| |
The Cross and The Holocaust | Regis Martin | From the Prologue to
Suffering of Love: Christ's Descent into the Hell of Human
Hopelessness
Print-friendly
version
With the promulgation of Nostra Aetate in October 1965, [1]
a significant milestone in Roman Catholic relations with
non-Christian religions was reached. As regards Judaism in
particular, a historic threshold had been crossed, over which
not a few timorous churchmen at the time had hesitated to
venture. Quite understandably, too, given so many centuries of impacted
silence marked by episodic outbreaks of
violence between the two traditions. "Since the foundation
of the Church," observed Hans Urs von Balthasar in his
book on Martin Buber published the year before the Council opened, "a
dialogue between Jew and Christian has always
been rare and invariably brief. Judaism shut itself off from
Christianity, and the Church turned its back on the people
which rejected it." [2] Can it be cause for wonder that, in
the circumstances, relations between the two should inspire
so little hope or confidence? [3]
But the Council Fathers intended to change that. In
the great work of renewal launched by the Second Vatican Council,
Mother Church, the whole People of God,
were to return to the roots and springs of their past; there
the encounter with Judaism was inescapable, rich, and full
of promise. Exactly ten years before Nostra Aetate was to
crystallize so much of what the Church had rediscovered
of her origins relating to Judaism, Father John Oesterreicher, in a
trailblazing first volume of Judeo-Christian
studies called The Bridge: A Yearbook of Judaeo-Christian
Studies, anticipated the aims of the conciliar declaration. [4]
Setting forth the journal's statement of purpose, he wrote: "A bridge
links two shores, spans an abyss, opens a road
for communication; it is thus an instrument of peace, as is
this bridge, its editors hope." In other words, both he and
the Council were pledged, in the terms set out by The
Bridge's editors, "to show the unity of God's design as it leads
from the Law to the Gospels--the unbroken economy of salvation. Never can the Church forget that the
Rock on which she stands is embedded in the revealed
wisdom of patriarchs and prophets and in the mighty events
which dominate the history of the children of Israel." [5]
The Second Vatican Council was intended to enshrine and
thereupon deepen and extend precisely this sort of understanding and
respect for the shared patrimony of Jew and
Christian. That the conciliar effort was one of unprecedented
ambition may be judged by the comment of Johannes
Cardinal Willebrands, who, writing some twenty years after
the event at which he had been a participant, recalls the
bracing and singular quality of the experience: "Never before
has a systematic, positive, comprehensive, careful and daring
presentation of Jews and Judaism been made in the Church
by a Pope or Council. This should not be lost sight of. " [6]
Clearly the Council's significance for Catholic-Jewish relations was
not lost on Pope John Paul II, whose extraordinary visit to the Major
Temple on the other side of the
Tiber in April of 1986 marked the first time ever that a
Roman pontiff had actually entered a Jewish synagogue. (Even
his saintly predecessor, John XXIII, had only stopped his
car one morning to bless the Jews as they were leaving the
synagogue.) Addressing this oldest community of the Diaspora the Pope
marveled at how Nostra Aetate succeeded in
midwifing "the decisive turning point" in the relationship
between Christians and Jews by professing the profound and
perduring bonds that exist between them. "On these convictions", the
Pope stated, "rest our present relations. On
the occasion of this visit to your synagogue, I wish to reaffirm and to
proclaim them in their perennial value. For this
is the meaning which is to be attributed to my visit to you,
the Jews of Rome." [7]
It is worth inquiring, certainly, into the nature of those
convictions that drew the Bishop of Rome across the Tiber
and into a Jewish synagogue where, to recall the headline
in L'Osservatore Romano, he gave thanks to God for the
rediscovery of a common fraternal love. What does that love
mean? At the very least, it implies an affinity between two
peoples on the strength of which the old deicide charge
cannot apply; thank God, that ancient canard of a specific
Jewish complicity in the Crucifixion was finally laid to rest
at the Council. While conceding that there were Jewish
authorities who conspired against Jesus and sought therefore to arouse
the passions of the mob so as to pressure
Pilate into killing him, the text of Nostra Aetate is perfectly
plainspoken in reminding us that "neither all Jews indiscriminately at
that time, nor Jews today, can be charged
with the crimes committed during his passion."
If we must speak plainly here, and here above all for the
conversation with Judaism is charged with an eternal meaning, it was
never Judaism that drove Christ to the Cross but
human sin and God's answering love. "It is not Israel who
crucified Jesus", writes Jean Daniélou; "it is the infidelity
of Israel. And consequently, what caused the death of Jesus
is, in the final analysis, sin. But then it is no longer Israel
alone who bears the responsibility for the death of Jesus;
rather it is the 'iniquity of the world' that it had taken upon
itself. Before the cross of Jesus, we too must strike our breast
like the centurion." [8] Here we are asked to accept an affinity with
Judaism in which there can be no question of arrogant superiority but
rather that complete and perfect solidarity
in sin which Christ came and suffered to remove. "At this
depth of mystery," concludes Daniélou, "all men are equal
at the foot of the cross, just as all are equal in the salvation
that comes through the cross." [9]
Under the circumstances, Christians are solemnly enjoined
not to speak of the Jews as an accursed or rejected race, as
if Holy Scripture had mandated one to do so. In fact, to so
vilify the Jews amounts to an act of dishonor against Almighty
God himself, for whom the Children of the Covenant are
to remain forever a sacrament of his fidelity; the deepest,
most abiding pledge that God's promised word, once given,
will never be withdrawn. Here the conciliar text cites the
Apostle Paul, kinsman by race to this people for whom he
would gladly have suffered-yes, even unto final separation
from Christ!--were the Father only to ask it. Paul's insistence on the
truth of Israel's continuing proximity to God
is unambiguous. It was God, he said, who called Israel to
be his own, and "the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable" (Rom
11:29). [10] In other words, if God chose the
Jews, a scandalous choice in its particularity of this people
and not another, why would he, having thus chosen, ever
revoke his word, the clearest and dearest sign of his eternal
solicitude toward this People of the Promise?
The glory of Israel is neither ethnic nor racial but fundamentally
religious: for two millennia all the revelations of
God were entrusted to it. Can such a thing be said of any
other people in the history of the world? And not just the
words of God were handed over to Israel; the unheard-of
enfleshment of God's very Word took place within Israel,
within the womb of the Jewish maiden Mary. No other
people can say that from the loins of its very life there once
sprang into human being the Eternal Word and Son of the
Father. "In this alone", says Daniélou,
there is a greatness that staggers our imagination and reason.
All other earthly greatness is passing. The great empires of
antiquity have sunk into oblivion; their monuments--attempts to defy
time--are merely tombstones of bygone civilizations. The great powers of
today will decline in their turn,
but Jesus Christ will live eternally and will be eternally Jewish by
race, thereby conferring a unique, eternal privilege on
Israel.'' [11]
But, it is sometimes asked, are there not then two Peoples
of God? No, there is only the one Covenant; and Catholic
Christianity, thanks to the blood of Jesus Christ, has been
mercifully grafted onto its salvific trunk. "If the dough offered
as first fruits is holy," announced Saint Paul in a sublime
passage touching on this mystery lying at the heart of things,
"so is the whole lump; and if the root is holy, so are the
branches" (Rom 11:16). It cannot be well, therefore, for a
mere wild shoot, so engrafted, to go about boasting of its
good fortune at the expense of branches broken away; but
if you must boast, adds Paul, "remember it is not you that
support the root, but the root that supports you" (Rom
11:18). [12] Abraham, in other words, is to be revered as our
common father in faith; it is he who, humanly speaking,
remains the source of that immense spiritual patrimony which
joins our two destinies. How well the Holy Father traced
this point of origin on the evening of his fraternal visit.
"The Church of Christ", he told the Jewish community,
"discovers her own 'bond' with Judaism by 'searching into
her own mystery' [cf. Nostra Aetate]. The Jewish religion is
not 'extrinsic' to us, but in a certain way is 'intrinsic' to
our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a rela-
tionship which we do not have with any other religion.
You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way,
it could be said that you are our elder brothers." [13]
This is why, at the profoundest level, the sin of anti-Semitism stands
condemned; why it is not lawful for anyone, especially not for the
Christian, to visit contempt upon the Jew, or to countenance the least
persecution by others
against him. Spiritually we are all Semites! [14] This is why,
more-over, that whatever sadly divides us--two disparate communities,
nevertheless rooted in a common revelational
source--the designs of our mutual Father in heaven cannot
suffer lasting defeat." "For if their rejection means the
reconciliation of the world," to quote those infinitely mysterious words
of Saint Paul, "what will their acceptance mean
but life from the dead?" (Rom 11:15). [16]
Notwithstanding all this, there exist between Abraham and
Nostra Aetate two horizon-shattering events that, for many,
would thwart even the superintending providence of Almighty
God. These are the Cross and the Holocaust. [17] How, in the
teeth of all the seemingly intractable differences of theology
and history presently confounding our two communities,
might these two events be joined in some creative and daring way, the
nexus of which could well empower Jew and
Christian alike to move as kindred souls in a common school
of suffering? "Ultimately," writes von Balthasar of the mystery of
Israel and Church, "they are two chambers of the one
heart which beats, which indeed beats on the cross of the
world, where the dividing wall was broken down and all hate
was overcome in the flesh of the suffering Christ, so that in
his person, the two are made one, in the single new man who
is our peace (see Eph 2:14-15)." [18]
ENDNOTES:
[1] For the full text of the conciliar statement see Austin Flannery,
OP., general editor, Vatican II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar
Documents (Northport, N.Y: Costello Publishing, 1981), pp. 738-42.
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Martin Buber and Christianity: A
Dialogue between Israel and the Church (New York: Macmillan, 1961),
p. 12.
[3] And yet, von Balthasar reminds us, notwithstanding all the
centuries of silence during which these two have lived entirely apart,
"without ever coming face to face or trying to see what sort of
person the other might be," their very existence "involves them in a
conversation which it is not in their power to terminate" (ibid., p.
7).
If the conversation to which, inescapably, Jew and Christian are
joined,
is to bear fruit that will last, "its range must therefore be such as
to
reckon with heaven and earth, and so it will always hark back to the
conversation held on the Mountain of the Transfiguration, when the
Son of Man conversed with Moses and Elijah" (ibid.). How could
the Jewish-Christian dialogue, cast at such a sublime level, not then
succeed in resolving our mutual difficulties?
[4] John M. Oesterreicher, ed., The Bridge: A Yearbook of
Judaeo-Christian Studies, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955).
[5] See "A Statement of Purpose", in ibid., p. 9.
[6] Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, "Christians and Jews: A New
Vision", in Vatican II: By Those Who Were There, ed. Alberic
Stacpoole
(London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), p. 222.
[7] "Let Us Thank God for the Rediscovery of Our Fraternal Love",
headline in L'Osservatore Romano, April 21, 1986, pp. 6-7.
[8] Jean Daniélou, S.J., Dialogue with Israel (Baltimore-Dublin:
Helicon
Press, 1968), p. 8. See also Saint Augustine Enarratio in Psalm
65, 5 (PL
36:790-91), quoted in "The Mysterious Destinies of Israel", The
Bridge
(1956), 2:61. Writes Augustine, "My brethren ... we beg you to be
on your guard: you who are in the Church, do not insult those who
are not; rather pray that they may be in it. 'For God is able to graft
them
back' [Rom 11:23]. It is of the Jews that the Apostle said this, and so
it
happened to them. The Lord rose and many believed. They did not
know Him when they crucified Him. But later they believed in Him,
and that great offense was forgiven to the homicides. I do not
say deicides, 'for had they known it, they would not have
crucified the Lord of glory' [1 Cor 2:8]. The slaying of an innocent was
forgiven them,
and the blood they had shed while out of their minds they later drank
by grace. Say then to God: 'How tremendous are your deeds!' [Ps 66:3]."
[9] Daniélou, Dialogue with Israel, p. 8. For a striking
confirmation of the above, see Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger's Dare to
Believe: Addresses, Sermons, Interviews--1981 to 1984 (Boston: St.
Paul Publications, 1986), pp. 3 3-94. Himself born and raised a Jew,
Lustiger reflects deeply upon this mystery of shared iniquity in which
all men,
from Pilate to the apostles to the ordinary people, remain silent:
"Everybody was compromised, including the disciples who were afraid and
ran away. Such is the universal dimension of the cross of Christ. The
Passion of Christ serves as an instrument of revelation of the totality
of evil which exists in the world and in each one of us" (p. 87).
[10] Romans 9-11 remains as profound and luminous a presentation of
God's word as any three chapters of Sacred Scripture. Von
Balthasar, in his book on Buber, speaks of "the dazzling eschatological
light that falls on Israel from the eleventh chapter of the Epistle
to the Romans" (Martin Buber, p. 12). A light, however, "which
had
hardly been mirrored in the works of Origen before it was once
again obscured", and no longer noticed at all. Perhaps the, as yet,
unharvested hope of the Council will restore something of that light
and so illumine the dialogue with its bright promise.
[11] Daniélou, Dialogue with Israel, p. 7. "The greatest saints
of Christianity", he continues, "are Jewish: above all, the Virgin Mary;
daughter of David and mother of God; John the Baptist, the precursor;
Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus and protector of the Church;
Peter, Paul and all the apostles."
[12] "The common link between the Jewish and the Christian
understanding of faith reveals the following law: There can be no
Christianity which is not a priori and inwardly, related in a deeply
sympathetic manner to the 'holy tree,' as the branch is related to the
root. Christianity is only the fullness if it is the fulfillment of
something" (von Balthasar, Martin Buber, p. 23).
He puts it in its strongest possible form on pp. 108-9, where he
asserts the following: "Jewish-Christian history is, at any rate from a
Christian point of view, an indivisible unity. There is no greater
unity
in the world, according to God's plan, than that between the Old
and New Covenant, except the unity of Jesus Christ himself who
embraces the unity of the two covenants in his own unity ....
Christianity when separated from the Old Covenant is always in danger of
degenerating into Gnosticism, Marcionism or some form of Hitlerism."
[13] See, again, L'Osservatore Romano, April 21, 1986.
[14] Pope Pius XI, speaking to Belgian pilgrims, Sept. 6, 1938.
[15] Von Balthasar in his study of Buber provides an apt illustration
of the point: "In Two Forms of Faith M. Buber ... carried his
lonely dialogue up to the point at which, in his opinion at least, the
only intelligible attitude was silence. His final conclusion was that
the two forms of faith are irreconcilable. That judgment is acceptable
in the world, but it is not one that invokes the grace of God"
(Martin Buber, p. 8, emphasis mine).
[16] For a superbly rich exegesis of the above, see von Balthasar's
Church and World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 166-76.
His extraction of Paul's three theses from Romans 9-11 is particularly
helpful: "First: Israel's obduracy enters incontestably into God's plan
of salvation in its historical working characterized by election and
reprobation .... Second: The reprobation of Israel serves
to the election of the Gentiles who, as the elect, are the spiritual
Israel and have their lasting roots fixed in the old Israel .... Third:
Israel's rejection, as a factor of salvation history, points to an
eschatological salvation common to it and the Church, in which rejection
and election are brought into equilibrium."
[17] Throughout the book the use of the term Holocaust will
refer
to the historical event of Nazi Germany's attempted destruction of
European Jewry between the years 1939 and 1945. Millions of Jews
were targeted for extermination merely because of one man's murderous
contempt for them. Concerning the specificity of this crime, that Jews
perished precisely as Jews, it is important that it be remembered in all
its ghastly particularity. In other words, while any number of things
about the Holocaust remind us of other horrors, and
men of the twentieth century have supped full on the flesh of their
brothers, this particular horror is entitled to its own distinctive
mark
of atrocious human behavior. In fact, it is its very shocking
singularity that provides the setting for the argument of this book.
Nevertheless, for all its uniqueness and unrepeatability, the Holocaust
is
not, alas, so inclusive an event or instance of human iniquity that
there can remain nothing left of man's inhumanity for us to lament;
nothing of that iniquity the cumulative impact of which in our
time threatens to undermine belief in the saving providence of
Almighty God. Yes, the Holocaust remains (in my judgment certainly)
the salient symbol and expression of demonic destructiveness
in our time; yet it plainly fails to exhaust all the possibilities of
human sin and suffering that continue to bedevil the human condition.
Therefore, while the march of my argument particularly focuses
upon the Holocaust as the chief symptom and example of that
which needs most deeply to be redeemed, because other atrocities
of our time as well evince that same need for healing grace that
Christ came to confer, they too will fall within the ambit of the
book.
[18] Von Balthasar, Church and World, p. 176. And not only Jew
and Christian. Is not membership in the school of human suffering
expansive enough to embrace every category of pain, including even
those expressions of cosmic futility and despair that characterize much
of twentieth-century literature? One thinks, for instance, of that
doomed poet who fell in the First World War, Wilfred Owen, who
left lines of such hopeless and bitter lacerating intensity that they
amount to a kind of anthem of existential anguish and despair.
"Futility" is a typical example of the genre, and the bitter question
posed at the end absolutely cries out for an answer, one that-so the
argument of the book will advance-only Christ in his descent can give.
"Move him into the sun . . .", it begins,
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,--
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full nerved--still warm-too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
(The Norton Anthology of Poetry [New York: W. W Norton and
Company, 1970], p. 1037).
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles, Excerpts, and Interviews:
The Question of Suffering, the Response of the Cross | Joseph Cardinal
Ratzinger
The Cross--For Us | Hans Urs von Balthasar
The Jews and the Second Coming | Roy H. Schoeman
Judaism Fulfilled | An interview with Roy H. Schoeman
Jews Find the Sweetness of Christ | Roy Schoeman
Benedict the Brusque? On Fr. Clooney's Vision of interreligious
Dialogue | Carl E. Olson
Regis Martin is a Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, and the author of several books on
spirituality and theology. His other works include The
Last Things, Garlands Of Grace, and
Flannery O'Connor: Unmasking The Devil.
If you'd like to receive the FREE IgnatiusInsight.com
e-letter (about every 1 to 2 weeks), which includes regular updates
about IgnatiusInsight.com articles, reviews, excerpts, and author appearances,
please click here to sign-up today!
| | | |