The video is a sermon transcript discussing the significance of historical moments and the impact they have on subsequent events. The speaker emphasizes the importance of not just observing historical events statistically, but delving deeper into their root causes and understanding the human suffering involved. The Holocaust is used as an example of a moment that should not be reduced to mere numbers, but rather explored for its profound implications. The sermon also touches on the rejection of Jesus and the consequences it had for the Jewish people.

Somehow, early this morning, I was stirred to consider a paper which is the transcript of an address given by a Jewish unbelieving professor at a university, I believe it was Vermont, in honor of another Jewish scholar of the Holocaust by the name of Raoul Hilberg, whom I've heard on some other occasion, who is a statistician of the Holocaust. He computes the data. There's something very bloodless in observing that man. In fact, I think I recall watching a video or a TV presentation with him that unless you probe the deepest issues of the Holocaust, and I'm only content to deal with it statistically, the irony is that you come out looking like, sounding like, and appearing like a concentration camp commandant. Isn't that remarkable? There's something about the numbers and statistics that are bloodless, and you enter into the same spirit of bloodlessness by which men functioned in administrative places in the whole apparatus of death, really to deal with the statistics of death without probing through them into the root causes of colossal tragedy is to affect you, and to make you like the thing that you're studying. That was my observation, my sense at that time. Nevertheless, he was being honored on this occasion, and I've got the whole program somewhere here. The Hilberg Symposium entitled Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders, an international conference on the Holocaust honoring the retirement of Raoul Hilberg, John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science, in April of 1991 at the University of Vermont. There's a number of speakers and guest scholars. It's a lineup that's awesome. Richard Rubenstein, the author of After Auschwitz, whom I mentioned in some of the earlier sessions, as a man who lost his faith through the Holocaust, he was a rabbi, and whose position was that we should not relegate religion to the dustbin, but just dispense with its supernaturalism, and just dispense with all of these things that have no basis in fact, but keep religion as a modifying influence for men that will affect their behavior. He's a professor of religion at the University of Florida in Gainesburg, and he commends this not only for Jewish religious sources, but for Christian, that both should recognize that as a result of the Holocaust, the traditional concept that God is defunct. But that's not a reason to dispense with religion altogether, merely to remove its supernatural content, like the idea of a living God. Another participant at this conference was the guy who made the film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, a French Jew, and Herman Wolk, the author of The Cane Mutiny, and a famous Jewish writer, Yehuda Bauer, chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the president, Michael Berenbaum of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Eberhard Jekyll, professor of history at Stuttgart University, another, Robert Lifton, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a professor of philosophy from Harvard University, and another professor of philosophy from Claremont McKenna College, and then this brother, whose paper I'm reading, George Steiner, and he's a Jewish man, he's a professor at Cambridge University, he also teaches at Geneva, and a man about my age, maybe just a few years older, and a scholar and author, and I watched the video of his presentation and I was awed. One of the most radical and stunning Holocaust for an unbelieving Jew that I had ever heard, and I was grateful that the people who showed it to me had already made a transcript of that message and gave it to me here, and so this is the first time that I've ever shared it, and I think that there are a lot of provocative things that will bless us. So he begins by this statement about the hysterical moment which has determined the tragic destiny of the Jews over the past 2,000 years, is the moment in which the core of Judaism rejects the messianic mission, the messianic promise put forward by Jesus of Nazareth and his immediate adherents. That's an unbelievable statement. That's absolutely incredible. How would you like to make a statement like that, knowing that sitting in the audience are the men whose names I have described to you, and at a university setting, with faculty members and students, and numbers of Jews because it's a Holocaust memorial conference at the beginning like that, and I intend writing him a letter to tell him I'm going to be in England, I'll come to Cambridge University, I'll meet you in London, I'm going to be in Geneva, I'll meet you in Geneva, I want to meet you, and have a conversation about your remarkable address. And when it was over, you should have heard the backlash. Men got up with indignation, and how can you say it? How do you imply it? What do you mean? Because he spoke of Jesus with a certain kind of validity, like the great question is how could something of this magnitude have happened and that Judaism has rejected it. And therefore by that rejection has opened itself to a history of tragedy, which includes the Holocaust, which is exactly my theme. And this is an unbelieving man, but he presents it from kind of a scholarly, philosophical, psychological, and biblical view. So let me read this opening statement. It talks about the historical moment. And do you have a sense of that? That there's a moment that comes in time, like a moment of truth. It could be an event like the Holocaust, it could be a statement of God, it could be a prophetic statement, where if you miss that moment, all of your subsequent moments are involved, are affected. You dare not miss a moment of truth. And I say that out of my own puny and inadequate experience, being the messenger of moments of truth for entire congregations, or men, or movements, and knowing that the missing of it had set in motion consequences tragic for that people to whom it was given and probably ended in the demise of the movement itself. As this moment has such tragic consequences for world Jewry. He says, the historical moment which has determined the tragic destiny of the Jew over these past 2,000 years, it is the moment in which the core of Judaism rejects the messianic mission, the messianic promise, put forward by Jesus of Nazareth and his immediate adherents. The key motion of spirit whereby Jews refuse the good news brought by Jesus, affirmed by his resurrection. Imagine speaking this like this is historical data. You're not getting religious here. This is like nuts and bolts, you know, undeniable events. Affirmed by his resurrection, the crucial repudiation by Jews at one of the most somber hours in their own history, that of the murderous suppression of natural insurgence of national rising, the consequence destruction of the second temple, the refusal to accept the concordat of human rebirth and divine pardon offered by the Galilean God man and his apostles. That refusal escapes us. How do you like starting a message like that? You know what I love? I love when the things of God that men like to keep in the category of religion break into the realm of the secular with a complete boldness, like we have every reason to be here. We have full credentials. This is uttermost truth, and we're not letting you get away by putting this into a category for Sundays. This is a conference on the Holocaust. This is the root of it, and it needs your consideration. Jesus was a historical person. He suffered a death. He was raised, and I cannot fathom his saying, the historic repudiation and rejection of this moment, this refusal. That refusal escapes me. This act of Jewish repudiation of the son of man, the version given in the gospels, acts, and epistles are by definition polemical and prejudicial. Now here's where a scholar comes in. What he's saying is not what we would say. He's saying that the accounts are not impartial and objective accounts. They're polemical. They are written in such a way as to prove a point, and they're prejudicial. They reflect the view of the writers of the gospels who are making the case for Jesus. But the rabbinic voices, so far as they have come down to us, speak only very late. And when Christianity, though still splintered, is dynamically ascended, even then they say almost nothing. This is itself perplexing in the extreme. It constitutes a black hole near the actual center of Jewish history and Jewish faith. Where was God in the holocaust? And his answer was that because we had been silent to him and not heard him when he cried out to us and sought us, now when we cried to him, he was silent. So this black hole near the actual center of Jewish history and Jewish faith is employed because the black hole is thought to be charged with almost incommensurable energy, both implosive and explosive. I don't know that much about physics, but in astronomy there's a black hole theory, and evidently at the epicenter of this black hole are enormous sources of power. So both the ingathering and the fierce scattering have their counterpart in the experience of Judaism after Jesus, that this event of indifference and rejection is like a black hole in Israel's history and has to do with the fierce scattering. Isn't that a powerful image, fierce scattering? And their source in that hour, somewhere in the mid-decades of that century of Jesus' ministry and death. And of that source we know so very little. Why did the Jews, more exactly, why did Judaism, so far as it can be defined in relation to Torah and Talmud, to nationhood and to exile, say no, no to the charismatic revelation? That's a great question. What compelling elements from within Torah and prophecy were being not listened to as they had foretold that very revelation? This is an unbelieving man, and I don't know what a believing man is. And here, as you know, we are on well-trodden ground. I can move swiftly. It is not only the general circuit of Christ's life, ministry, and passion which are foretold in the Old Testament, but notably in the Psalms, the Psalms of the Suffering Servant. In Deutero-Isaiah, that means Second Isaiah, because the scholars from Isaiah 40 on see a different kind of speaking, and they assume from that, just like in the book of Ephesians, that was not Paul, but a second writer who is called Deutero, Second Isaiah. In numerous specific texts, it is in small details, the just man of suffering is to be mocked, scourged, and hung upon the tree of death, a virgin birth. So, of course, Hebraus insists that at this point, a forced and over-determined reading of a phrase signifying a young woman has often been held. The garments of the martyred servant are to be divided, and lots are to be cast for them. Where would you find that in the Psalms? Where does the Psalms speak? Psalm 22 speaks of garments being divided and lots being cast. And so, you've got all of this data. This is known to Israel. This is their history. These are their scriptures. These are their Psalms. They should have had every reason to recognize that this one who has hung is that fulfillment. And in Amos, that most ancient of prophetic texts, we learn of the sale and betrayal for a handful of silver. Modern narratology and structuralism invert the relation between these numerous predictions. They ascribe to the writers of the Gospels a deliberate misappropriation of these prophecies, thus trying to negate that which pertains to Jesus. It is difficult to conceive of such a device as transparent of first-century Jews or Judeo-Christians. To them, the accomplished enactment of the precisely foretold entailed a natural logic. Why, indeed, how could the Jew deny that which their own revealed books and prophetic wisdom had so concretely and so poignantly anticipated? Jesus' assertion of the imminence of God's kingdom, his summons to mankind to cleanse its ways, to cleanse its spirit in the face of once terrible and transfiguring, of the nearing last judgment, accorded seamlessly with contemporary symbolism, textual interpretations, and sensibility in Judaism. In other words, it was perfect. It dovetailed. Everything was in its place that had been anticipated. What if he's building a case here? Why then the rejection? Even the seemingly blasphemous dictum that he, Jesus of Nazareth, would lay waste the temple had been shown to be in perfect congruence with prophetic and mystical perceptions of what are called the violent acts which must proceed and bring on the coming of the Messiah and of his hour. There was in Jesus' career a most brilliant opportunism of the eternal. At the heart of that career lie the teachings enabled in Jesus' parables and the Sermon on the Mount. These teachings and the specific language in which they are put correspond very nearly point for point with cardinal tenets in the Torah and with the ethics unsurpassed of the prophets, and most especially Isaiah. So it's perfectly congruent with all of Israel's scriptural, biblical knowledge and expectations. In short, at essential points, I'm skipping here from place to place, at many levels, textual, symbolic, figurative, eschatological, and verbal, ethical, the phenomenon of the coming and passion of Jesus match perfectly the expectations and needs, the hopes of Jews in those decisive decades of the first and second centuries. Yet, he was denied. Jews in manifestly significant numbers chose to remain Jews. For them, for us, the Messiah had not come. Now he equates himself as being with that Jewry that has rejected this. And he says, again, I have to ask why. Knowing both that the evidence is so opaque as to be unrecapturable and that this question is so rarely pressed, defines our history and indeed our present condition. You know, if he had sat down after that one statement, it would have been worth everything. Just let me read that again. Knowing both that the evidence is so opaque as to be unrecapturable and that this question, so rarely pressed, defines our history and indeed our present condition. He's putting a smack dab at the whole center of the enigma of Jewish life and Jewish tragedy. It is in this perplexity that one ventures to speculate. There had been many soothsayers, magicians, roadside priests, epileptics, heralds of one greater to come, of the ending of time, plotters against Herod and Rome. There had been many ascetic fundamentalists out of Galilee in the desert, roaming the backlands, the wilderness with a fistful of more or less fanatical royalists, speaking riddles, figures such as the Baptist, in which he capitalizes, meaning John the Baptist, and so on. And even the miracles that his followers embroidered upon were perhaps a part of a too well-known scenario with a possible profoundly emblematic exception of the resurrection of Lazarus. In other words, Jesus did what a lot of other apocalyptic figures did and men who raised up movements in that time. So he could be dismissed with them. But there's one thing he did that's not too easy to dismiss. It's the resurrection of Lazarus. I love this because he speaks of it as a historical event. It's not a speculative thing. It's something that took place. Will the transmutations of water into wine, the casting out of devils, the healing of the blind in the rain, thought to be magical, a faith healing, or the skill of some sage, or suspect bits of jugglery, were they believed at all, we have no answer to these crucial questions. What of the claim itself, at moments ambiguous and resistant, that he would sit on the right hand of the Father, the claim to be his Son, in a sense more distinctly, more exactly filial than that allowed to all human beings who may seek to image themselves as children of the Almighty. Do you understand what he's saying? After considering what he did, how about Jesus' own claim to be the Son of God? However, others may have used that phrase. He used it in such a way and with such an authority, with such an intimation of such a relationship with the Father as having been sent of him, that can we just readily dismiss this? If we read between the lines of themes in rabbinic texts, unless I'm mistaken from the medieval period, not from antiquity, if we attend to modern religious historians and cultural anthropologists, a further motif emerges. It is that of Jewish revulsion. The word is too strong at the mere notion and image of a crucified God, of a Messiah done shamefully to death. From the outset, we are told, this revulsion, unattenuated by a wholly implausible epilogue of the ascent from the grave, this is fancy language, speaking of the resurrection, this revulsion was at work. I think he's really touching something here. You can't understand the rejection of this enormous body of evidence, the works of Jesus, the words of Jesus, the enormous parallel and conformity with biblical and eschatological expectation of the last days, this claim to be the Son of God, except that you note that in the rabbinical writings there's a strong element of revulsion. It's not just rejection, it is revulsion, and it's getting at something deeper than just rejection. It's rejection with a vehemence, and therefore we need to understand why, because it exists still. Everything that he's saying is contemporary. It was true then, it's true now. It was tragic then, it's tragic now. The proposition that some kind of self-emptying of divine self bestowed in human form was too anthropomorphic to pass muster in Jewish belief. God as man, the God-man, is too anthropomorphic. We talked about this, the view of God as abstract, lofty, distant, is much more compatible with rabbinical view of God. And there are reasons why men prefer God in the abstract than in the actual. So he's acknowledging that that might be a factor. And yet he says that there are episodes in the Torah where the physicality of God is expressed, notably in God's direct fleshly encounter with Moses. We can add to that. There's a word for divine appearances in the form of man called theophanies. So if you could think of other occasions where God has come as the angel of the Lord or the revelation that came to the parents of Samson, and other times the wrestling of Jacob with the angel is clearly seeing God face to face. And yet there's a wrestling with an anthropomorphic entity in man. And so he's saying, well, then why are you getting upset about Jesus in the form of man? Because this is not unprecedented in our Jewish scriptures. A fourth reason might be pragmatic. The coming and going of the wonder worker from Nazareth had changed nothing. The world was as cruel and corrupt and chaotic as before. This, by the way, is one of the most prominent arguments cited by those who want a discount of the validity of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. Where's the change? The world is the same. There's still cruelty. There's still injustice. Where's the lion lying down with the lamb and all the rest? The messianic must comport an eschatological transformation. The promise of the new kingdom had not been fulfilled at the time of Jesus' death and was now being either adjourned or metamorphosed by the preaching of the early church, putting it at a later time. So clearly there is a force in Jewish refusal, but there is something that they are suspicious about in the Christian arguments that Jesus came, but that his first coming was intended to be inward, something personal and not something that would bring alteration in the world. More resistant to refutation is the undoubted fact that Judaism has, at critical junctures in its troubled affairs, welcomed and invested fanatical credence in messianic claimants such as Zabotai Tzvi. You know that there's been a whole series of presumers to be the Messiah of Israel right up into the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. Zabotai Tzvi was one of the most famous. He had a following by the tens of thousands and when he was threatened with death by Moslem authorities in capture, he converted to Islam. What about the one that Rabbi Akiva endorsed as being the Messiah, who led the Bar Kokhtar, B-A-R-K-O-C-H-B-A, who also died in the wars against Rome and Rabbi Akiva believed that he was the fulfillment. So there's a whole history of false claimants to be Messiah. Why then the rejection of Jesus? If you could entertain other candidates, was his claims less poignant, less convincing than others? Again, I ask, why the grand refutation? Why the great refusal? And the relationship between Christ's agony and the Holocaust has offered a kind of a connection that men ought to consider. But does the Jew in psychological and historical fact truly believe in the coming of the Messiah? More certainly, does he truly thirst for it? What remarkable questions to raise. Or is it, was it perhaps from the very first, what logicians or grammatologists might designate as a counter-factual thing, a categorical meaning never intended to be realized. I'll tell you what, I would give anything to see a man stand up and raise that question for the church today. Not to miss this, here's what he's saying. Maybe all of these biblical categories of the promised Messiah was never intended to be taken seriously. It's just something that is raised as a verbalism, something that you entertain as a concept, but there's no actual real anticipation of the thing in fact. And it becomes a kind of a religious curtsy, a kind of a ceremonial thing. Because the same question that could be raised about Judaism in dismissing Jesus in that way could be raised about the church. And his second coming, do we really expect? Is there really an intense longing? Or has that for us become what the advent of Jesus had meant for Judaism? But listen to the scholarly academic language with which he says this. So, does the Jew in fact truly believe in that coming? More certainly, does he truly thirst for it? Or is it, was it perhaps from the very first, what logicians or grammatologists might designate as a counterfactual updative? I don't even know what these words mean. That is to say, a categorical meaning never intended to be realized. One of the images used by these theologians, and that he suggests that the real addiction of the Jew is to the morning newspaper in a way that, given the choice, the Jew prefers tomorrow's news, however grim, to that of the arrival of the Messiah. We are a people unquenchably avid of history. Our appetite for knowledge is in constant motion. We are the children of Eve, isn't that interesting, whose primal curiosity, remember, is modulated into that of the philosophic and natural sciences. In his heart of hearts, the Jew cannot accept the messianic end-stopping of history, the closure of the unknown, the everlasting conclusion, because it's for him the boredom of salvation. I mean, I'm just... It is, I mean, it's staggering. Like, I don't care what God has done. I don't care that God has... I don't like... I want history to go on. I want to look at tomorrow's newspapers. I like question marks. I like myself to be involved with things. I don't like history to be terminated by God sending his Messiah. Imagine looking upon salvation as a boredom, because the drama's gone. There's no more conflict, and you can't rust and have ambitions anymore. You're now sanctified and a saint, and you're submitted to the Lord, and so the fun's gone. You know? Little do they know, the fun just begins. In denying the messianic status of Jesus and subverting early Christian beliefs, in the proximity of the eschatology, the Jew gave expression to his genius of restlessness, that genius central to his psyche. We were, we remain, nomads across time. And maybe this is what Jews need to hear. In other words, they're not going to hear four spiritual laws. They're not going to hear some canned presentation. What they need is something that challenges them, is conceptually devastating, breaks into where they really live, puts the finger right on their chest, and says, this is what you are. The problem is not the revelation of God and Messiah. The problem is you, and your inability or unwillingness to receive it, because you are a perennial nomad. You don't want the end of history. You want to go on and make your own. You have God sent to yourselves. I often have said that the Church makes a mistake to give the answer before the question is raised. What's the point of telling Jews about a Messiah of whom they have no need? Or that the deliverance from sin, who have not even yet come to a consciousness of sin. The Jew gave expression to his genius of restlessness, that genius central to his psyche. We were, we remain, nomads across time. Strikingly, this reading does accord with the dialectical tension undeniable in Jewish thought and feeling. One needs cite only Maimonides' insistence on a purely figurative, allegoric sense of the expectation of Messiah. So Judaism has argued a perennial adjournment of the Messiah. The Jewish suffering and survival would be tragic nonsense unless the Messiah were to come. It affects deeply the degree of Jewish recognition of the state of Israel, both inside that nation, whose legitimacy is denied by those in ritual attendance on the arrival of Messiah, and within the relation between Israel and the diaspora. He's talking about how a Messiah would make sense in terms of alleviating Jewish suffering and being a deliverer, particularly as it pertains to the recognition of the state. In what measure and act, what level of consciousness was the Jewish refusal of Jesus, at the time and thereafter, a symptom of radical psychic commitment to historical freedom? I wrote, instead of freedom, historical independence to the creative diamond of existential destiny on a changing earth. I'm the only one who can understand this because I've written this in a word. He's saying, to what degree is there something consciousness of Jews in their psyche, in the way that they're constituted, that made the rejection of Jesus, then and now, the outworking of their own commitments to historical independence to the creative diamond of existential destiny? That is to say, men who make their own destiny and do not have it made by God, do not want the God who brings His answer because, in effect, they want to be their own God and make a... I don't know of anyone who's raised questions like that from Jewish hearers. And, in fact, even in the entertainment field where Jews are so prominent, they create their own reality. E.T. and Jurassic Park and whatever they do and now Disney Studios is run by Katzenberg and you just make your own reality in animated cartoons and it's ideological. Something's being communicated. I haven't seen this animated film on the Lion, but Christian commentators say that there's a real ideological thing that's expressed there that is occultic, that conveys a certain view of reality contrary to that given by God in Scripture and we think it's harmless for our kids. He says, but we do know this, however motivated, this abstention, this tenacious dissent has marked to their very depths the histories of Judaism and of Christianity. The identifying destiny of the Jew and that of the Christian is that of the ineradicable scars left by that hour of denial by the veto of the Jew. The concept of theology, per se, is largely foreign to Judaism. That's true. Judaism boasts that it has no theology. That's for Christians with their doctrines that Judaism is a mode of life or of living, a culture. Judaism produces moralist visionaries but very few theologians of any mark. So-called post-Holocaust theology articulates pathos, some arresting images and metaphors, but it is not a rigorous theological reevaluation in any intellectual and analytical sense. It's not constitutionally disposed to be analytical and yet in the business realm and in culture brilliantly analytical but when it comes to understanding things that pertain to its own history, its own destiny, its own faith, its own suffering, remarkably incapable. So I don't know if it's a constitutional inability or just a turn of the wave from seeing things in a way that would contradict its mode of life. It has signally failed to set the matter of the final inhumanity of the systematic bestialization of the human species as being at the pivot of current philosophical inquiry where it belongs. What he's saying is much better. What I say, what he's saying is much better that the Holocaust is the single great group fact of modern times because it reveals something in civilization so rotten to its canker and to its core, the consequences so devastating that unless you plunge in and ferret out the meaning of that contradiction you're giving up reality itself which in fact is what has been done. So just let me read again his last statement about this failure to have any kind of rigorous theological evaluation in any intellectual analytic sense and it has signally failed to set the matter of the final inhumanity of the systematic bestialization of the human species as being at the pivot of current philosophical inquiry where it belongs to ignore the Holocaust and the bestialization the words that he puts together, the systematic bestialization the bestialization could be primitive could be crude, it could be the outworking of people who have no culture and their last niceties are dissolved by some brute necessity but when Germany, the land of Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms when the German genius systematically becomes bestial and you don't examine that as the pivot of reality then you're condemning yourself to unreality and to further tragic consequence whatever their reasons, Judaic paying in attention to the New Testament to patristic literature of the church fathers to Augustine and somehow others is a consequential void for it is in these writings that the record of Jewish suffering among the Gentiles and the Holocaust is to be seen as to a glass dock or lit lodge because we've not brought biblical and post-biblical writings of the church fathers and the men like Augustine to examine the things that would give insight and explanation to what came as the Holocaust. Let me be absolutely clear on this positive examination of the roots of the Shoah, S-H-O-A, everybody knows that that's Hebrew for Holocaust Shoah some don't like to use the word Holocaust they like the word Shoah instead that the roots of Shoah and modern anti-Semitism are of great weight. Political history sociology, the history of economic and class conflicts rudimentary as it is yet of mass behavior has contributed much but the sum of secular understanding falls drastically short of any fundamental insight this is what I have always said you can examine the Holocaust politically economically, culturally, from secular perspectives you'll never come to the truth of it it falls drastically short of any fundamental insight we cannot, of this I'm persuaded be capable of thinking the Holocaust however inadequately if we divorce its origins and its radical enormity from theological sources can you put that statement in your own words what is he saying? In the last analysis it's a theological problem it's a spiritual theological issue and you can rack your brain economically, culturally, you'll never come to it and for a scholar to say that it just blesses me we cannot, of this I'm persuaded be capable of thinking the Shoah and the Holocaust however inadequately if we divorce its genesis its origins and its radical enormity from theological sources more specifically we will not achieve penetration into the persistent psychosis of Christianity which is that of Jew hatred even where there are no Jews or hardly any Jews left unless we come to discern in this dynamic pathology the unhealed scars left by the Jews know to the crucified Messiah I've never heard such things here's what he's saying, of course I'm not agreeing with him when he uses the word Christianity he wants everything, that's Roman Catholicism and so on and he sees the Holocaust as coming largely as the failure of that but the root of it is the unhealed scar or scars left by the Jews who know to the crucified Messiah in other words, we have invited and provoked Gentile Christianity against us in such a way by our persistent rejection of the Messiah it is to these unhealed scars or stigmata that's the word to describe the wounds of Jesus that we may apply in a dread sense an injunction from Soren Kierkegaard the Danish philosopher that the wounds of possibility must be kept open don't close the book on this we need to see if we're not provoking something against ourselves by a persistent rejection of the one whom God has sent how readily we forget that not only Jews but the authors of the Gospel and the Acts and all his first followers were Jews the beginning of the macabre history of Jewish self-hatred are inextricably involved with those of Christianity I don't like to get psychological but I don't want to dismiss this either that there may be a root that has gone on through time of Jewish self-hatred in an unconscious way that has come upon the entire nation for the grievous rejection of that moment of truth that came to us 2,000 years ago that we're candidates to be victims we look to be victims and in fact we become victims because there's a kind of self-hatred that invites victimization and that that self-hatred has its roots in this earlier rejection and revulsion you can imagine those people are stunned listening to this Christianity is at fundamental points a product and externalization of this Jewish self-hatred the thought presses one that Christianity is at fundamental points a product and externalization of this Jewish self-hatred this is palpably Luke you can moreover read his detestation of his fellow Jews I don't see that to hand over Christ the Messiah for shameful execution is grievous enough but by far far worse is the reconsequence of the Jew before Christ's divinity his refusal of the identity and epiphany of the Savior epiphany is the revealing betrayal and judicial murder can be repaired in belief in Christ's resurrection and a conversion to his promise but the abstinence of the Jew from such conversion amounts to deicide persistently renewed that is to say to remain silent in the face of Jewish rejection and crucifixion is to take that sin to yourself and to affirm it that the only way to be absolved and we're going to get into this as I go back into my own paper of the collective guilt is to reject the acts of the fathers and the crucifixion of Jesus which is to say to affirm them in the absence of that affirmation your silence constitutes an approval of their act and there's an unbroken continuance of sin with your fathers and therefore you inherit of those curses I can hardly believe that an unbelieving Jew could make a statement like this to hand over Christ to Messiah for shameful execution is grievous but far far worse is the recalcitrance, the unwillingness of the Jew before Christ's divinity their refusal of the identity and epiphany the revealing of the Savior betrayal and judicious murder can be repaired through a belief in Christ's resurrection and a conversion to his promise but the obdurate abstinence of the Jew from such conversion amounts to deicide persistently removed we stand guilty in every generation and even in the present of the rejection and the crucifixion of Jesus as God is of such a kind that it cannot be done and finally openly and in every generation will have its expression and its consequence have you ever heard of a French mathematician by the name of Pascal, P-A-S-C-A-L he made the statement no man has a right to sleep because Jesus remains in agony until the end of time talks about the house of Israel is again on the verge of national ruin Israel is redeemed but only so far and exactly insofar as it ceases to be itself only if it understands their willful self-exclusion from the new dispensation makes of it an unpeople a vestigial absurdity and a lamentable spectacle wow it's a wonder that that guy did not get away stoned the Jew holds Christianity and indeed mankind insofar as mankind is the object of Christ's sacrificial redemptive love we Jews hold man hostage by refusing to accept Jesus Christ the Jewish remnant has condemned man to the treadmill of history had the Jews acknowledged Jesus as the son of God had they received his concorda of grace that filiality that status of transcendence would have been proved the new would then have been shown to be beyond doubt the fulfillment of the Old Testament the cross would indeed have overruled and cancelled the fatal tree in Eden made of the same wood the Jewish rebuke to Christ prevents the coming of the messianic realm it pries and forces open the ravenous jaws of history I'm so glad you like I have second thoughts about trotting out academic papers but I knew that this was so special the thoughts are stunning and the way in which they are expressed just pierce right through want to hear that again? the statement that Jews hold man hostage it's not just that they themselves are victims of their own rejection but their failure to have received and to acknowledge Messiah has had consequence for all mankind because had we received him what excuse then would men anywhere have had you see what I mean? but our rejection gives men room for their rejection and therefore has left mankind in a pitiful condition that presently is in had the Jews acknowledged Jesus as the Son of God had they received his concordat of grace that filiality from the word filial like brotherly that status of transcendence would have been proved had they received it the truth would have been revealed that's what Jesus said if you know my doctrines are true do them the new would then have been it's shown to be beyond the the fulfillment of the Old Testament the cross would indeed have overruled and cancelled the fatal tree of Eden made of the same wood the Jewish rebuke to Christ prevents the coming of the messianic realm that pries and forces open the ravenous jaws of history and in fact what you need to do is just ponder for a moment and think of the Jews who have pried open the jaws Karl Marx the birth of communism Sigmund Freud I mean there have been victims by the millions in perverted messianic schemes that men have produced out of their own humanity because they had not surrendered to the messianic claims and had them proved and demonstrated remember that the soldiers came back to the Jewish authorities who had paid them and gave the clear statement of what had happened the great power had released Jesus from death and they said will you tell let this story go forth that his disciples came at night and stole his body from the tomb and then it says and this story is relieved still you know there's such a thing as a choosing to believe a lie in fact you can see this in Christendom that people will go out looking for counsel until they find that counsel that agrees with what they want when men want to live a lie they'll find a way to confirm it no matter what the testimony of truth so the resurrection of Lazarus the way in which Jesus died that was sufficient to turn an unregenerate Gentile to exclaiming truly this is the Son of God the empty tomb after his death his appearance to 500 that even in the crucifixion men came up out of their graves the rending of the veil in the temple that was what like a hands run thick and was read from top to bottom in the moment that he gave up the ghost and not to put this together and say hey we have really boohooed this lightning this shaking this earthquake this rent veil these are evidence this empty tomb