blond Anglo-Saxon type in the stained glass windows. I made an especially intense study of the 'historical Jesus' with scholars who rigorously emphasized Jesus as a prophet of his own people to his own people. My preaching was always grounded in the knowledge that Jesus was a Jew. But now I keep on discovering new levels of denial within myself. A few weeks ago, addressing a gathering at the Holocaust Museum, the Presbyterian theologian Christopher Leighton startled me by asserting that it is not enough for Christians to say that Jesus 'was' a Jew; Jesus is a Jew. It was the "is" that stung me into realizing that at some level I had been supposing all along that Jesus' identification with his own people in the covenant had somehow evaporated on the cross and in the grave. And that he was now a Universal Being and Presence, having shed through the resurrection the chrysalis of his Jewishness. Somehow, through a hidden chemical reaction in my soul, the universalizing message of Paul that in Christ there "was no longer Jew nor Greek" had had the effect of making Jesus' inherent and ineradicable Jewishness seem to disappear. I had never said to myself, "Jesus is a Jew" - let alone said in my prayers, "Jesus, you are a Jew." Those who had the uncanny privilege of those fleeting appearances of the Risen Christ said they saw a body still bearing the wounds of crucifixion. Just as surely it bore - we must say bears - the marks of the first wound that sealed him irrevocably with the sign of the covenant. And so perhaps there is a loss that can still be tragic, if we forget Jesus' circumcision. Many are highly reluctant to meditate in this way. The prudish will condemn as tasteless any allusion to Jesus' genitals that threatens their spiritualized and sexless religiosity. For others, the thought that Jesus' Jewishness is indelibly and eternally embodied in his circumcision doesn't 'work' at all from the feminist perspective. And for many, the effort even to imagine a Risen Christ as anything other than a metaphor for a vague 'spiritual presence' is too much. For them the Incarnation, whatever that means, only lasted 30 years. I often think of the 'neutering' tendencies in modern religion. I have to think a lot now of the anti-Semitic tendencies in our religion, and their tenacity. Sometimes I walk through the Holocaust Museum on my own, praying silently to the Christ, who, even as the Risen One, suffers until the end of time in and with all the suffering. And never more so than in solidarity with those who will always be his own people, who have borne such unbearable things - many of them at the hands of those who claimed to be Christ's own. [Back to index of January articles]
|
|
||||||||||
