Easter and Antisemitism

For a month now, God has been telling me to write this blog post. The problem is that the concept behind it is so short, that I haven’t bothered. It’s not “long enough” to be worth the time to write… nor read. But He keeps saying “WRITE IT!” So, in my endeavor to be obedient, here I am.

“The Passion of Christ” is one of those movies that gets good circulation every Easter, and when I see it, I’m always reminded of a heated “discussion” that an actor friend and I had about it when the movie first came out. She argued that it is Anti-Semitic. I argued that it’s not.

Of course the gist of the argument goes like this:

Her: “It blames Jews for killing Jesus.”

Me: “No, it credits certain Hebrews for doing the Will of God.”

The whole Christian faith hinges on one fact: that Jesus gave himself as The Perfect, Living Sacrifice as an atonement for our sins, then rose from the dead, conquering Death, so that we may have a direct relationship to God, the Father, and have Everlasting Life, with Him in Heaven.

NOTHING else about our faith matters if this did not happen! In order for it to happen, though, He had to have been “sacrificed” first. This implies that He couldn’t die of old age, but had to have been “put to death.” And who would have done that? Who could have done that?

Those who loved & followed Him, surely wouldn’t.

Those who hated Him were too scared of Him to dare to take action to cause harm.

But when we keep in mind that only the people who are closest to us, and have known us most, if not all, our lives, are the very ones who will scoff that we are or could be anything “special”, then we can find those who would and could bring about His death. Luke 19:41-42, Isaiah 53:1, and Isaiah 6:1-4 speak about Israel not believing (as in to recognize or identify) their own. So it had to be the Hebrews who would reject him and have him put to death. They (the Sanhedrin, specifically) couldn’t do it themselves because Pontius Pilate would have had them put to death, too, for the resulting uprising. Not to mention that they were sticklers of the law. (In the interest of time & space, I’ll not get into all the reasons why they couldn’t simply have had him stoned to death themselves, except to say, “That’s not how God wanted it done.”)

So here we are with the fact that, in order for God’s Will to be done, Jesus had to be “killed.” Therefore, there were several people who acted alone (Judas Iscariot) or in groups, as God, Himself, led them to do.

Thus, who’s being Anti-Semitic here? God? The Hebrews themselves? These accusations would be ridiculous. Anyone who says the story of the Crucifixion of Jesus contains Anti-Semitic overtones just does not see the big picture.

Nobody “blames” the Jews for killing Jesus. We recognize that God, Himself, closed their eyes and hardened their hearts to Jesus’s teachings, so that they could and would do what was required of them at that time in history. Thank you, God, for doing so!

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