St. James' Episcopal Church
Jackson, Mississippi
May 6, 2001
4th Sunday of Easter

The "Christian Dilemma"
The Rev. William A. Kolb

Gospel: John 10:22-30

"So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, 'How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.' Jesus answered, 'I have told you, and you do not believe…because you do not belong to my sheep.'"

When I read the Gospel for today, and saw the all-too-familiar negative reference to "the Jews," I was reminded once again of the discomfort within me, one that may exist in many people who love this faith but who have trouble with some of its apparent teachings.

In Will Campbell's great book And Also with You, Gunnar Myrdahl is quoted
as calling race "The American Dilemma" - I would like to borrow from him and
call Judaism the "Christian dilemma."

As a Christian by faith who was born Jewish and raised Jewish, and as one
who considers himself to be Jewish to the bone (not only can we be both, all Christians ARE both; the New Testament makes no sense without the Truths of the Old Testament), I always have a problem with the apparent anti-Semitism of the New Testament (mostly the Gospel of John). We yearn so for the certainty offered by believing that Jesus is the "only way to the Father," that we are willing to imply in many ways that non-Christians are "less," if not doomed. The necessary faith and ambiguity required to believe that God the Father embraces all people is just too hard for many Christians. But William Loader of Murdock University and member of the Uniting Church in Australia said this year about this passage, "For God remains God. Jesus is not a second God. Ultimately everything about Jesus points away from himself to God." I truly believe that if Jesus were on this earth today and could speak to us in a human voice, we would find that He was a Universalist and would consider his co-religionist Jews very much a part of His Father's flock.

Let me go back aways. I was born into a Jewish family. I was raised a Jew but did not go to Temple very often. In Christianity we call it "C and E" (those who go to Church mainly at Christmas and Easter) and in Judaism I guess it might be called "High Holy Days Jews;" we went about twice a year.

When I was a boy, Adolf Hitler was making it more uncomfortable than usual
to be a high-visibility Jew in America, so many Jews were very much into
assimilated and low-profile lives. I went to Temple classes but they were on
Sunday mornings. My Uncles, even before the rise of the Third Reich, were
"confirmed" in their Chicago Temple, not Bar Mitzvahed.

As I grew to adulthood I knew one central thing about God: God is Love; God
is goodness. God loves all of us.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I was taken with a need for a deeper meaning
in life and got very much into the Bible and into its implications for everyday
living. Because my little children were practicing their mother's Episcopal faith, I found God there. When introduced to Paul's eternally true statement about the human condition found in Romans chapter 7, I found the wisdom of God that
I had sought and was baptized. The line of scripture that took me all the way to this pulpit was (paraphrasing),"I do the very thing I hate and I hate what I do;
who will save me from this body of death." I had known I had trouble living up
to my own ideals, and that I never could quite seem to be the person I believed I ought to be, but I didn't know until that time that I was not only not alone, it was a universal human condition! That bad news was very good news to me and I figured if that was the teaching of Christ through Paul, that was where I was going.
One thing led to another and six years later I was in seminary and it has
been an incredibly wonderful faith journey ever since.

So why am I uncomfortable with this morning's Gospel reading? Why do I, a
Christian by religious conviction and a Jew by cultural heritage, wince when
I hear certain excerpts from the Gospels, mainly from St. John?
I will tell you, I struggle with my faith. I struggle because I love the
Church and I yearn for the black-and-white certainty of knowing that Jesus
Christ is, as St. John says elsewhere in his Gospel, "the only way to the
Father."

But if in fact Jesus is the only way to the Father, then all human beings
other than believing Christians are cut off from God. Many will say, "Oh,
we don't believe that." But it is the obvious inference to be drawn from
what is called "one-way Christianity," which holds that the one way to
relate to God is through Christ. It is the theology that caused the head of
the largest Protestant denomination in America to declare not too many years
ago, "God does not hear the prayers of a Jew."

I could go into some detail about the role of the early Church in the
politics and the writing of this particular Gospel, and how the apparent
anti-Semitism in the New Testament has affected so many lives over the
millennia, including mine and those of many of my relatives and especially
of the Jews of Europe - not just during the Third Reich but for many
centuries before that -- but neither time nor the point of this sermon allow
that. Instead, I invite you to read a brief, insightful and informative
article that appeared in the New York Times this past Sunday [April 29,2001]. It was written by Gustav Niebuhr, a member of one of America's great families of Protestant theologians. In the article Niebuhr says, "The occasional eruption of statements blaming Jews for Jesus' crucifixion may reflect some below-the-radar uneasiness as the idealized vision of a Christian nation bumps up against the reality of religious pluralism - even though recent surveys show a widespread sense of tolerance among Americans.

"Part of the answer may lie in the difference between tolerating those with different beliefs and truly accepting another religion as legitimate."

Niebuhr goes on to discuss the advances that have occurred in the last 40 years in biblical scholarship and Jewish Christian relations, yet states that "four decades of such work and collaboration must still confront the deep roots in Western culture of the idea that Jews in general bear responsibility for the crucifixion." The problem, according to Rabbi Leon Klenicki, director of interreligious affairs at the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is that "those ideas are not incorporated yet in the teaching of local churches and seminaries." Though Americans as a whole are tolerant of other religions, Niebuhr says, their tolerance "is not grounded in any deep appreciation of the 'other,' whomever that other may be."

So why, on this beautiful day of God's making, as we gather for Eucharistic
worship as a parish family, do I talk about these things? Because I want to
bring home to our minds and hearts what my mother taught me so many years
ago: God loves you and me, without reservation, God loves each and every one
of us and makes no distinction between Jew and Christian, between Buddhist
and Muslim. Jesus preached the love of God for all humankind. All who
prize love over hatred, all who know that God created us and that we need
God if we are to be the fully-human beings God means us to be, all of us
know His voice. All of us are His sheep. All of us. Thanks be to God. God
is. God is Love. And we are living expressions of that love to each other.
To all.

Amen.

Copyright 2001 The Rev. William A. Kolb

Gospel: John 10:22-30
At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly." Jesus answered, "I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one." NRSV

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