Page 67 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

in churches with a long history of supersessionism, that is, of spreading the erroneous idea that Israel is ‘replaced’ by the church and therefore Judaism is rendered obsolete. A single social media post featuring ‘baby Jesus in the rubble’ as a Palestinian infant is one thing; but a deluge of the same, circulating in a cyber ‘bubble’ with no balancing reminder of Jesus’ actual Jewishness or of the Jewish perspectives employed by the Gospels, is alarming. Distortions of the Christian message are inevitable; these feed into toxic theologies and then into the hands of extremists who seek to do terrible harm to Jewish people. Outright denial of Jesus’ Jewishness is already a tactic of hard-core antisemites today. We would do well to remember that negation of Jesus’ Jewishness was a manoeuvre in Nazi Germany, where Christian supersessionist theologies were manipulated by Nazi ideology to redefine Jesus as an Aryan, and where the so-called ‘Aryan race’ was championed in violent opposition to those with Jewish ancestry.
Following the end of World War II, as the horrific crimes of the Holocaust came into clear view, the Catholic Church and other mainstream churches took decisive steps to address the antisemitic errors and sins of their past. They repudiated false notions such as an Aryan Jesus or a Jesus who rejected his own people and tradition. They embraced the Jewishness of Jesus as core to the Christian proclamation: to speak of God’s Word incarnate in Jesus is to say that the infinite God took human form in the flesh-and-blood earthly life of a particular Jew, ‘born of a woman, born under the law’ (Galatians 4:4). God’s gift of liberating love is offered universally by way of a particular people, the people of Israel—their history, homeland, traditions, stories and sacred texts.
It is imperative that this corrective path of understanding continue to be walked by present-day Christians. In the words
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