The Jews answered him,
“We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.
You, a man, are making yourself God.
The Gospel of John becomes the central narrative during these final days of our Lenten journey. As Jesus nears the culmination of his life’s mission in Jerusalem, “the Jews” more and more are portrayed as his primary detractors.
Sadly, down through the centuries, many of these passages became the pretext for the cancer of anti-Semitism to metastasize among the people of God. From the expulsion of the Jewish people from Spain in 1492, to the relegating of the Jews into Ghettos in Rome and other European cities, the charge of ‘God-killers’ became the pretext for such horrific actions.
Anti-Semitism at the hands of Christians reached its horrific intensity with the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Substantially a ‘Christian’ country, the cancer of anti-Semitism grew in Germany because so many good people refused to confront its ugliness and, hence, quietly acquiesced and were complicit in this scare on humanity.
The Second Vatican Council spoke truthfully of the Christian Church’s historic complicity in the sin of anti-Semitism and formally declared that the Jewish people as a whole are not guilty of deicide. It spoke affirming that the covenant that God made with the Jewish people was not abrogated or done away with but continues to this day.
St. John Paul II throughout the whole course of his lengthy pontificate witnessed to this fraternal and loving attitude toward ‘our Jewish sisters and brothers.’ And affirming that we are all children of a loving God. This is a beautiful affirmation that has continued in both the pontificates of Pope Benedict and Pope Francis.
When we hear such language in John’s Gospel, let us realize with renewed clarity that John was speaking of the contemporary religious elite whose self-perceived importance and hubris did not permit the transforming power of God’s grace to liberate and make new. May we never follow in their footsteps.