Ecumenism and Engaging Our Jewish Roots - Workshop - By Fr. Bob Sears, SJ

I have a Jewish friend I have directed for some 25 years, who is now more and more devoted to Jesus.  When I told him about our topic he said “Of course, Jews see creation as “good” and sexuality as a gift from God, not as a temptation as Christians historically have viewed it as.”  Jewish thought does not separate spirit and body as the Greek speaking Gentiles tended to do, but refers both to the whole person.  Where we Gentile Christians tend to see body as belonging to us and what separates us from one another, for “my body is not your body,” Jews see body as what unites embodied persons.  We share bodiliness.  Marriage itself was a new embodiment.  It was because Eve was formed from the one body (a rib) of Adam, that succeeding humans were told that they were to leave father and mother and cling to each other and become “one body.”  They were to became an embodied unity.   
      Similarly, since creation is good, the earth is not something to manipulate, as our scientific viewpoint tends to see it.  It is a gift from God, a “garden” given to humans to “have dominion over” (that is, tend for God) while walking with God in the garden.  The earth is a partner, given to humans to “rule” on God’s behalf, not to manipulate for humans’ self-centered goals.  For nature expresses human attitudes even though the “land is the Lord’s.” (Lev 25:23) It was the land that cried out because of Abel’s blood that was shed.(Gn 4:10)  By praying to heal the land, we have learned how the land is affected by the misuse of humans or by wars.  The land reveals how it has been treated.  The land needs healing when humans have sinned. 
      Individually, the human person is seen by Jewish thought as embodied and in community, not simply as individual and spiritual.  The unique hope of NT faith, from its Jewish roots, is the resurrection of the body, not just the soul entering into immortality.  This is Jewish, for it was bodily resurrection that they awaited along with a bodily manifestation of the transformed world that the Messiah was to bring.  It is largely the failure of the world to embody this transformation that makes Jews conclude that the Messiah has not yet come.  

      The fact of fulfillment as embodied is further witnessed to by Jesus in giving us his body to eat and his blood to drink.  That this is not simply symbolic is indicated by John 6 where the word Jesus uses is “chew” or “gnaw” as animals eat (Jn 6:54-58), not just eat in general as be nourished symbolically, as when Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of my Father.”)  This assimilation into Jesus’ body needs also to be expressed bodily, by “washing each others feet,” by self-sacrificial love which is embodied for one another.  For all believers form “one body” just as man and wife, so believers are one body in Christ (Eph 5:25-33).  It is an embodied unity that is fully expressed by Jesus dying on the cross for us and reuniting with us in his Spirit which is “handed over” in his dying (Jn 19:30) and forms his followers into “one family,” his “brothers and sisters” (Jn 20:17 “tell my brothers”). 
      In reading about our Jewish roots, I also learned that our Catholic devotion to Mary, “the mother of my Lord” (Lk 1:43) and to the Pope is also rooted in the Hebrew Davidic Covenant.  Alongside the Davidic king in the messianic court of Jerusalem sat two of the most important people of the Kingdom, the gebirah, the mother of the King, whom Solomon seated at his right (1 Kgs 2:12-19), and the Royal Steward (prime minister of the kingdom).  Solomon bowed to the queen mother, for she signified that he was the legitimate heir of King David. Jeremiah signaled the end of the Davidic Kingdom when he wrote: “Say to the king and to the queen mother: Come down from your throne” (Jer 13:18).  The Royal Steward was not the King, but by appointment he cared for the realm and carried the authority of the King, the “key of the house of David with which ‘he shall open and none shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open.’” (Is 22:22).  Mt 16:18-22 indicates that Jesus appointed Peter to this position of “Royal Steward” in His Church, and Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary showed how the early church looked on her as Queen Mother. To lose those roots in Jewish tradition is to miss the full meaning of those positions.  (See The Crucified Rabbi, by Taylor R. Marshall (Dallas, TX: St. John Press, 2009) 42-47.)

      Where we, who are from Gentile origin and influenced by the Greek tradition, tend to spiritualize all these truths or miss their ancient roots, our Jewish heritage sees them very concretely, and sees the resurrection as bringing about a new embodiment already in this world. Many Hassidic masters honored the need to embody the spirit which they saw as capable of the same degree of enlightenment as the soul when the body was in a state of purity.  Rabbi Nachman cited Job 19:26, “from my flesh shall I behold God.’  “Through the very flesh of the body one can behold God…(for) the human sees and perceives spirit by way of the body.” (quoted in Estelle Frankel, Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing and Inner Wholeness (Boston: Shambhala, 2005) 267)  It is not enough to talk about love; we must embody it.  
      It is in really by living the unity of body and spirit in this world, by our [lived] love, that Jesus’ death and resurrection has brought about, that all will know we are his disciples. (Jn 13:35)  Our Jewish heritage calls us to that embodied fulfillment.