This week’s Gospel reading prompts me to share a twist from my somewhat convoluted faith history.
Long ago and far away, in the mid-1990s, I came very close to adopting Judaism. For two years, I worshipped every Saturday at a Conservative synagogue called Rodfei Zedek on the south side of Chicago. Rodfei Zedek means ‘Pursuers of Righteousness’ in Hebrew. With the help of a rabbi there named Elliot Gertel, I enrolled in a conversion course along with a handful of other non-Jews with connections to the congregation.
My excursion into Judaism came about in the context of a past marriage and is not something I would have undertaken apart from that relationship. Prior to that marriage, it had taken me many years to choose to be baptized and acquire a Lutheran Christian identity after being raised unchurched by parents with a long forgotten, generically ‘Protestant’ ancestral heritage. My choice to be baptized at the age of 22 had been incubated by the academic study of religion as an undergraduate, and I was still at it, studying for a doctorate in History of Religions, when I found myself, unexpectedly, in an interfaith marriage. My partner at that time, who was himself a convert from Judaism and an ordained Lutheran minister when we married, experienced a crisis of faith when his mother died and returned to his Jewish roots.
As a student of religion, I was open to the idea that I should share in this transition with my partner. It seemed to me that I was not being asked to give up anything from Christianity that had no satisfying analogue in Jewish tradition. I anticipated that, for my initiation into Judaism, I would be immersed in the sacred bath known as the mikvah. This, I told myself, was the very prototype of Christian baptism. The discipline of keeping a kosher home appealed to me as not unlike the discipline of the Daily Offices or saying the rosary. Observing the Jewish dietary laws would be, I hoped, a way of walking with God in daily life. The Days of Awe – between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – would afford me ample scope for penitence and reconciliation with God and my neighbour. And who needs a Christmas tree when the menorah is such a splendid Tree of Life?
I had never been the sort of Christian who believes that Jesus is the only path to right relationship with God and the world. So, Rabbi Elliot’s teaching about the Jewish understanding of sin and repentance made sense to me – and continues to do so today. Rabbi Elliot explained that, in Judaism, there is no doctrine of original sin. Human beings are regarded as capable, on balance, of choosing good over evil, and God’s law – the Torah – is there to aid and guide us. When we fail, when we miss the mark and fall short of rectitude, repentance and renewed effort at doing better next time are sufficient means of grace. We are not said to be incapable of pleasing God, and God makes no impossible demand for absolute perfection.
Well, things happened, and I never did go to the mikvah. But this time of study and exploration of Judaism changed forever how I am a Christian and how I read the New Testament.
When I read today’s appointed text from Luke, for example, I cannot help but notice that John the Baptist is said to have preached ‘good news’ – a gospel message, that is to say – and that this gospel message was probably not about Jesus. Last week we read that John came ‘preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.’ This week, he is telling everyone that divine wrath is coming, but God will find them acceptable if they repent and do the right things: things like share their resources, deal fairly with one another, and press their advantages against no one. Just be decent, for pity’s sake; that’s all God asks of you.
As fiery and formidable as John seems to have been, this is simply a version of one of the many diverse teachings that composed the Judaism of his day – a teaching according to which there will be a final Day of Judgment when the good will be set apart for blessing and the wicked for perdition.
And John the Baptist’s gospel – his teachings – are remarkably similar to teachings ascribed elsewhere to Jesus. In Mark we read that, after John’s arrest, Jesus came ‘preaching the gospel of God’, and saying, ‘the Time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’ What gospel? Presumably, the gospel of repentance itself. Or, looking ahead in Luke to chapter 10, when the earnest lawyer asks Jesus, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ we are reminded of the crowds that had asked John ‘What then should we do?’ to avoid the wrath to come. The answer Jesus elicits from the lawyer – ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself’ – is the consummate way of saying what John had already said: treat others right and you will live. Just be decent, for pity’s sake; that’s all God asks of you.
Not surprisingly, these gospel teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus are also consonant with teachings ascribed to Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. According to one of the most revered collections of sayings attributed to him, the Prophet said:
‘Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should not hurt his neighbour, and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should serve his guest generously, and whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, should speak what is good or keep silent.‘
So why didn’t I convert to Judaism? If there is plenteous gospel in Judaism sufficient for right relationship with God and the world, why am I still a Christian?
There is a short answer: Listener, I divorced him. But, of course, such life decisions are never reducible to one cause alone. As the following incident illustrates, there were also theological reasons. I came to realize that, even if I went to the mikvah, I would always be a Christian at heart.
I was part of a small cohort of prospective converts who met regularly with Rabbi Elliot. One evening we were discussing the sabbath and the prayer that the female head of a Jewish household normally says after lighting the sabbath candles before sunset every Friday. I had been reading about the popular rabbinic tradition according to which this domestic ritual invites the Shekhinah, the presence of God, to take up its abode in the Jewish home – just as it was formerly said to dwell in the Temple at Jerusalem when all was well between God and his people.
Full of what I thought was a very creative insight about this, I said to the group: “It’s just like Christmas! God with us! God suddenly comes to his temple, but in Judaism people get to welcome the divine into their midst every week, not just once a year. How great is that?”
Well, this was probably an insensitive thing to say in a Jewish context on many counts. Given the history of Christian anti-semitism, few Jewish people are receptive to the idea that something in Christianity might illuminate or augment something in Judaism. And besides, should the younger sibling presume to teach the elder? Rabbi Elliot was swift to put plenty of clear blue water between the sabbath and Christmas, and thus between the Shekhinah and the doctrine of the Incarnation. Centuries of Jewish polemic against the Incarnation had taught him to dismiss it as akin to Homeric accounts of Zeus begetting children with mortal women. The Shekhinah was no such promiscuous thing, he wanted me to understand.
But what I chiefly came to understand is that the Incarnation is the beginning and the end of faith for me. I could sacrifice Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost but not Christmas.
One of the many things I learned as a prospective convert to Judaism was a song that children sing at Passover. It’s called ‘Dayenu’, which is Hebrew for ‘It would have been enough’. The song rehearses all of the things that God has done for the Jewish people and affirms, with each one, that it would have been enough. If God had brought them out of Egypt but had not given them the Torah, it would have been enough. If God had given them the Torah but had not led them into the Promised Land, it would have been enough, and so on. My Christian version would go, If God had been born into the world but had not been crucified, dead, and buried or raised again on the third day, it would have been enough.
The Jewish people, I am confident, can do very well without the Incarnation, but I cannot.
I don’t need Jesus to have been perfect in my place, or to have satisfied the terms of absolute justice on my behalf, or to have bled for me. But I do need Jesus to be Immanuel, God with us, ‘in all our dangers and necessities’ as we sang recently in one of our Compline anthems. Only the Incarnation is atonement enough for me – God’s atonement for the pain and suffering that is inseparable from, and the price to paid for, the joys and wonders of creation.
I need a God who did not flee from the wrath to come – the wrath of the world, my wrath – but bore it, knowing he could never rightly protest his innocence.
Amen, come Lord, Jesus!
Just be with us, for pity’s sake; that’s all we ask of you.
