Rosh Hashanah 5782: The King as Judge and Jury

It's not hard to see injustice in the world today. It's everywhere. And the notion of "it's not fair' shouts at us from the playground's fence which is locked as a prevention to the tears of the daughter prevented from seeing her dying father because the border to his state is similarly locked. The reason for all the closures, they say, is a virus and the need to keep it away from others. 

But some bypass the border restrictions if they have money or a football league and its wealth behind them. That only amplifies the unfairness of border closures, at least to those of us who are prevented.

On an ordinary day, such reasoning is accepted. Take for example, the sexual offender/criminal. We want, after his sentence at the jail is complete, him to be released (that's fair), but not in my backyard. That would be unfair. 

So the closed playground, or the closed state borders, the closed neighbourhood-- all these moments in time, even in our times, are real and evidence the cries that are justified, "It's not fair!"

'Fairness' is the modern word for the more ancient term 'justice.'

Monday evening, the 6th of September, across the world, Jewish people will pause their already-paused life due to the virus of COVID-19, and begin the 10 days of prayer and consideration called the '10 Days of Awe.' Rosh Hashanah begins the calendar watch as we hear the sound of the shofar, traditionally blown 100 times each day during the first two days of the year 5,782. Jewish people consider this the number of years since the original couple from the Bible was created. That's how long it has been since Adam and Eve were created and placed in the Garden of Eden. That's also how long it's been since the first cries of 'It's not fair!' were heard in the world. 

After all, how were they supposed to know what would happen if they disregarded or as we have learned for centuries, disobeyed the Almighty? The information was limited; the declaration of what was allowed and what was disallowed was scant.  Some in our day would say the legislation was confusing. All we have recorded from the Bible is "The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2.16-17)

Not much to go on there. An entire patch of land, perhaps the size of New South Wales, and yet, this deity told the man of the household to enjoy the lot. All except for one tree, don't eat from that one, or there will be consequences.

If you have ever had children, or ever were one, you know that as soon as instructions like this are given, after a certain age of the child, the invitation to disobey seems larger than the call to obedience. Sure enough, the story unfolds as a certain serpent slinks along on all fours and invites the woman of the couple, who hadn't heard the message directly from the Lord herself, to have a bite. Sure enough, she does, and then the man joins her in this fatal snack. 

Boom! What follows is the monologue of the judge sentencing both the man and woman to ongoing troubles and death and sentencing the serpent to slide on his belly from then on. The three curses, on each of the participants in that Garden scene, are still with us to this day. But some will cry, "that's not fair!" For 5700 years Adam's descendants would work by the sweat of their brow and have other troubles. What did we do? Why is this punishment being doled out to us?

From verse 17 of chapter 3 of Genesis we read, "Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil, you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground. Because from it, you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.” (Genesis 3.17-19)

Listen to the curses, yes, we call them curses, not only consequences but penalties harsher than a 6-week suspension from rugby or a small notice in the sports section after Tom Brady in 2014 with Deflategate.

To the woman, God declared three (and some say 10 (Nathan, page 9)) penalties. "To the woman, He said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain, you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband. And he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3.16)

That all seems so unfair, so unjust. I mean, ok, it's justice. Yes, we see that. God was in charge of the Garden. It was his place after all. They were brought in to tend to the setting like Peter Sellers in "Being There" they were Chauncy Gardeners. I get that. But seriously, one little mistake would cost them forever the chance to stay in the Garden. Even Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, and Nash later went to Woodstock and wanted to 'get themselves back to the Garden." 

Don't you want to cry 'foul?' Don't you want to say, 'that's not fair!'

We'll talk more about the punishments, especially to the serpent in a while.

On Rosh Hashanah, the saying goes, it is written and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed. May it be written, and may it be sealed that you have a new year that brings fulfillment and joy, peace and prosperity, health and wisdom. That's a lot of 'may it be.' Some would say, it's a lot of wishful thinking. On what is it based after all?

These 10 days we ponder the God who made Adam and Eve, and who, we are told, is Sovereign over all the earth. Here in Australia we understand the term ‘sovereign’ while in the US, where I grew up, that’s an odd term. But a sovereign is more than a coin, it’s the ruler, the dominus, actually the KING is the best term for that. God wants to be king in our lives the next week and a half. 

Of course, 10 days does not make a person a subject of a king, as that’s something we work on throughout our lives. But there is time to render yourself the subject of the king during this period and thus ensure that his kingship, his sovereignty, his kingdom will rule in your life going forward. That’s actually the point of this season. To reconcile ourselves to him as Judge and King. That’s why we have round challahs. They represent God as King and Sovereign. It’s an image of his crown. Yes, of course, it’s about the continuity of the calendar that goes around and around, and on and on, but it’s more than that. I wear a mitre, like a king’s crown and a white robe. It’s royal. God wants us to remember his kingship this day and these 10 days. He is the king and in Bible days, the king was the judge. Remember King Solomon and the two women fighting over the same baby? As the king he had to consider the court his own and make determinations. He was the Judge.

In our days, we often think of a judge and the instructions the judge gives the jury. The jury, a court within a court of 12 of the defendant’s peers, listen and make those decisions mostly in criminal cases here in Australia. The judge is left to sentence what the jury decides. But in the court in heaven, there is one judge and he is also the jury. To be sure, each of us has a role to play in sustaining one another in the family of God, but when it comes to judgment and punishments, there is one Lawgiver and one eternal Judge before whom we all must stand. 

That could sound ominous to you. It probably does if you ponder your own sin and the penalty or penalties those deserve. Yes, the Judge, the Jury, the prosecution led by the District Attorney, are all in agreement. But that’s not the worst of it. You see, even your own lawyer who knows the law will tell you that your sins have separated you from the Lord. (Isa. 59.1-2) There is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and does not sin. (Ecclesiastes 7.20) The soul that sins, that one shall die. (Ezek. 18.4) This sounds fairly hopeless, doesn’t it?

We need a lawyer, an advocate who can argue something or that can fix our desperate situation. Where is such a one?

For that we have to go back to our Bible reading and listen to the declaration by the Almighty against the serpent. There we see and hear a hint of hope in this most desperate situation.

It’s in verse 15. 

I will put enmity between you and the woman. Between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head and you will crush his heel.

There we see a hint of how this meeting with the King might actually turn out to be different in our days. Strange, isn’t it that we should look back 5700 years to find a hint of hope?

I’ll get back to this hint in a few minutes.

For now, what do most Sydneysiders do when confronted with their own loss, their own failures, their own dismal desperation? After all, this is New Year’s Eve, and we in Sydney know how to bring that in, not only for us, but for the rest of the world. We light up the bridge and the harbor, and make resolutions, don’t we?

We resolve to do better.

We resolve to make a change in our diet or in our exercise regimen. We hope, often against hope, that something will be different in our lives, but often by the 10^th of January, all those hopes are dashed. 

But, you might argue, we are religious and thus our resolutions are of a different calibre and quality. And you may be right. So maybe your ‘read the Bible in a year’ program did prove successful that one year. Maybe your ‘fasting on Mondays and Thursdays’ lasted until Passover, but then again, maybe it didn’t. We couch our change mechanisms in religious terms, but that won’t fix the problems at all. In fact, at times they make the problems that much worse. 

When confronted with our own insufficiencies, we promise to reform. But that fails.

Then we have to look elsewhere, away from ourselves, to a power that is both outside us and who is stronger than us. Who or where is that help?

King David sang, “essa einai, el hehorim” in Psalm 121. He found out that his help was not on the mountains or we might add, not on the harbour. His help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. 

Here then, my friends, is the conundrum. We have the demands of God, for wholesome life choices and responsible love for him and our neighbour. We have the justice demands measured against our failures and what we call ‘sin’, or rather, what God calls ‘sin.’ So how is it that our help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth?

The answer is in our Bible text tonight. The curse on the serpent was in answer to Satan’s boasts. 

Listen to his boasts, to which God replied.

Satan said he would kill Adam and wed Eve. God answered, “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” He thought he would be the king over the whole world. God’s answer was ‘cursed are you from among all cattle.” Your thought was “I will walk upright” but God answered you were to crawl on your belly. Your thought was “I will eat the world’s dainties.” God said, you will eat dust all the days of your life.”

But there is one that the rabbis seem to miss. In our text, the enmity between the serpent and Eve is carried on through generations. We read that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. This ultimate victory over the Satanic forces of the world catches my attention every year. 

The victory for which we all long, every year when we litanize our sins, the victory over sin itself, and the way into the presence of the Almighty, is not from our own reformation or our own realization. The victory is in our repentance to the One who is the serpent-bruiser. Conquering sin and Satan is the work of the Messiah. 

In fact in Bereshit Rabba 23, a rabbinic commentary on Genesis, we read, “Eve had respect to that seed which is coming from another place. And who is this? This is Messiah the King.”

The one to bruise or crush the serpent is actually King Messiah. Now this begins to make sense. The only one who can fix things between us and the Lord is the Lord himself. It would take a royal to go before the king and plead our case. Only an in-house royal could accomplish what we, the members of the masses, so desperately need. 

And thus he did. Yeshua came from heaven to a patch of ground smaller than New South Wales, a village outside Jerusalem in Bethlehem approximately 2000 years ago. Why did he come? The words of the song say this:

In the darkness we were waiting 

Without hope, without light 

Till from heaven You came running;

There was mercy in Your eyes 

 

To fulfil the law and prophets 

To a virgin came the Word. 

From a throne of endless glory 

To a cradle in the dirt.

 

To reveal the kingdom coming 

And to reconcile the lost, 

To redeem the whole creation 

You did not despise the cross.

 

For even in Your suffering 

You saw to the other side, 

Knowing this was our salvation 

Jesus for our sake 

You died.” (written by Brooke Ligertwood, Scott Ligertwood, and Jason Ingram)

There is the victory for us in Sydney. For those of you on the zoom call in New Zealand or in the USA. Up in South Korea or Japan, and wherever you live. The promise of the Bruised One who would bruise the serpent and win for us the victory is fulfilled in Yeshua, born in Bethlehem, but he already ever existed. 

On this evening of Rosh Hashanah, take away more than extra calories in round challot and apples dipped in honey. Take away more than the shofar blasts. Take away the joy of knowing you are forgiven and redeemed. God initiated this in the Garden of Eden. And you can rejoice in this season of rejoicing because GOD has taken away your sins. 

Yes, there will continue to be football players who get away with high tackles or mistreatment of others. Yes, we will feel the bother of COVID even though we will hit the 80% vaccinated here in NSW. “It’s not fair!” may be a cry you feel, if not repeat, when others get ahead of you, or ahead of those for whom you barrack. Your favourite café may never reopen. The bad guys will appear to get away with murder.

In the end, when Yeshua comes back to earth, restoration will happen. Peter pronounced this early in his public ministry:

“But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His messiah would suffer, he has thus fulfilled, therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; and that he may send Yeshua, the messiah appointed for you, whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things (Acts 3.18-21)

The call then is to repent and return. That’s still my call tonight. 

INVITATION

In a moment I’m going to ask you if you would like to receive Yeshua as your messiah and saviour. I’m going to ask if you want the one who was Beaten to beat the serpent on your behalf. His justice is everlasting. His fairness is unto the ages. 

Yeshua took it on the chin, and in his wrists and feet, and died a criminal’s death so that you could have eternal life. 

Do you want that?

Do you want God’s justice?

If so, pray with me just now. 

If you prayed that prayer, just now, will you write me to let me know?   bob@jewsforjesus.org.au   I’d love to write you back and encourage you and be available to answer any queries you have. Or at least I’ll try!

We don’t ask God to inscribe us in the Book of Life any more. That’s already been done. We don’t ask him to seal you any longer. That’s been done by the Spirit of God. 

We ask God to give you a good and sweet year. L’shana tovah um’tookah to you and all yours in 5782 and well beyond.

Let’s listen and sing along to that song, please.

 

-----------------------/

 

Bibliography:

The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Judah Goldin (Translated), Schocken Books, New York, 1955. 

 

Actual text read

Gen. 3:1   Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from ¹any tree of the garden’?” ² The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; ³ but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” ⁴ The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! ⁵ “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and ^ayou will be like God, knowing good and evil.” ⁶ When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they ^aknew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves ¹loin coverings.

 

Gen. 3:8   They heard the sound of ^athe LORD God walking in the garden in the ¹cool of the day, ^band the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ Then the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “^aWhere are you?” ¹⁰ He said, “^aI heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” ¹¹ And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” ^12 aThe man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” ¹³ Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “^aThe serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

¹⁴      The LORD God said to the serpent, 

         “Because you have done this, 

         Cursed are you more than all cattle, 

         And more than every beast of the field; 

         On your belly you will go, 

         And dust you will eat 

         All the days of your life;

¹⁵      And I will put enmity 

         Between you and the woman, 

         And between your seed and her seed; 

         He shall ¹bruise you on the head, 

         And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

¹⁶      To the woman He said, 

         “I will greatly multiply 

         Your pain ¹in childbirth, 

         In pain you will bring forth children; 

         Yet your desire will be for your husband, 

         And he will rule over you.”

¹⁷  Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; 

         Cursed is the ground because of you; 

         In ¹toil you will eat of it 

         All the days of your life.

¹⁸      Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; 

         And you will eat the plants of the field;

¹⁹      By the sweat of your face 

         You will eat bread, 

         Till you return to the ground, 

         Because from it you were taken; 

         For you are dust, 

         And to dust you shall return.”

 

Broken hearted (Love, whose month is ever May)

It's a rather odd phrase-- broken hearted. There are medical influences that cause the heart of a man to tear, but that's not what anyone really means when they use this phrase. It has to do with pain and aches on the inside, perhaps regrets and suffering sometimes caused by others, and sometimes caused by ourselves. Usually this has to do with a situation of discomfort, and a desire on the part of the hearted to wish things could improve.

Some people really don't know how to handle other folks; most of us wish we did, but admit that we have a long way to go.

So what is a broken heart? It's used in reference to a state of extreme grief or sorrow, typically caused by the death of a loved one or the ending of a romantic relationship. As in "she broke my heart" or "that one is going to grow up to break many hearts" and such.

There is another use of the phrase, too.
The singing team from Hillsong in their song "Hosanna" wrote these prayer lyrics, "Heal my heart and make it clean; Open up my eyes to the things unseen.
Show me how to love like you have loved me.
Break my heart for what breaks yours,
Everything I am for Your kingdom's cause,
As I walk from earth into eternity

Of course, their use of broken heart has to do with being moved to be concerned about other things that matter. It reminds me of the heart-strings being pulled by the sight of a blind person with flies around his face, or a small child newly orphaned looking at her bombed village's hut with tears. So a broken heart can mean a heart that stops thinking about itself, and cares about others for just a moment.

No wonder there is confusion about hearts and broken ones at that. When we see a homeless war veteran, our heart ought to 'go out' to such a person and his family. I suppose that's the 'brokenness' that others reference. "That just breaks my heart to see him eating out of the rubbish bin by the cafe," we say.

In terms of God and His compassion for people, He especially cares about the widows and orphans and He especially wants us to care for them as well. A cursory reading of either Testament will highlight this concern. (e.g. Job 22.9, Isa. 10.2, James 1.27) We ought to care for those whom care forgot.

So may I aver that there are two uses of this concept and they really do overlap. 1) A broken heart is when someone experiences the pain of love lost. Shakespeare said in "As you like it" (Act 2): "If thou remember'st not the slightest folly that ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not loved." He well knew the pain of wrongly placed love. He said in Love's Labours Lost "By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy." (Act 4, scene 3)

But 2) the other use of broken heartedness is compassion. It's the concern we feel for the weak and the downtrodden. Our hearts break for them. And that's a good thing. So how do we dovetail these two thoughts?

Francesca Battisteri wrote this song:

Truth is harder than a lie
The dark seems safer than the light
And everyone has a heart that loves to hide
I'm a mess and so are you
We've built walls nobody can get through
Yeah, it may be hard, but the best thing we could ever do, ever do

Bring your brokenness, and I'll bring mine
'Cause love can heal what hurt divides
And mercy's waiting on the other side
If we're honest
If we're honest

Don't pretend to be something that you're not
Living life afraid of getting caught
There is freedom found when we lay our secrets down at the cross, at the cross

It would change our lives
It would set us free
It's what we need to be
Bring your brokenness, and I'll bring mine
'Cause love can heal what hurt divides
And mercy's waiting on the other side
If we're honest"

They used to say "God can heal the broken hearted, if we give Him all the pieces.' But now I think He can heal us if we just turn to Him and are honest. Lord, heal our sick and broken hearts. Make us ministers of your life and love. Give us compassion for the hurting. Others who are hurting much worse than us. And don't help us to help them SO THAT WE ARE BENEFITED. The issue is never us. Lord, help us to forget about ourselves and care for others, full stop.

No one knew that better than Yeshua. He was the Lord of life and love and we read of His broken heart for the Jewish people of His day with "Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd." (Matthew 9.36) And He knew the other kind of disappointing heart break with his friend and colleague Judas in Luke 22.48: 'Jesus said to him, "Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?" '

You want a model of broken heartedness that makes a difference in this world? Check out Yeshua. Best one to model, to be sure.

Who bears the guilt for the death of Jesus?

Published in Eternity website in Australia: here During the 2015 Hillsong Conference, Jarryd Hayne, the former Parramatta Eels rugby league star and now running back for the San Francisco 49ers, sent out a tweet to his followers: “Jesus wanted to help people but was killed by his own people.” The next day after being challenged by one of his followers that Jesus was killed by the Romans, Hayne wrote, “The Jews were the people who took him to the Romans n [sic] forced them to give the order because they couldn’t.”

Because of the tweets, Jewish representatives immediately launched a counter campaign. Hayne subsequently removed the two tweets.

Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about the Jewish reaction, quoting the chairman of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, Dvir Abramovich, who said he was deeply concerned by Hayne’s tweets and labeled them “damaging, painful and irresponsible”.

“For thousands of years Jews were held in contempt and were persecuted and murdered because they were labeled as Christ-killers,” Abramovich said in a statement.

Koziol reported, “Most Christians no longer hold the view that the Jewish people were responsible for Jesus’ death, and persistent belief in that narrative is now associated with anti-Semitism.”

Hayne later sent out an apology tweet, which was welcomed by Jewish community representatives. But the issue remains unsettling for Jews. Some of Hayne’s Twitter followers chided him for his apology, using ugly language to describe Jewish people.

It is unsurprising that the Jewish community was up in arms about Jarryd Hayne’s announcement that Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus. We will cop it yet again from another generation of angry Jesus-defenders. Jews will “get theirs” for what they have done to “our” Saviour.

Anti-Semitism is a horrible reality most clearly seen through hundreds of years of persecution: the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Inquisition.
Church and synagogue hostility began as early as the Apostle Paul and the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:54-60). Mainline Jewish resistance to messianic Jews (those who believed in Jesus Christ) was sealed in 90CE during the Council of Jamnia where prayers were added to the synagogue service saying that ‘minim’ (Hebrew for heretics, also a reference to believers in Jesus of Nazareth) were to be hopeless, lost and cut off quickly. The situation deteriorated when Rome and the church united under Constantine. Church merging with state has never been good for the Jews.

The evils of forced baptisms from as early as the sixth century, along with pseudo-conversions in medieval Europe, add the anguish of Jewish people who hear from Christians the charge of deicide (the killing of a god).

Here’s how their reasoning works out: since Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, God’s Son, then their fate, their deserved fate, is hostility from God, and from the church. Thus, any punishment that the Jew receives is warranted due to their rejection of the love of the Jesus of history. As a result of this, Jews have been blamed for the Black Death in Europe, the AIDS virus, financial crises and even the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001.

No matter which way you look at it, such claims cannot be proven.

But something Jarryd Hayne said does ring true. It’s about culpability.

Someone is responsible for the death of Jesus. And the Scripture does teach us that there were five agents who had a “voice” in the matter.

One of those is the Jewish people (the leaders or the generation who were alive at the time). And that’s the part that might be the most uncomfortable. Without the Jewish man Judas and the Jewish leadership “dobbing in” the Messiah Jesus, he might have lived on for years. But Scripture teaches us that it was the Jewish people who brought Jesus to Pilate for the matter to be finalised (John 18-19). They heard the option to release him later and chose Barabbas instead.

Of course, the Romans were guilty of the actual deed. They are the second voice. It was a Roman soldier who nailed him to the cross and Romans who held the court that convicted him. The government from Herod to Pilate share the guilt in this matter.

The third guilty party in the death of Jesus was he himself. He had the authority and power to accomplish anything or to call down angels to save himself. But he said, “No one has taken it away from me, but I lay it down on my own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:18). Without his own permission, no one would have had the ability or power to kill him on the cross.

The fourth is one of the worst to ponder. It was the Father himself. The most famous verse in the New Testament is John 3:16. There we read that the love of the Father is demonstrated in the death of his Son: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” If the death of Jesus did not accomplish anything, then the Father would be the worst sadist and child-abuser in history. For who among us would give his son to death?

Finally, and most relevant to each of us, is the responsibility each of us has in the death of Jesus. Without our sin, and our sins, he would not have needed to die. But the story is that he died for our sins and without that death/atonement/blood, we would be eternally lost. “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3), and again, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by his wounds you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

So when people mention that the Jewish people were culpable for the death of Jesus, they are 20 per cent right. It’s true, but it’s not the entire story. And how grateful I am for the lamb of God giving himself for our sins and demonstrating his own love to us in that one marvellous act. - See more at: http://www.biblesociety.org.au/news/who-bears-the-guilt-for-the-death-of-jesus#sthash.4AOu0GCb.dpuf

Jarryd Hayne, the Jews, and the Gospel

Jarryd Hayne and the Jews: "Is evangelism anti-Semitic?”

By Bob Mendelsohn

Jews for Jesus, National Director

During the 2015 Hillsong Conference, Jarryd Hayne, the former Parramatta Eels rugby league star, sent out a tweet to his followers, “Jesus wanted to help people but was killed by his own people." The next day after being challenged by one of his followers, that Jesus was killed by the Romans, Hayne wrote, “The Jews were the people who took him to the Romans n forced them to give the order because they couldn't."

Because of the tweets, Jewish representatives immediately launched a counter campaign. And Hayne removed the two tweets.

Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about Jewish reaction, “Chairman of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission, Dvir Abramovich, said he was deeply concerned by Hayne's tweets and labeled them "damaging, painful and irresponsible".

"For thousands of years Jews were held in contempt and were persecuted and murdered because they were labeled as Christ-killers," he said in a statement.

Koziol reported, “Most Christians no longer hold the view that the Jewish people were responsible for Jesus' death, and persistent belief in that narrative is now associated with anti-Semitism.”

Hayne later sent out an apology tweet which was welcomed by Jewish community representatives. But the issue remains unsettling for Jews. Some of Hayne’s Twitter followers chided him for his apology, using ugly language to describe Jewish people.

Hayne is a forthright Christian, and his comments about Jewish people, inspired by a sermon to which he was listening, highlight a larger question for the ordinary Christian in relation to evangelism. Is sharing the Gospel with Jewish people by nature anti-Semitic? Can a person have a view of another’s religion that is not tolerant or sympathetic, and yet be forthright in proclamation of Jesus?

I believe the exact opposite is actually true. If someone does not share the Gospel with a person because of an apparent theological difference, it actually is the most hateful thing a person can demonstrate. What if a pair of Jehovah’s Witness knocked at my door? What if my thoughts were: Since their religion is heretical, I will have nothing to do with them, ever, and thus refuse to share what I believe with them? Or imagine if I concluded the Muslim teller at my bank, with whom I at times share social pleasantries, was not able to hear the Gospel, because, well, they are followers of Islam and thus didn’t give them an invitation to my local church’s fete or carols program? That would be a very hateful thing to conclude.

The same is true for the ordinary Christian considering sharing faith with the ordinary Jewish person. I’m not saying that each person has to pounce on every situation and each person in their life, but I’m saying that with the people in our sphere of influence, when God gives us opportunity we should extend to them a snippet of the religion we hold so dear. To withhold a segue into Gospel presentation because of their religion being different or even wrong, that’s influenced by a wrong spirit.

Here is a definition. Evangelism: Giving someone an opportunity to say “yes” to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. There are two historical mistakes in sharing the Gospel with Jewish people. One: not giving them an option/ opportunity, but rather requiring the saying of ‘yes.’ This is most known in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and pogroms. Forced conversions/ baptisms of Jewish people is an ugly blight in Church history. I suppose some would say that “become a Christian or die” is an option, but it doesn’t really give the Jew an opportunity to say ‘no.’ By (my) definition if you give someone an opportunity to say ‘yes’ you are also giving them a chance to say ‘no.’ Wicked church persecution of the Jewish people prevents that ‘no’ saying.

The other historical error is more abundant in our days. Since the 1880s, worldwide, Jewish people are more in social contact with their Christian neighbours than ever before. Jewish people may enter into any field of study or occupation. Jewish academics since Schweitzer and Montefiore (around 1900) and throughout the 20^th Century have “accepted” Jesus in a way that would make every Jewish scholar before more than uncomfortable. Notables in our days: Vermes, Flusser, A-J Levine, and even Rabbi Shmuley Boteach write about the New Testament and the Jesus of history with sensitive and Jewish eyes. Councils of Jews and Christians are allowing dialogue and mutual tolerance and acceptance globally.

That’s why Koziol’s remarks can be so forthright: “Most Christians no longer hold the view that the Jewish people were responsible for Jesus' death, and persistent belief in that narrative is now associated with anti-Semitism.”

With all the welcome and blame revision from the Jewish community, the 2^nd great mistake Christians make viz evangelism is not giving the Jewish person a chance to say ‘yes.’ We hear officials and thus give the individual only the opportunity to say ‘no’, and thus fail to evangelize.

Either wrong is wrong. Giving the Jewish person only one option: to say ‘yes’ or to say ‘no,’ is not biblical evangelism.  Proclaiming the Gospel to each person, in language they can understand, via the personality and style of the Christian, that’s when rubber meets road. That’s when we are fulfilling the Great Commission.

To be fair, when rubber meets road much friction is caused. That’s what happened with Jarryd Hayne.  In measure that’s what you can expect from the ordinary Jewish person with whom you want to share the faith. I hear it a lot. But thousands, actually tens of thousands of Jews today, in Sydney, Melbourne, throughout Australasia and worldwide, who are now believers in and followers of the real Jesus, owe great gratitude to someone who had the character and courage to share the faith with them. And we are grateful.

Is evangelism anti-Semitic? The exact opposite is true. It’s the most loving thing a person can do with a Jewish neighbour, colleague or friend.

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If you have Facebook, you can see the thread of comments here:  Hayne on FB