Blood and Promise
The Second Vatican Council was a gathering of leaders of the Roman Catholic Church that occurred in four sessions from 1962 to 1965. During this time, the Roman Catholic Church made a few important changes. The liturgy could be in the language of the people instead of Latin everywhere in the world. The right to religious freedom was recognized. And antisemitism was officially condemned. In the aftermath of World War II and the atrocities of the Holocaust, the Catholic Church had to carefully examine some of its own historical teachings. One teaching in particular saw the Jews as being cursed by God for having killed Christ. Though this wasn’t a teaching of particular importance at the time, the church found it necessary to officially repudiate it.
Unfortunately, the Church has had a long and complicated history with regard to the Jewish people. We share holy texts and call upon the same God, and certainly there have been Christians and Jews throughout history who have gotten along well. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of Christians with awful things to say about the Jews. Even Martin Luther isn’t exempt, writing in his treatise “On the Jews and Their Lies” that Christians should “[Set] fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.”
This animosity goes back to the very beginning. It is even written into our Gospels. According to Matthew 27, when Pilate washed his hands and declared himself innocent of Jesus’s blood, the Jews responded together “His blood be on us and on our children.” This is a very weird thing to say. I think most of us recognize that even if we wanted to condemn someone in the strongest possible terms, we still wouldn’t bring our own children into it, implying that they are guilty of his blood. That is bizarre. And with only Matthew recording this particularly vile line, I can’t help but wonder whether or not this was actually said at all. This sounds like less of something the entire crowd actually said and more like something that Christians, bitter and frustrated about the rivalry between themselves and their religious brothers, claimed had been said. This statement is about assigning blame, about claiming that the Jewish people willingly accepted it. And the fact that the children are included gave permission for later anti-semitic theologians in the church to place the eternal blame on the Jewish people, not simply the small group of people who had called for Jesus’s death.
There are other quotes from the Bible that have been misused for anti-semitic purposes, but this one stands out as particularly strong. Part of the reason for this is the ongoing nature of it. The blame continues to be on the Jews in each generation. I think we all can sense something fundamentally wrong with that, something horribly unfair. Imagine being born condemned. Imagine being accursed, less than, evil, simply because of your heritage. For many of us, where we have come from is a point of pride. We come from hard working farming families, homesteaders, immigrants who learned the language and made a new life here. We come from people who made a stable home for their children. We come from people who served in wars to defend their country. We are proud of the culture, the family, and the experiences we came from. But if that were all condemned, all hopelessly evil, our pride would turn to a source of shame and isolation. We would be disconnected from popular society, because of those pasts that everyone else is allowed to hold so dear.
This sort of discrimination isn’t only true of anti-semitism. It also has appeared throughout our history as racism. In the last two decades, Islamophobia has isolated people and made them afraid of their neighbors. During the recent Congressional hearings about Tik Tok, some representatives suggested that Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew may be secretly aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. This claim can only be supported by racism, because Shou Zi Chew isn’t Chinese. He’s from Singapore, which is, to be clear, a different country. That would be like assuming that Jeff Bezos is secretly working for the government of France just because he’s white. Our fear, racism, and distrust of others is so strong that we will even associate them with a heritage that isn’t theirs just to demonize them. Heritage is so often used to hurt people that it almost seems like we have thoroughly turned this blessing into a curse.
However, Acts 2 gives us hope where Matthew 27 disappoints us. In a striking parallel, when Peter tells the crowd assembled in Jerusalem about Jesus, even claiming that they had crucified Jesus, the crowd hears and asks what they should do. Peter tells them to repent and receive the Holy Spirit before saying, “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.”
It is no longer guilt that is upon the children. Here it is a promise. The promise is for those present, and for their children, and for the entire world. The children need not be haunted by the specter of past crimes, whether or not their parents were guilty of them. They are free to receive the promise of God’s love for all the world. Heritage can be a blessing for them.
We too often assign blame to people that we expect to carry generationally. This entire group of people is just terrible. They are bad. Their children will be bad. There is something wrong with who they are. Sometimes we take that blame onto ourselves, living into cycles of generational trauma. We learn the worst habits of our parents and repeat them with our children, who in turn learn them from us. We don’t see a way out. Sometimes, we wonder if we deserve a way out. This is just how life is. There is pain and sadness and suffering.
Of course, it is true and natural for life to contain pain and suffering, but that doesn’t have to be the end of it. As much as we put guilt and blame upon ourselves, others, and our children, we can also listen for what God is doing. God isn’t cursing people. God isn’t pronouncing inescapable generational blame—except for a few exceptions in the Old Testament, but that is a discussion for another time. God is offering a promise, a promise that allows us to escape fear and blame and reclaim the blessings that God has intended for us. God loves us, all of us, and in God’s love we can find hope for a better world.
