On Good Friday, the hours between noon and 3 o’clock have
traditionally been reserved for the faithful to reflect on Jesus
Christ’s great suffering on the cross. Churches encourage prayer,
reflection, and silence. Your humble scribe is not good at any of
those things. So, half a dozen years ago now, I went looking for
help.
I found an indispensable aid in the form of a short book
by the New Testament scholar Joel Marcus. It carries the highly
improbable title (for the purposes of Good Friday reading, anyway),
Jesus and the Holocaust: Reflections on Suffering and
Hope. When I told a Jewish friend about my annual reading
habit, he joked that it was mighty goy of me to give “equal time”
to a rebuttal of the Gospel of John.
That is not why I keep coming back to Jesus and the
Holocaust. I come back because it has a way of concentrating
the mind on Good Friday like no other devotion that I am aware of.
I come back because it is a beautiful book and a brave
one.
The project began when Marcus preached the Good Friday
service at the Episcopal cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1995.
That year also marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the
Holocaust and so Marcus, who is Jewish by birth and Anglican by
conversion, determined to “explore the links between that one
Jewish death” in the first century and the some “6 million Jewish
deaths that occurred more than 1,900 years later.”
Marcus took this approach because he had “wanted to see if
the hope that Christians have found hidden in the darkest hour of
their liturgical year might shed any light on the most tragic
moment of our recent history — and vice versa.” He gave the
parishioners (and, later, readers) the sort of stories that they
expect from the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible at this time of year,
and also poems, paintings, and tales of Jewish
persecution.
To wit, before Marcus gets to the reading from the prophet
Isaiah about the “suffering servant” (a figure Christians interpret
as Jesus and Jews believe to be Israel), he relays to us the story
of the liquidation of 4,000 Jews from the Lithuanian shtetl of
Eisysky on September 25, 1941. The town’s Jews were ushered to open
graves, ordered to strip, and then, in groups of 250 or so at a
time, “shot in the back of the head by Lithuanian guards with the
encouragement and help of the local people.”
One teenage boy named Zvi Michalowsky was put on that
firing line but survived. He did so in the first place because of
good timing. He figured out when the volleys were coming and
launched himself into the pit of bodies a split second before the
soldiers fired. The boy continued to get by because of his cunning
and his audience.
After Zvi clawed his way out of the pit, he made his way
to a few Christian homes and begged for shelter. “Jew, go back to
the grave where you belong!” the first homeowner told him. The
naked, bloodied young man was similarly rebuked until he got to the
home of an old widow, who tried to chase him away with a burning
piece of wood. Rather than run away, he, well, he innovated. “I am
your Lord, Jesus Christ,” Zvi said, “I came down from the cross.
Look at me — the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent.
Let me in.” And let him in she did.
Marcus’s multidisciplinary (some would say jumbled)
approach was not one that carried with it any assurance of success
and it could have gone badly wrong. This is a danger that the
author absolutely grasped. The most obvious point of the third
chapter (“An Atheist in Five Minutes”) is that “nothing can induce
despair more quickly than a premature, ill-thought-out affirmation
of faith.”
Jesus and the Holocaust gets the mood and
the magnitude of Good Friday exactly right. There is hope here
today, but it’s buried pretty deep.
