Laying Down Our Cudgels
International Holocaust Remembrance Day[1] is commemorated January 27th each year. The date commemorates the January 27, 1945 liberation of the Nazi’s largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. This UN-sanctioned day commemorates the Nazi genocide of six million Jewish people, as well as 11 million non-Jewish people.
For my generation, the Holocaust – more than any other recent historical event – explains my peoples’ “No! Never!” response to following Jesus as our promised Messiah. Tragically, the Christian cultural and religious background of the perpetrators and those who permitted the Holocaust has become a cudgel to beat senseless any rational consideration of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.
My own personal story is a case in point.
When asked to consider Jesus as the promised Messiah I immediately shot back, “No way! I’m Jewish. How can you possibility expect me to consider following a man in whose name my people have been killed and persecuted for two thousand years? Weren’t Germany, Poland, Austria…Christian nations?”
Case closed – consideration of Jesus’ claims was a non-starter for me, as it is for most of my people. With one swift blow of my cudgel, I negated the need for thoughtful discourse or inquiry.
The validity of my response was unassailable, or so it felt. It is true that Hitler was not a Christian. But it is equally certain that many within the Third Reich and its collaborators were Christians in reality and not simply by confession.
Taking a stand against this hypocrisy and its legacy of destruction and standing for my people was baked into my emotional DNA. My father saw the camps shortly after their liberation and refused to discuss it until the day of his death fifty years later. All communication with my mother’s extended family stopped permanently after the massacre at Babi Yar[2].
Yet, through the loving patient witness of a Christian willing to be honest about Christian hypocrisy and failure, I came to see the fallacy in my response.
Now, as a follower of Jesus, I see the sad irony in my people’s refusal to consider Jesus in light of the Holocaust – Jesus more than anyone in history understood its cause.
Rejecting Jesus and blaming His followers for the Holocaust underscores our ignorance of His teaching and mission. Reading His words reveals how definitively He condemns events such as the Holocaust and how He lays bare the heart attitudes from which they flow. Observing His life, especially His willingness to lay it down, confirms His love for humankind (even a humanity capable of the Holocaust) and His commitment to doing something to redeem it.
As we observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let us honor the memory of all its victims by committing ourselves to speak out against anti-Semitism, and to speak up to our Jewish friends about the real Jesus and His good news…to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.
May the Lord use us to help our Jewish relatives, friends, neighbors and co-workers to lay down their cudgels and consider Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, who came to save us from ourselves.
“Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.”[3]
Written by Dan Strull, LIFE Board Member
Click to view Dan’s personal testimony on video.
For practical ways to combat anti-Semitism and demonstrate Yeshua’s love, see https://lifeinmessiah.org/learn-how-to-fight-antisemitism.
Footnotes:
[1] This international UN-sanctioned commemoration is not to be confused with Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated by Jewish people in Israel and around the world each spring following Passover.
[2] Babi Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where Einsatzgruppen (Nazi) mobile squads killed at least 34,000 Jews over a one-week period in September 1941. Russian estimates put the number of killed at nearly 100,000. (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/babiyar.html)
[3] Isaiah 53:4–6, written approximately 700 years before Jesus was born.