This Sunday is our 4th and last Sunday of Advent. Monday is also the beginning of Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights marking the re-dedication of the Temple after its desecration by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Some of you may remember the wonderful evening we had a few years ago (everything these days is dated pre- or post-COVID), with Rabbi Silberman and me, marking Christian and Jewish festivals of lights (the Hanukkiah, the 9-branch candlestick) the Christian 4-candle Advent wreath). It was a joyous time of fellowship.
It seems a good time for us to recall what the birth of Jesus means for us and what messianic expectation in general meant for Jewish hopes. It is a good time to remember what our Scriptures tell us about these events. For Catholics, the birth of Jesus is seen as the fulfillment of the promise made to the Jewish people through the prophets. Isaiah tells us that the birth of a young woman’s child would be the mark of survival for the besieged population of Jerusalem. Matthew’s Gospel directly equates this promise and its fulfillment with the conception and birth of Jesus. So first and foremost, the promise of a Messiah is linked to the hopes of Israel. Whether people then looked at Jesus or John the Baptist or anyone else as the fulfillment, they looked because of this hope. It is only subsequently that we Gentiles (goyim) are incorporated into this hope: we are the wild shoots grafted onto the Vine of Israel, as St Paul reminds us (Romans 11:17b, 24). We are secondary beneficiaries of the promise of God to Abraham and his descendants forever. In our days, this relationship is being called, not only into question, but being vulgarly defied. In our days we now have all kinds of media “personalities” who are happy to deny the Holocaust, to praise Hitler, to consort with professed neo-Nazis. In the Christian churches this CANNOT be tolerated—it must be condemned. After all, St Paul assures us (again, Romans 11, this time verse 29): “The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” Never forget this, please. I say all this not only because of the spate of hatred and venality I have already observed in our “celebrities,” but because the Mobile Christian-Jewish Dialogue has signed on to a statement condemning this tendency. I affirm this, being a member of the Board of the Dialogue. The “National Reckoning of the Soul” (from the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations) fears “…the normalization of antisemitism in American discourse…” and asks that “…all churches redouble their efforts to denounce antisemitism publicly as antithetical to the very essence of Christianity itself.” Then, 3 questions are offered for our reflection. I will leave #3 to consideration when we arrive at Holy Week, but these 2 are sufficient for us right now: Do we think of Jesus as if he were an outsider to Judaism, or as a Jew devoted to Torah and its proper interpretation? Do we contrast the teachings of Jesus with the Old Testament as if his own spirituality was not inspired by the sacred texts? I come back to the beginning of this essay—if Jesus’ birth is seen by Christians as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, what should that tell us about our relationship to the Chosen People, then and today? We share the same hope; we may disagree on its fulfillment, but we share the same hope—restoration of all things in the Messianic Kingdom. They are our “elder brothers/sisters” in faith (as Pope St John Paul II often said). Let’s live that way.