The Scandal of Jewish Belief

The Gospel of Matthew ends with this promise of Jesus to his disciples: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age”—an eternal covenant. Now imagine a man comes along and proclaims that a new savior must be followed. He would be met with, at best, an indulgent smile. It is hardly an outlandish scenario. Think of Mormonism, or of Islam—which accepts the Virgin Birth but regards the divinity of ­Jesus as blasphemous and considers itself the divine evolution of both Judaism and Christianity, the last and most perfect iteration of Abrahamic ­monotheism.

Now imagine this invitation comes not from a man but from an angel, a messenger of the Almighty. What should you do? Don’t tax yourself too much. St. Paul gives the answer in Galatians: Curse that angel! The iteration of the­ ­Abrahamic covenant through Jesus is eternal for his community of faith.

If God is omnipotent, you may wonder, could he not have a change of mind? Surely not, for paradoxically this would compromise his omnipotence. He would never be able to make a truly eternal ­promise.

So why would Paul even imagine such a scenario—that God would send a messenger to tempt his faithful to abandon his son, the one and only Savior? Paul knew his Scripture well, including the proclivity (“And God tested Abraham”) of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, to put his faithful to the test.

This brings us to the alleged “scandal” of Judaism. For R. R. ­Reno, the scandal resides in Judaism’s rejection of Christ—an “unbelief, which is ongoing to this day.” He sugars the bitter pill by suggesting that this unbelief was “ordained by God, so that he might have mercy on us all.” This, with all respect, is a startling theological proposition. Why would the Almighty need an act of defiance from his “Chosen People” in order to extend his love to all of humanity? Had the Jews not been “unfaithful,” would God then have withheld his love and mercy from the rest of humanity? Does this account not reduce him to a pagan tribal god?

At a deeper level, my disagreement with Reno arises from our different understandings of Jewish belief and “­u­nbelief,” and from what may seem to be a conflict of eternal divine commitments.

The Sons of Israel were instructed in Deuteronomy 12: “These are the statutes and rules,” ethical and ritual, “that you shall be careful to do . . . all the days that you live.” This, too, is an eternal commitment. And not merely eternal but unchangeable, for there follows in the same chapter: “Every thing I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.” Interpret, yes. But to add or detract would be to break this iteration of the Abrahamic covenant.

There follows immediately one of the most stunning passages in the Hebrew Bible:

If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, “Let us go after other gods,” which you have not known, “and let us serve them,” you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams.

In the Hebrew Bible, a “sign” or “wonder” always indicates divine provenance. When Aaron’s staff turns into a snake, it is a sign and a wonder. When the Egyptian priests perform the same feat, it is neither sign nor wonder but wizardry. This “prophet or dreamer,” then, is truly a prophet, a holy man, who is doing God’s will. But why should God want his prophet to tell his people to go after other gods? The answer follows:

For the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him.

Why does the Lord test his faithful? The Hebrew verb nissah (“to test,” from nisayon) points to one solution to this ancient puzzle. ­Nisayon is an experience, a trial of fire and water, through which the subject learns things about himself and about the demands of faith.

The trial of Abraham was terrifying, not just in that it asked a father to sacrifice his son, his only son, the son he loved, Isaac. It also asked of him, as a proof of his faith, to sacrifice his future and the future of his descendants—for when Abraham and Sarah were given the gift of Isaac, it was through him that the promise of eternity was to be fulfilled.

Through this trial, Abraham learned that the way of the Lord may demand sacrifices. He also learned something about himself, a lesson learned by all who followed him: that though walking in the way of the Lord will never be easy, God will never break his eternal promises. The angel held Abraham’s hand. Isaac (and his progeny) lived and live, forever. The covenant was honored and has endured.

The Deuteronomy text does not end here. What follows is a statement that calls the very justice of the Almighty into question:

But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of slavery, to make you live the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk.

This command jars our sense of justice and our belief in the justice of our Father in heaven. Why should the godly messenger, following the will of the Almighty and serving his purpose and thus entirely pure and innocent, be put to death?

We may now return to the “scandal” of Judaism. At a minimum it would seem plausible that in the eyes of the Sanhedrin, Jesus appeared to be the person prophesied in Deuteronomy: His signs and wonders were astonishing, clearly indicating a divine source. Did he invite his listeners to follow another God which they had not known? The answer is yes. It was the same God, but not the God they and their fathers had known.

How do we know God? Abrahamic monotheism believes in a transcendent God, impossible truly to know with our human faculties. We know him through his moments of immanence, which we call revelation. For the Sons of Israel, that moment of immanence was Sinai. The God, the only God they knew, the God to whom they swore eternal allegiance, is the God of Torah, with its combination of moral and ritual commandments. It is not the God incarnate, but the God “wordified.”

I want to suggest that from a Jewish perspective, one need not reject as untrue the gospel’s nativity narrative, nor even the Incarnation. If that is the way the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wished to extend his love and grace beyond the Sons of Israel to the rest of humanity, who are we to deny it? But for Israel who prays twice a day, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one,” the new trinitarian offer is clearly not the immanent God they know and to whom they have sworn eternal allegiance. They are divinely commanded to reject it.

Can Jesus, pure and innocent, faithfully following the words of his Father in heaven, fairly be understood as inviting his Jewish listeners to stray from the laws of Moses (as the accusation against him is framed in Acts) and not “walk after the Lord [their] God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and . . . serve him and hold fast to him?” Can Jesus be seen as both adding and detracting from these commandments?

Certainly. True, he teaches: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Faith in Jesus thus substitutes for Torah. And, indeed, the nations of the earth, to whom, finally, the Abrahamic covenant and the love and mercy of God are extended, may find salvation and eternal life through Jesus Christ, God incarnate, not through Torah, God “wordified.”

Yet, acting not as an interpreting rabbi but with divine authority (“I am the Lord of the Sabbath”), Jesus both adds and detracts. To give but a couple of examples, he forbids divorce, clearly permitted by Torah, and his moral teachings are no less innovative (and noble):

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to ­judgment.

To the nations of the world this is a new manifestation of the Abrahamic covenant, a new—and in the eyes of some, perhaps superior—way of enjoying the love and grace of the Almighty and the promise of salvation.

But where does it leave the Sons of Israel? I have indicated that it would not be unreasonable for the Sanhedrin to have regarded Jesus as the realization of the prophecy in Deuteronomy 13. Dare we propose that it was not just reasonable but correct?

If so, this understanding resolves one difficulty of the Deuteronomy prophecy: the injustice of putting the messenger of God to death. Jesus, unlike Isaac, was indeed sacrificed. But his was a death like no other. He was to be resurrected in three days. Thus, it was by faithfully following the divine command to put him to death that the Jews accomplished the salvific purpose of the Passion. Might this not be one way to understand ­Jesus’s statement that salvation is from the Jews?

If indeed the call of God through Jesus was the “test,” the trial, the nisayon, that the Almighty indicated would come to his people, it is a test no less terrifying than that of Abraham. The call of God, the test, was so tempting. At stake was the very future of the Sons of Israel, the question of their salvation or damnation. As in Abraham’s case, only supreme faith in the eternity of the Sinai iteration of the covenant could explain and justify their action. May it, after all, not be pleasing to the Almighty that, say, those who accepted as eternal the rules and statutes of Sinai continue to circumcise their sons when they bring them into the covenant of Abraham, four thousand years after they were first commanded to do so? Moreover, the timing of this test is propitious. At the moment when all nations are invited, through ­Jesus, into this new iteration of the Abrahamic covenant, might it not serve to demonstrate the supreme loyalty and fidelity that faith in the Lord of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the Lord of Jesus—requires?

For Reno, “Jewish unbelief, which is ongoing to this day, is ordained by God so that he might have mercy on us all.” I prefer a theology that takes the eternal commitment of Deuteronomy as seriously as the eternal commitment of Matthew. I find Reno’s formulation a tad condescending to Judaism and—I write this with fear and trembling—a tad condescending to the Almighty. Would not a more satisfying theology have God’s universal mercy result from an act of belief in the Lord, rather than unbelief?

What, then, are we to make of the seemingly conflicting eternal commitments? In the Vatican’s statement on Catholic–Jewish relations of 2015, we find the following:

That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.

I have offered a way to reflect on this mystery. God revealed himself first to Abraham, in a moment of immanence. Abraham’s mission was clear:

The Lord said . . . Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

That covenant was extended at Sinai to one people, who had a particular testimony—Torah—to follow for eternity. And then, the Abrahamic covenant and the mercy and love of God were extended eternally to other nations through his risen Son—while at the same time, and in the same act, testing and affirming the faithfulness of the Sons of Israel to their particular eternal divine promise and commitment, their particular enduring testimony.

I wonder whether Reno will ­accept this one-word emendation: “Jewish belief, which is ongoing to this day, is ordained by God so that he might have mercy on us all.”