One night a couple of years ago I spent a very interesting time with some of the members of the youth group at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. The session was part of their comparative religion course they all took as part of their religious education program, and the topic for the night was Christianity.
I gave a presentation on the basics of the Christian faith, with a focus that helped them to understand the teachings of Jesus in the context of the Jewish tradition. They were very engaged, and along the way they asked many very thoughtful questions, a lot of them based on an understanding of Christianity drawn from media reports about fundamentalist evangelicals.
Along the way, I explained to them how Christians accept all the books of the Hebrew Testament, and how we Catholics believe that God has never revoked the divine covenant with the Jewish people, and that we honor that covenant as we honor the Jewish people.
Then came the big question from one of the teens. He asked me, “If you accept all the Jewish scripture, and most of your teachings derive from Judaism, and you believe that God’s covenant with the Jewish people remains in effect, and if Jesus was Jewish, then why be Christian? Why not just be Jewish?”
What would you tell him? How would you answer that question? We’ll come back to this shortly, but let’s take a look at how today’s readings situate us in this context.
In our first reading, from Deuteronomy, Moses is exultant in his praise of the wonders God has done for the Chosen People. In many ways, it reminds me of Mary’s song of praise, a joyful recounting of God’s working in history and in our lives.
Moses exclaims,
Ask now of the days of old, before your time,
Ever since God created humanity upon the earth,
Ask from one end of the sky to the other:
Did anything so great ever happen before?
Was it ever heard of?
Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
Here is awe at the fact that the transcendent God, the King of the Universe, stoops to work wonders for this ragtag nomadic people. God has protected them, fed them, guided them, taught them. Along the way, the Jewish people developed the most highly developed theology of any people of the ancient world, for their god was not the god of a patch of desert, but of the universe.
Then enters Jesus. Jesus never contradicted Jewish theology, and in most ways he fit right into Jewish culture, except for that troublemaking streak. He had an unusual take on how we should view this loving God who had split seas, conquered armies, sent food from the sky and sent down plagues on the Egyptians. Jesus told us to call this awesome God Abba, which translates roughly as Daddy, or Da-da. In the second reading, we heard from the letter to the Romans this very word, which we are told gives us a freedom from slavery, an inheritance, a glorious legacy.
Paul wrote:
Brothers and sisters,
those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God.
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear,
But you received a spirit of adoption,
Through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!”
And here is the wonder of Christianity, that as marvelous as the works of God were before Jesus came, Jesus showed us that God always has surprises for humanity. How could Moses have guessed that as awesome, as loving, as marvelous as God is, that God would become one of us? And could Moses have thought so big as to imagine the world as we know it today, and that God desired a relationship will all people, nit only the people of Israel?
You see, this is what Trinity means, that God is a God of surprises, with three different ways of working in our lives, with an infinity of wonders in store for each of us here on earth as we live and for ever after that. God’s surprises never end.
Now let’s come back to that question from the teen at the Temple.
“If you accept all the Jewish scripture, and most of your teachings derive from Judaism, and you believe that God’s covenant with the Jewish people remains in effect, and if Jesus was Jewish, then why be Christian? Why not just be Jewish?”
I hope you’ve thought of a good answer. I’ll tell you what I told him, because it’s what Jesus commanded each of us in today’s gospel.
I told him that while the Jews remain faithful to their special covenant with God, it is our duty as Christians to spread the knowledge of the one God we received from the Jews to every part of the world, to share will every person the wondrous stories of the Hebrew Testament, to share with every person the love of this God, and to encourage them to let God change their lives.
The Jewish people remain faithful to their covenant with God. But ours is a different relationship with God, directed to all those in the world who are not Jewish, to proclaim the might deed s of God as narrated in the Jewish tradition, as demonstrated in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, and as they unfold in our own day under the driving force of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said,
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,
Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the ages.
And so he is, always offering further evidence that our God has surprised us in the past, and has many more surprises for us in the future.
