'Forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob': a proposal for the Third Good Friday collect
And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David - Matthew 21:9.
After two days was the feast of the passover, and of the unleavened bread - Mark 14:1.
And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, This Is The King Of The Jews - Luke 23:38.
And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments, and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment - Luke 23:56.
There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews' preparation day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand - John 19:42.
In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre - Matthew 28:1.
... that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me - Luke 24:44.
The Church's proclamation of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection during Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter Day is grounded in the story of Israel. Again and again, the Gospel readings for these days set before us how the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are inextricably bound up with the covenant people who worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Apart from Israel, the Lord's Passion and Resurrection cannot be understood.
It is against this background that we should understand the historic practice of the Church's solemn prayer on Good Friday embracing the Jewish people. This practice has, of course, often taken forms that fall very far short of a recognition of the "good olive tree" onto which the Church of the Gentiles has been "grafted contrary to nature" (Romans 11:24). The third 1662 collect for Good Friday is certainly an example of this, with no recognition of the continued status of Israel celebrated by the Apostle:
to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.
While there are various revisions of the 1662 collect - with that in Ireland 1926 being the best and most open to a reading which coheres with the point made above - they too have difficulties, capable of being read in ways which foster anti-Semitism.
At the same time, however, the practice preferred in many contemporary Anglican liturgies - of omitting a Good Friday collect referring to the Jewish people, as is the case in Ireland 2004 - also has a significant difficulty. Despite the Gospel readings for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter Day repeatedly demonstrating how the account of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection is grounded in the story and faith of Israel, this practice means that the Jewish people and their particular vocation are not prayed for on the most solemn day of the Christian Year in the Prayer Book liturgy.
An alternative approach is offered by a prayer written by two priests in the Anglican Church of Canada, one the Chair of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, and with the support of the Society:
O GOD, who didst choose Israel to be thine inheritance: have mercy upon us and
forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob; the arrogance of
our hearts and minds hath deceived us, and shame hath covered our face. Take away
all pride and prejudice in us, and grant that we, together with the people whom thou
didst first make thine own, may attain to the fulness of redemption which thou hast
promised; to the honour and glory of thy most holy Name. Amen.
This collect - 'For reconciliation with the Jews' (FRJ) - was written to replace a prayer in Canada's BCP 1962 'For the conversation of the Jews'. As one of the authors stated of its characteristics:
this prayer is in keeping with the form and tradition of the Prayer Book ... it is necessary in its penitential post-supersessionist attitude toward the Jewish people ... it is biblically rooted.
The Biblical rationale for the reference to "our brother Jacob" is explained:
FRJ attempts to locate this fraught history within the particular biblical figure of Jacob and Esau – a figure mysteriously invoked by Paul in Romans 9:10- 13, near the beginning of his three chapters of knotty and anguished reflections on the covenant, election, Israel, the Gentiles and God’s providential plan of salvation. But whereas Paul quotes from Malachi 1:2, FRJ uses words taken directly from the Book of the Prophet Obadiah, verses 3 and 10. In this, the shortest book of the Old Testament/Tanakh, Obadiah pronounces God’s judgment on the nation of Edom for siding with the Babylonians during the siege of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. As the descendants of Esau, the neighbouring Edomites should have assisted their brother Jacob, but instead took advantage of his destruction. In the day of Jacob’s calamity, Edom stood aloof, gloated, looted his brother’s wealth, and handed over his survivors (Ob. 11-14). This same dynamic has played out any number of times in the history of Church’s relationship with the Jews and the parallels with the Shoah are particularly striking.
The echoes of the Kaddish - the Jewish prayer for mourners - in this collect also has a particular resonance:
the Church laments its sin of supersessionism and mourns its many Jewish victims; therefore it seems appropriate that our prayer be in harmony with the mourning of ‘our brother Jacob.’
While this collect was not written for Good Friday, it would be an eminently appropriate replacement for the 1662 text and its variants. Mindful of how the 'Christ killers' slander has been vilely used across the centuries, of how the evil of the blood libel has been associated with the Passover, there is a need for the Church on Good Friday to confess, before the Cross of Jesus of Nazareth, its participation in the sin of anti-Semitism. And it is on Good Friday that the Church should pray for reconciliation with the Jewish people without whom the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord cannot be understood or proclaimed.
In God's Unfailing Word: Theological and Practical Perspectives on Christian-Jewish Relations (2019), the Church of England's Faith and Order Commission outlined key principles for Christian-Jewish relations:
The Christian–Jewish relationship is a gift of God to the Church, which is to be received with care, respect and gratitude, so that we may learn more fully about God’s purposes for us and all the world ...
Christians have been guilty of promoting and fostering negative stereotypes of Jewish people that have contributed to grave suffering and injustice. They therefore have a duty to be alert to the continuation of such stereotyping and to resist it ...
With regard to both resisting stereotyping and thinking theologically, Christians have a responsibility to ensure that whatever they may say about Judaism is informed by continuing dialogue with Jewish people.
In light of these principles, God's Unfailing Word asks of the third Good Friday collect, "does it matter that [it] remains part of ... authorized worship?". The answer must surely be 'yes' because, as the report itself states, such texts "can perpetuate a strain of Christian anti-Semitism".
What might then be done? Perhaps, as was seen in Canada, the Prayer Book Society could take a lead on this matter. While the status of 1662 in the Church of England means that official revision is well nigh impossible (for which we have cause to be grateful), the Prayer Book Society could recognise the inappropriate nature of the third Good Friday collect and propose the Canadian collect 'For Reconciliation with the Jews' for use as an alternative. This would be a meaningful response to the deeply disturbing signs of an increase in anti-Semitism, to the insights of God's Unfailing Word, and to the theological rationale for the Canadian collect. It would also show a serious commitment to securing the richly Christocentric Prayer Book provision for Holy Week and Good Friday, when there will be many deeply worried by the third Good Friday collect.
While simply advising that use of the third Good Friday should be discontinued would also have merit, it would fail to recognise the case for praying for reconciliation with the Jewish people as the Church commemorates the Lord's Passion. It would also fail to model how the best traditions of the Prayer Book could be marshalled to respond to an issue that continues to cast a shadow over Jewish people and Jewish-Christian relations. Those of us who cherish the Prayer Book's Holy Week provision, with its deep, challenging and unrelenting focus on the Cross of the Lord, would be encouraged in our observance and devotion, knowing that a particular weakness in that provision had been meaningfully and wisely addressed.
(The picture is of the sculpture 'Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time', at the Institute for Catholic–Jewish Relations at St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. It is used on the front cover of God's Unfailing Word, and is therein described as "reimagin[ing] the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as one of mutual affection and interdependence".)
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DeleteInteresting reflections.
ReplyDeleteI do believe the theological antisemitism of our fathers, which resulted in blood-libel conspiracies, horrific pogroms, ghettoization and other enormities, is the greatest of our sins as a people. Jewish Christians, such as Roy Schoeman, point out that though different in kind from the scientific racism of the 19th C, which led to the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the Church's theological antisemitism did, to her shame, lay the ground work for the Jewish Holocaust. Every effort, therefore, should be made to acknowledge and confess our historic failure to love the Jews as God loves them, our incalcuable debt to Israel as the priestly nation whom God chose as the agent through which he would spread his saving health unto the nations, and, finally, to fulfill the Law in the exercise of loving kindness towards them, especially in opposing the ugly resurgence of antisemitism.
And yet we must not fail the Jewish people once again by forfeiting our vocation to preach the Gospel to them as we would to every other nation. If there is no reconciliation with the Father apart from his incarnate Son, and if salvation is convertible with incorporation through the gifts and mens of faith and holy baptism into his Jewish and male humanity in hypostatic union with the Divine nature, then there is no salvation outside the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, "which is his Body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.": Totus Christus; Christ and his members: Jews and Gentiles, males and females, slaves and freemen, adulta and children; a redeemed humanity composed in the union of Jew and Gentile as one new man in Christ.
And, apart from distorted construals of supercessionism, which miss Paul's teaching that despite having been cut off from the olive tree for denying her own Messiah, unbelieving Israel retains her gifts and callings and is beloved of God for the sake of the patriarchs, we must confess that Christ's Body and Bride is indeed the fulfillment and glory of OT Israel; for she has come into the greater glory of the New Covenant established in the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of God the Son, the Jewish Messiah, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost.
I belabor this not because I think the Canadian collect insufficient; but the perennial error of over-correction can be found among some Christians in the idea of "Dual Covenants", which connotes two peoples, Israel and the Church, and two covenants by which each respectively attains reconciliation with God and the hope of beatitude in the life to come. Mr. Schoeman, who is himself a devout Jewish Roman Catholic and liturgical traditionalist, has critiqued this tendency among his fellow RC churchmen. In so far as Evangelical Protestants actaully seek to convert Jewish people, he gives them very high marks. He is absolutely right in that.
Many thanks for your extensive comment and taking time to engage with the post.
DeleteWhile I agree that Christian anti-Semitism (over centuries) was of a different form to the scientific racism of National Socialism, there can be no doubt that the dark traditions of Christian anti-Semitism provided a source of support for the Holocaust, particularly in eastern Europe.
When it comes to the current status of the Jewish people, I agree with Robert Jenson: "God, in the time between the times and when there is no temple, wants a community that studies and obeys the Torah as Judaism does". Likewise, Richard Neuhaus has stressed the eschatological nature of the final reconciliation between the Jewish people and the Christian Church: "Along the way to that fulfillment, Christians and Jews will disagree about whether we can name the name of the Lamb". Neither Jenson nor Neuhaus, of course, were theological liberals.
Another significant non-liberal voice was Ellen T. Charry's essay on the Baltimore Declaration, in which she stated that the Church had to recognise that "There will always be Jews who are offended by the name of Jesus". In responding to this mystery, she said, the Church must heed Paul's eschatological reference in Romans 11:25-26.
There is, then, another Scripturally serious approach to Jewish-Christian relations, not dependent on the principles of theological liberalism. It is not a 'Dual Covenant' theology, for there is both a common root for Jews and Christians ("Abraham ... for he is the father of all of us"); the Gentiles having been grafted on to the vine of Israel; the Messiah being the Son of David, foretold by the prophets; it still being the case that to Israel "belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises"; and the Church knowing that all Israel will be saved at the end of the ages.
Thanks for your response.
ReplyDeleteThe recognition that God desires the Jewish people to carry on in the study and obedience of Torah is as old as Augustine. (Paul himself may hint at this when he suggests that Israel hears the Gospel whenever the Hebrew Scriptures are read in the Synagogue.)
Jenson and Neuhaus are fundamentally correct in their intuitions. But I would wish to temper them a bit with these suggestions:
1) While we may indeed look forward to an eschatological reconciliation between the Jewish people and the Church, this will be a denouement of what Christ has already accomplished: the formation of a new humanity in the union of Jew and Greek in his body; a prolepsis of the age to come, which is of the very nature of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church (we must ever be on guard against the error that the Church is a Gentile thing). Until then we must faithfully proclaim the Gospel to unreconciled Jews and Greeks; we must bid them to "come into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise" within the true eschatological temple that is the mystical body of Christ.
2) Jews and Christians will indeed argue about naming the Name of the Lamb. Let them carry it out in the freedom of vigorous debate leavened with charity. But while Judaism provides for the salvation of a virtuous Gentile, we Christians are constrained by the narrowness of the Gospel, which demands nothing less than the conversion of the nations by preaching and baptism. That's one hell of a burden for a people to shoulder. It takes a lot of chutzpah to proclaim a message which boils down to "you must belong to Christ with the rest of us Christians. Turn to him, repent of your sins and be baptized into his death and resurrection lest you perish eternally." (This is especially true relative to past Christian antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust.) But difficulties, especially when they are of our own making, are no excuse for dereliction in the eyes of heaven.
N.B. Jenson's warm friendship with Michael Novak, the noted Jewish intellectual, provides something of a model for what I'm driving at. Novak eulogized the passing of his friend "Jens" by noting that the two of them could never agree on the theological priors which separate Judaism and Christianity. But that did not get in the way of their loving and admiring each other.
It's also interesting to note that while Jenson believed the arrival of New Creation rendered the levitical sacrifices obsolete, they nevertheless have a New Covenant completion-in-fulfillment in the celebration of the Holy Mysteires at the place of the Holy Table.
To respond to both your points:
Delete1. I think I would emphasise that while the eschatological reconciliation can be anticipated in various aspects of the church's life now, it will be a renewal of all things, a new heavens and a new earth. This is also seen in Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 pointing to the discontinuities between the earthly body and the heavenly body. And so the eschatological reconciliation when all Israel will be saved will also have profound and surprising discontinuities with the church's current life, including those who have not been embraced in that current life.
2. The church is mandated by the Risen Lord to proclaim the Gospel to all, to give assurance of salvation through faith and sacraments by the Cross and Resurrection. This does not mean, of course, that God's grace - because of God's sovereignty - is not encountered outside of the Church's life. What the Church's proclamation is not going to change is the fact that the Jewish people will endure and remain, still leaving us with the question of how we articulate the relationship between church and synagogue.
My counterpoint:
ReplyDelete1) That the eschatological reconciliation of all things in Christ, which the Church presently enjoys in this "now but yet to come" epoch, is only partial I fully concede. The Church's life is indeed a participation in "the powers of the age to come", but we have yet to see all things placed in subjection to Christ. But just as the discontinuties between the natural body and the spiritual body presume a continuity of ontological identity-the natural body which is sown in dishonor is one with the spiritual body that is raised in glory-so the nature of those discontinuites with the Church's current life at the time when all Israel shall be saved will be peripheral enough to ensure that the substance of redemption by union with the ascended Lord Jesus Christ is maintained.
2) God's grace is by no means limited to the Catholic Church. The revelation of his almighty power and Divinity in the things that are seen (and its implications for moral behavior) are as translucent now to human contemplation as they ever were. The Jewish people moreover have the revelation of God in the Messiah as a golden thread running through the narrative of the OT Scriptures. We may assume the Divine Providence continues to steer all kindreds and tribes toward the atttainment of their end in finding God as revealed in his Son. And yet there is an urgency in Paul's preaching to the Athenians which marks a transition from a time when God winked at men's idolatries to a dispensation where submission to the requirement of repentance is necessary if a man will save his soul in the day when Christ judges the world in righteousness. We must never forget this.
We mustn't imagine that the proclamtion of the Gospel will diminish the Jewish people in any form or fashion. If the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, then its proclamation is instrumental in the conveyance of grace to all those with ears to hear. And when grace is recieved it is no diminishment of the recipeint; it is an an enlargement. For grace does no harm to nature, but rather presumes and perfects it. The question then is not whether the Jewish people will endure; that is a given vouchsafed by the loving kindness of God for his people. But must we assume that receiving salvation in Christ and becoming members of his mystical body poses an existential threat to the continuance of the Jewish people? This seems to be the inference; and it presumes a normativity in being estranged from their own natural inheritance in Christ and the Jewish olive tree from which they were severed. That cannot be their end; for it is certainly no end for Gentiles like you and I. If it was God's loving intention to make us citizens of the Commonweath of Israel and to graft us as unatural branches into her olive tree, then we have truly come home. But if this is so, how much more is it the case for the natural branches?
To respond:
Delete1. I really do disagree with the contention that the differences between the Church before and after the eschaton will be "peripheral". Mindful of the consistent Gospel witness that the disciples did not recognise the Risen Lord, when this is applied to the Church before and after the eschaton, I think we can say that the differences will (thankfully) be substantial.
2. I do not think we can use the Apostle's preaching to the Athenians in a discussion about the Church's relationship with the Jewish people: the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem is stark (compare the Apostle's comments regarding Athens to his comments in Romans 9:4-5). As to the olive tree metaphor used by the Apostle, the key thing is that Israel is now still the "good olive tree". The Jewish people are not estranged from their natural inheritance from but its fulfilment.