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Apologetics
It is December so we all know what that means! Christmas. But Christmas is only the last week of the month; most of December, of course, is Advent. Liturgically speaking, Advent gives us some of the most beautiful music and imagery. My all-time favorite liturgical hymn is “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which I could sing every day this season.
When we go to Mass during this preparatory season, we hear readings full of Old Testament prophesies about the coming of the Messiah, which fill us with great anticipation of Christ’s birth. Of all these prophesies, none is more iconic than Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.”
Because Advent focuses so much on the Jewish scripture’s anticipation of the Messiah, it brings into focus a question that every priest gets asked from time to time: Why did the Jewish people not accept Jesus as their long awaited Christ?
My first response to this common question is that many did, in fact, accept Jesus as the Messiah; otherwise Christianity would never have taken off. The very earliest followers of Jesus were mostly all Jews.
That being the case, we know that the vast majority of the Jewish people did in fact reject Jesus. But why? For we who are Christian (which is probably everyone reading this column unless my Jewish mother is reading it), we look at the Old Testament through a Christian lens. We have 2,000 years of Advents in which we as a Christian people see these prophesies as clearly pointing to Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jewish people do not share the same lens; they look at things obviously quite different than we do.
Jesus was radical in what he said and did, and although it is impossible for us to fully appreciate that, let me offer an analogy. Say you are sitting in the pew some Sunday morning and some guy stands up and proclaims himself to be greater than the Eucharist. That would be unsettling, to say the least. But then this guy gets to the tabernacle, takes out the consecrated hosts, and strews them all over the floor, and then asks people to abandon their Catholic faith to follow him.
Would he get many takers? I don’t think so.
It is not a stretch to say that what the Eucharist is to Catholics, the Temple was to the Jewish people. The Jews, for centuries, believed the Temple in Jerusalem to be the place of God’s unique presence, often referred to as “the foot stool” of God. In Matthew’s Gospel, referring to himself Jesus says, “There is something greater than the Temple here” (Matthew 12:6).
Even more shocking than that is when Jesus “cleansed” the Temple. So shocking was it, in fact, that it was recorded in all four Gospels. In John, it is recorded to have happened at the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, but in the other three Gospels, it is towards the end of his public ministry, leading scholars to believe that this bold action of Jesus was the final straw that led to his planned execution.
We can imagine this to have been seen by many of the Jews at the time as akin to the analogy of someone claiming to be greater than the Eucharist and then dumping a full ciborium of consecrated hosts on the floor. It was not taken well.
Really, if you think about it, it is more shocking than not that any Jews followed Jesus, because from their perspective he was making himself to be greater than the one thing and one place they took to be most sacred. And that is the point: It is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for the growth of the church in the opening decades.
Recently, I heard a portion of a conversation between a rabbi and a minister. The rabbi said something that made me take notice. He said, and I am paraphrasing here: “We Jews would be ready to accept Jesus as the Messiah, we are just not ready to accept him as the Son of God.”
So, as we make our way through Advent, listening to all the Old Testament prophesies about the coming of the Christ, it is important to understand that we look at these prophesies from a completely different perspective than what the Jewish people do. That is true for today as it was 2,000 years ago.
Father Richard Kunst is pastor of St. James and St. Elizabeth in Duluth. Reach him at [email protected].