Holocaust Sunday - Responding to the darkness

LUKE 10: 25-37

In “Night” which is surely one of the most haunting books ever written, Elie Wiesel tells of being forced at Auschwitz to watch the hanging of three people including a young boy. The boy takes a long time to die and amidst the horror, the young Wiesel hears a man ask;

“Where is God now?”

Within himself Wiesel hears a voice answer the man;

“Here he is - He is hanging on the gallows.”

The murder of God! Quite a thought especially for a devoutly religious Jew!

And of course the Holocaust with all its horrors remains a powerful presence in all of our thinking about God and seeking to live as God’s people. It challenges our temptation to offer facile answers to what are big questions.

Certainly it challenges our notions of God being in control over all things. After all, how can this be reconciled with children being thrown into flaming ovens? Instead the case for an emphasis on God’s vulnerability and dependence in place of omnipotence, surely needs to be taken on board. For God is not so much a controller of events as an often suffering participant.

This leaves the likes of you and me with freedom to make choices. We have responsibilities. A sad feature of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s is that amongst those who made life denying choices were Christians and Christian organisations in a land with a long Christian heritage. Yes, there are the Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Niemoellers who resisted the regime at considerable cost to themselves but they were well and truly outnumbered by those who out of varying motives such as nationalism, anti Judaism and fear, collaborated with the Nazi regime, in some cases to the bitter end.

Now, none of this makes the Holocaust a Christian phenomenon. The Dabru Emet statement by Jewish scholars makes that quite clear. But it does not let Christianity of the hook, saying;

“Without the long history of Christian anti Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried out.”

These words point to the dangerous tradition of falsely representing Jews as Christ killers - a tradition which along with other factors such as blood libels has left Jews subject to a long history of violence down through the centuries especially at Easter. Doubt not that bad theology can cost lives!

The Holocaust reminds us that we need to be accepting of those who are other. Eleven million people were murdered in the Holocaust. Six million were Jews with political and religious dissidents, Roma gypsies, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people and homosexuals also numbered among the victims - simply for not fitting in with Hitler’s plans for an Aryan master race.

Other genocides have taken place for similar reasons. Armenians murdered in vast numbers by the Ottoman Empire, Tutsis and Hutu sympathisers in Rwanda and even today the events in Darfur - all bearing testimony to a tendency to be unable to offer dignity in difference.

Of course, prejudice is often born of ignorance and the prejudiced mind does not normally will such horrific outcomes as the Holocaust. But our prejudices are surely potentially the midwife to the violent and destructive. Not long ago, I stood in a queue listening to a conversation between two people as to their hatred of Muslims. I am sure/well hopeful that these people, who seemed quite pleasant in the few moments when they were talking on other subjects, would not wish physical harm on Muslims. But as I stood feeling a powerful urge to jump in on the conversation, I wondered how many such equally ill informed and ignorant conversations about Jews and other groups of people targeted by the Holocaust, would have taken place in just such surroundings in Germany and indeed this country, in the first half of the last century.

Jesus has something to say about prejudice. He does it through the Parable of the Good Samaritan in which a battered Jew finds that the neighbour who helps him in his moment of need is a Samaritan. This is a story that would have drawn gasps from Jesus’ hearers for they knew and doubtless felt the shock of a story which challenged a poisonous prejudice between two peoples that had existed for over 500 years. For this story was not just Jesus telling his fellow Jews that they shouldn’t be unkind to those wretched Samaritans. No it was more! Jesus was telling them that those whom they had despised did not merely merit toleration but that they had resources of kindness and goodness to offer. They could benefit from and learn from their ancient enemies.

I cannot see another Holocaust happening in West Europe in my lifetime. Yet, there are the seeds of prejudice and exclusion all around us. Holocaust Memorial Day is a day in which we need to respond to the challenge to embrace humanity with all its diversity rather than to hold back from and to judge harshly those who may be other than we are. Nationality, race, religion and sexual orientation should not be the causes of distancing or failing to engage as neighbours with others. For to use such as these to deny the Divine Spark in others is to send God into exile from our lives.

But the pressures are around us. In particular, we find sections of the media who continually seem to seek to incite an anti Muslim reaction. Whilst accepting the reality that bad religion can and does exist within Islam as elsewhere, we need to protest at any incitement to exclude. Surely too much of that has already happened in history.

Our calling is to be radical disciples of Jesus in affirming the dignity of human differences. Our calling is to resist the drumbeat of conformity when it would dehumanise others. I am reminded of how when awaiting trial in a Berlin prison, Martin Niemoeller was greeted by a prison chaplain with the words;

“But Brother Martin! What brings you here? Why are you in prison?”

Pertinently, Niemoeller replied;

“And brother, why are you not in prison?”

This morning we look back and see humanity at its very worst in dehumanising those deemed to be other. In the teachings of Jesus we see an invitation to embrace diversity. It is a lesson we need to go on learning. Rightly, today we look back so that we may live better in the future. For in the words of the founder of Hasidism Bal Shem Tov, words found in the main hall of the Holocaust Memorial at Vad Yashem;

“Forgetting lengthens the period of exile! In remembrance lies the secret of deliverance.”



BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY JANUARY 27TH 2007