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CELEBRATING OUR JEWISH “ROOT”
“By faith You justified the Forefathers, when through them You betrothed Yourself beforehand to the Church of the Gentiles. The saints boast in glory, that from their seed there is a glorious fruit: she who bore You without seed. By their prayers, O Christ God, save our souls.” (Troparion, Sunday of the Forefathers)
On the second-to-last Sunday before Christmas, our church celebrates the Jewish “forefathers” of the Theotokos, who rightfully “boast in glory” that she came “from their seed.” But this makes me think about Romans 11, where St. Paul talks about a wrong kind of boasting on the part of some Gentile Christians, who boasted “against” the non-believing Jews in their midst.
St. Paul warns the Gentile Christians not to boast or feel superior to those Jewish people who rejected Christ, because the latter remain the “root” and the original “branches” that support the new Tree of Life, the incarnate Son of God, while Gentiles were “grafted in” from the “wild” later, after the “Tree” had been well-established: “And if some of the branches were broken off,” St. Paul writes to these Gentiles, “and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you.” (Rom 11: 17-18) In this chapter, St. Paul also expresses his faith that “all Israel will be saved” in the end, because “they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.” (Rom 11: 26,28)
As we pray for the intercessions of the Jewish ancestors of our Jewish Lord this season, I take pause and say, “Thank you, Jewish people!” for being our root. It’s not an easy thing to be, as we can see throughout history and today, when many of us continue somehow to resent you for it. Holy Forefathers, pray to God for the Jewish people and for all of us this season, that we remember we are all “beloved”!
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I very much appreciate Sister Vassa's recognition of the "Jewish people" and our thankfulness to them for being the root of our Christian Faith. As the Lord declared: "Salvation is from the Jews." (Jn. 4:22) Perhaps we may understand the anguish of the Apostle Paul who so hoped and prayed for the conversion of Israel in his profound conviction that Jesus, indeed, is the Messiah of Israel. But that has nothing to do with the irrationality of "Christian" antisemitism - possibly the greatest historical sin of Christianity through the centuries. As profound as our disagreement may be about the "identity" of Jesus of Nazareth with our Jewish friends, that disagreement must remain within the bounds of sharing a common root and of respect and care for the "other," especially of those who have born the burden of persecution for their faith.
As the Roman Catholic thinker Leon Bloy expressed it: "Antisemitism ... is the most horrible slap in the face suffered in the ever continuing Passion of our Lord. It is the most stinging and most unpardonable because He suffers it on His Mother's Face and at the hands of Christians."
