Jesus the Jew

The Russian painter Marc Chagall -- a Jew -- painted this image called The White Crucifixion. This Jesus is clearly Jewish, and he is so in the midst of the suffering of his people, which includes persecution and death at the hands of those who claim to be his followers. For nearly twenty centuries too many Christians have misunderstood the Jewishness of Jesus.

There is an article in a recent issue of the Christian Century titled Misusing Jesus: How the Church divorces Jesus from Judaism. http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=2761 It reminds me of what I already know, that Jesus never renounced the faith of his birth and neither should those of us who call ourselves Christians. In the article Amy-Jill Levine says:

This divorcing of Jesus from Judaism does a disservice to each textually, theologically, historically and ethically. First, the separation severs the church's connections to the scriptures of Israel—what it calls the Old Testament. Because Jesus and his earliest followers were all Jews, they held the Torah and the prophets sacred, prayed the Psalms, and celebrated the bravery of Esther and the fidelity of Ruth. To understand Jesus, one must have familiarity with the scriptures that shaped him (or, as a few of my students will insist, that he wrote).

Second, the insistence on Jesus' Jewish identity reinforces the belief that he was fully human, anchored in historical time and place. This connection is known as the "scandal of particularity": not only does the church proclaim that the divine took on human form, it also proclaims that it took on this form in a particular setting among a particular people. The church claims that divinity took on human flesh—was "incarnated"—in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore the time and the place matter.

It is a simple truth that I don't have to misrepresent Jesus or feel superior to Judiasm in order to be a faithful Christian.