Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

RELATIONSHIP OF JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY
further event, one they had not anticipated at all; namely, the
messiah's death.
Caution: Whenever one responds to a new event, believing this
event illuminates the original event, there is a risk. On the one hand,
the response shows faithfulness. On the other hand, there are great
dangers. One risk is to give your trust and faith to a false messiah—the
new arrival may turn out not to be the true messiah. There is a further
risk—the new developments may lead to a transformation of the
original ideas. Then, out of trying to be faithful to the new experience,
one may find oneself in some way leaving behind or betraying the
original commitments. Which then are true: the old ideas or the new
ones? Or both? The answer, of course, is that there is no guarantee in
advance. Wait until it is all clarified and it will be too late. One must
respond right now. Faith response is a wager of one's own life, out of
faithfulness.
Consider the Jewish Sitz im Leben of those faithful Jewish Christians
responding to the messiah. Here was this man whom they
experienced as the messiah. He was shockingly killed. It was a
terrible, degrading death. Equally shocking was the belief the messiah
was supposed to bring the final perfection: peace, dignity, prosperity,
independence. Instead of doing all this, this messiah died miserably,
according to some reports, even in despair and self-denial.
Now, as faithful Jews (they still were not Christians) how ought
they to have responded to his death? Should they have said, "He was
a false messiah"? Should they have betrayed the original insight that
this person was the messiah? Or should they have thought, "Maybe
this death is another event that illuminates the meaning of the
previous event"? Maybe the Crucifixion is not a refutation of Jesus'
being the messiah, but rather a clarification of the nature of
redemption. Up to now, they thought that the messiah would
straighten out the political and economic world, because that was the
mental image of what it meant to perfect the world. But if I as an early
Christian knew this was the messiah but he did not bring worldly
liberation, I had an alternative to yielding faith. The alternative was to
say that the death is teaching a lesson. The lesson is that true
redemption is not in this world. The kingdom of God is within you.
Faith leads to a world of spiritual perfection: even though I am a slave,
I am free in Christ.
The Christians responded faithfully but later history suggests
theymade a hermeneutical error. To put it another way: In retrospect,
it was a mistake to say that the explanation of the Crucifixion is that
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