A passionate plea to Christians to repent for Christianity’s pride…by Christians
Watching the videos and pictures of the recent protests of Jewish religious God-loving groups (yes, we do believe so!) against Christian-messianic events at the temple mount and in the King of Kings congregation in Jerusalem is heartbreaking. My husband was even present in the first event and deeply grieved by seeing this confrontation on the one side and the response or ignorance to this wake-up call for Christianity in Jerusalem on the other side.
From a Christian perspective, watching these videos as they were depicted, we know that it leaves a bitter picture of a violent mob of Jews against Jesus and his followers – even within the Israel-loving, Christian Zionist community worldwide.
Do you hear what I am saying? This is the sub-tone of the unaware, deeply rooted antisemitism and replacement theology of large parts of Christianity, even within the Israel-loving Christians! The over and over repeated lies that lay in the foundation of Christianity since the early Church fathers resound here, like: “The Jews killed OUR Lord Jesus (as if Jesus was someone completely taken out of context, a roman-greek God, not the Jewish Torah loving and defending Rabbi from the Galilee). They are our enemy. The Church (or Rome) is the New Jerusalem or the Bride of God. Who needs the Jews anyway? Who cares for the Jews?” We are in pain to tears; how happenings like this widen the gap between the Believers in the God of Israel from the nations and our Jewish brothers and sisters – yes OURs! We are part of even those who violently try to defend their faith, the Jewishness, the Torah, the name of God!
We want to believe the best about them, that this group sincerely loves HaShem and zealously does what they think is the right thing to openly defend His cause, even though there might be those who jump in on this occasion of sensationalism and justification of physical activism, as it is in every movement. See, behind the scenes, Christian brothers and sisters!
WE, WE, are guilty of opening the wound in Yeshua’s heart by deliberately killing, robbing, defaming, forcing, and murdering his own brothers and sisters, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, over the last 2000 years, by abusing for our pride and agendas the name of God and Jesus!
Working with Holocaust survivors, we hear the pain written on the SS belt in the Nazi era: “God with us.” So if he was with us Christian Germans, where then was He for the Jews in the concentration camps?
WE hang up banners with the Swastika in Lutheran churches, replacing parts of the Bible as a Jewish-free book, just to name three examples. You say that was not you? You are not Catholic; you are no Nazi? Well, all this could only happen because of this deep anti-Jewish hate. You can even smell it in many bible translations. Look from the outside – or better, from within the Jewish people, how it may appear to them when once again a vast group of Christians comes to the holiest place of the Bible, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, their holiest site and seem just to take it as a nice background for own speeches and agendas which don’t have anything to do with the land and the people, to whom God promised this land.
We Christian Zionists tend to create a kind of idealized “Love for Israel” but without loving the actual people there. Look, here are real people with a real history of murderous, defaming Christians hunting them down and trying to delete them from the face of the earth, or from Europe, or from Israel… Suppose you really love somebody (and that is what it takes to pray in power for someone). In that case, you change your perspective and take on some empathy, trying to understand what leads to this kind of strong reaction – like “as it was not enough to exterminate us from Europe in Nazi time, forcibly convert us within the inquisition, kill us in the Crusades, etc… now they even come here into OUR land, OUR most holy city, even having the nerves to come close to the temple mount, and doing their ceremonies and declaring a false God!”
Are we really so ignorant to believe that we are right and they are wrong? Do we really think that Jesus /Yeshua takes delight in our gatherings and concerts while we fail to love his brethren by simply stopping our agenda and seeing them, listening to them, reacting, getting into conversation, staying with them? What does hasten the Ge’ulah, the coming of the Messiah that we all are waiting on in a moment like this? The most painful point for my husband in this event was hearing the protestors chant as an expression of their opposition, “Am Israel chai!” -The nation of Israel shall live. This is the same song we sing together with our Holocaust survivors at every meeting as representatives of German Nazi descendants as a statement of tikkun for the visible and invisible world.
Would it not have brought us more together, to bind the wound between us international and Jewish lovers of God, if we just started to sing alongside with them, that Israel shall live? Isn’t this showing more love to them and to Yeshua, than just letting the police do their job and minding our own business, feeling we are right and they are wrong?
Isn’t this what would fulfill the command of Yeshua to love even those who despise you? What a pain to have missed this opportunity! Please, brothers and sisters, for the love of Yeshua, let’s examine our hearts even to the most subtle form of replacement theology and negative sentiments towards Jewish people, thinking we are better, we know more, they don’t get it, or what ever and put ourselves into their shoes. Let’s choose today, even while reading these lines, humbleness and not pride, and ask every Jew we meet honestly for forgiveness for the sins of our spiritual forefathers, the Church, Christianity, what we have done to the Jews in all generations in mocking the name of God and his Messiah.
Let us please identify with this sin of all Christianity and remove thereby the “stumbling blocks out of the way of My people!” (Isaiah 57,15) We do that with our survivors in each meeting, and we see healing and opening up hearts. Let’s help to close the wound in the hearts of this nation and close the gap between Israel and the world, so we will be called by the Lord “The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in,” according to Isaiah 58,12.
Alexander and Cäcilia Dietze were born in Germany but have been living in Israel for several years, with a special focus on helping Holocaust survivors.
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