Jesus, Mary & Josephus

I like Jews. I've had occasion recently to ponder why this is.

Typically, one of my biggest pet peeves is when people confuse the terms "ecumenism" and "interreligious dialogue." The latter, obviously, concerns conversations aimed at mutual understanding and whatnot between adherents to different faiths. The former is just like it, only between Christians of different denominations. Except that it's not. What sets ecumenism apart is that those who engage in it can not only talk but worship together, thanks to the centrality of their common faith in Jesus Christ. Thus, sloppiness about ecumenism often foretells a broader confusion about Christ himself.

An interesting middle case, however, is in Christian relations with the people of Jacob. We don't share Christ, yet there's no question that Christians and Jews worship very much the same God. Plus, without the ways of worship and belief that the Jewish people, by and large, continue to keep alive, God's self-revelation in Christ would never have made sense in the first place.

This was all brought home to me quite vividly in reading Jerusalem's Traitor: Josephus, Masada, and the Fall of Judea, by British historian Desmond Seward. Josephus, his subject, must be one of the more fascinating figures in antiquity. A philo-Roman upper-class Jew born in Jerusalem shortly after the death of Christ, he served half-heartedly as military governor of Galilee after the Jewish uprising of 66 AD. After feuding incessantly with Galilee's more zealous, err, Zealots, he was captured by the Romans and immediately turned state's evidence, advising future emperors Vespasian and Titus as they laid seige to Jerusalem.

You get the feeling that this guy would have made a great character study: one of the many cooperative figures among Rome's conquered peoples, but one who nonetheless took for himself the dignity of a prophet, depicting Rome's destruction of Jerusalem as God's punishment for the sins of the Zealot leaders -- who indeed, Josephus tells us, spent much of their time under seige feuding with each other and slaughtering their own people. Seward doesn't do a great job of this; then again, his only source for much of the history was Josephus himself.

It's an amazing -- and heartbreaking -- story anyway, particularly when it comes to the final storming of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. A Christian remembers that Jesus foretold as much -- but also that he wept for the city as he did so. And why not? There would have been no Jesus Christ without Jerusalem and its Temple.

The meaning of the Temple, especially to Christians, is apparent from its first dedication under King Solomon. "Can it indeed be," he asks, "that God dwells among men on earth?" (1 Kings 8:27) Oh, I don't know ... maybe? For a Christian, God's presence in the Holy of Holies prefigures his presence in Christ himself.

I think you could say a similar thing about the entire Jewish people -- that there are hints of the Incarnation in the mere fact that God chose them. The beauty of the Incarnation is its earthiness -- the idea that God physically became one of us to redeem every aspect of human existence. So it really only makes sense that to prepare us for such a thing, he would choose not to rule from on high like some evenhanded, abstract watchmaker, but rather to stick his nose into every corner of the life of one nation.

(This, by the way, is how I've come to appreciate the Virgin Mary -- as the ultimate Jew. In other words, just as God blessed and set apart a certain people as the means by which he would come into the world, so, when the time was imminent, he blessed and set apart one woman from that people, to get the job done.)

So, what does all this have to do with Jews today? It's certainly been a blessing of my two years in New York to get to know so many of them and to see how my Jewish friends cling to God's law -- and the idea of themselves as a people. (Though they'd doubtless disagree with my gloss on some of our shared scriptures.) This is fairly hard to miss: By one count, the New York metropolitan area holds 15% of the world's Jewish population.

What's surprised me is how edifying a strong Jewish presence has been for my Christian faith. I think that's because there's a sacramental reality going on here -- that's to say, and outward sign of an inner truth. To wit: The perseverance of God's original Chosen People is a living reminder of the long and laborious care he took to reveal his ways to man.

(Note: The late great Richard John Neuhaus says some simlar things, much better, here.)