The Importance of Body in Our Jewish Roots - Panel - By Fr. Bob Sears, SJ

After experiencing the impact of the Jewish Christian service in Albuquerque, I was moved to reflection myself.  My personal initiation to Messianic Judaism began in Jerusalem, at Christ Episcopal Church where I attended a messianic Jewish service.  During it I felt God’s joy.  It was as though God were saying “at last those I have chosen are entering into the blessing I have prepared for them for 2000 years!”  I felt the blessing of those 2000 years of preparation, knowing the depth of spirituality of mystics like Teresa of Avila who had Jewish ancestors.   
      Pope Paul VI, expressed the Church’s relation to Judaism this way: “The Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets….To the Jews ‘belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ,” (Rom 9:4-5) “for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” (Rom 11:29)  (See Paul VI, Nostra Aetate, 4)  We can only be whole by embracing our Jewish roots. 
      A conversation I had at lunch with a Jesuit who had attended a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem brought home to me the gift of reconnecting with Jewish roots.  He experienced that a poor person came into the gathering and asked for help.  People most naturally contributed to his need.  Afterwards his host explained that Jewish people took it as a matter of fact that they would help a fellow Jew in difficulties.  After all, they were one people and all brothers and sisters.  I could glimpse St. Paul’s image of “being one body” with Christ as something he had learned to take for granted.  Our experience of being separate people brought together in an external union of belief would have been foreign to him.  The body was real, and the community of Jews were one body. 
      It is this sense of corporate identity, fostered over thousands of years, that was weakened when Christianity went over to the Gentiles who had no such history.  Many Jewish structures and practices were continued and transformed by the early Christians but in separating, and under Hellenistic influence, they also tended to emphasize the spiritual more than the bodily connection.  Family ties were an obstacle for early believers because they needed to separate from their tradition to become Christians.  Baptism moved from the home to the church.  The environment and land, which was reverenced by Jewish tradition as belonging to God and God’s gift to those who faithfully obeyed God, tended to be neglected in Western Christianity as focus was more on future, spiritual fulfillment. The organic unity of humans with nature that God originally intended was not then fully experienced.   
      Jewish thought does not separate spirit and body as the Greek speaking Gentiles tended to do, but refers to the whole person as both body and spirit. The body is what unites us with one another, not what separates us from each other. Jews take seriously God’s word that husband and wife are “one body” and have a God-given call to “be fruitful and multiply.” Sexuality is integrated with spirituality, and becomes a part of their Sabbath celebration, whereas the Gentile Christian tradition as tended to be suspicious of sexuality till very recently.

      Writing the article on “The Trauma of the Broken Church,” I discovered further aspects that we lost.  There I quoted Jurgen Moltmann [The Way of Jesus Christ]: “We need to open in gratitude to the gift of Judaism, even to their present “No” to accepting Jesus as Messiah… The Christian church’s treatment of Jews as “those who rejected Jesus” must be changed to Paul’s view that God’s providence is at the root of their inability to believe. Paul wrote in Romans 11:11-15, “Through their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make them jealous …. If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?” In 1933 Martin Buber explained that the Jewish “No” to Jesus as Messiah was not a question of unwillingness or hard-hearted defiance. It was an “inability to accept.” He wrote, “We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations - that the world is not yet redeemed. We sense its unredeemedness. …The redemption of the world is for us indivisibly one with the perfecting of creation, with the establishment of the unity which nothing more prevents, the unity which is no longer controverted, and which is realized in all the protean variety of the world. Redemption is one with the kingdom of God in its fulfillment.”( Quoted in Moltmann, The way of Jesus Christ, p. 28) Moltmann explained, “Israel will be delivered because it sees glory…[Paul’s] practical answer to the Jewish “No” is not anti-Judaism but the evangelization of the nations.” ( Ibid. , pp. 35-36.) We need to embody our faith in deeds (Jms 2:14-17), for the sign that we are Jesus’ disciples is our love for one another. This is a call also to evangelization to all the world for the Jewish “No” will last, as Romans 11:25 says, “until the full number of Gentiles comes in,” as a visible sign of God’s love.  
      In other words, Judaism looks for the kingdom of God to be manifested in reality, bodily, not just in spirit, and it is this realism of full bodily union that has been weakened by our separation from that root.  Christ came to reconcile through the blood of the cross (Eph 2:14-16) not to further divide.  Reunion with Judaism brings with it a deep rootedness in history as well as a full sense of bodily union.  I see it as a special gift to experience further the new healing and wholeness that messianic Judaism could bring us in a conference focused on healing of the body.  For “body” is not just individual but corporate, including relationship to the environment, and it is this corporate sense of oneness that was weakened by separation from Judaism.