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Three Things "Gentile" Christians May "Never" Understand

Conrad Gempf

Introduction
The talk that I gave at the BMJA weekend in High Wycombe in September 2004 was meant to be playful and enjoyable, but it had a very serious purpose. As a card-carrying evangelical and sympathetic outsider to Messianic Judaism, my overriding concern was to affirm those of you who feel isolated and unappreciated because of differences with other Christians. What I hoped to put across was that your Jewish instincts are often right. And further, the playfully resigned nature of the title "they may never get it" is meant to sympathize with how hard you're finding it. But I also want to say that some Jewish distinctives are going to be more important for Gentiles to get than others and therefore more important for you to assert.

It's worth stressing, as I tried to in the talk, that it might not really be a Gentile-Jewish split, as if it's a racial thing. It's probably as much or more to do with the eccentricities of the post-Enlightenment western culture that many people have naively come to regard as "normal" but which, of course, is remarkably odd to any other people group that has ever lived on this planet. I'm well aware that many members of the BMJA are Gentiles by birth. Many of the ones that I've met are now as Jewish as gefilte fish (and a few are better looking, too). So note please the inverted commas in the title. These are three things that ordinary western evangelicals without a Jewish mindset will find very difficult to feel comfortable with.

I won't have space in a short article to go through all 3 points fully, so I'll skim through the first two in order to concentrate on the third.

God talks like a Jew
The first thing an ordinary Christian finds hard to understand is that God talks like a Jew. The Gentile (or western or whatever we call it) evangelical Christian regards communication between people almost exclusively as a process of transferring data. For Jews, information is fine, but talking is much more expressive than that. For someone with what I'm calling a Gentile mindset, "you may never understand" has to do with time and duration. The way I mean it is a very non-western way of saying it. "You may never understand" has little to do with time and everything to do with depth of feeling. Here's a Gentile: "In a million years, the tectonic plates that define the continental shelf will have shifted to the new positions shown in figure A." Here's a Jew: "Never in a million years will I speak to her again."

Everyone knows the story of Genesis 18:22-33, in which the Lord haggles with Abraham about how many righteous people would be required to save the city. "How about 30?" "OK, 30 but that's my final figure!" The difference is that someone with a Gentile mindset says "How very strange!" and a Jew says "How typical!" God talks like a Jew.

Meticulous obedience is not legalism
The second thing is something I have great trouble explaining to my students. Meticulous obedience is not necessarily legalism; Jesus was not against Pharisaism per se, but against the way the Pharisees he met carried it off (Matt. 23:3). When we're reading the Old Testament, we cheer for the Jews who meticulously observe Torah. Suddenly these same people wake up one day in the New Testament and they're the bad guys? There was nothing wrong with the Pharisees' desire to keep the Law. There is even a way of setting a "hedge around the Law" that is good -- Jesus himself does such a thing with the commandment about murder (Matt. 5:21-22).

I use the example of the 70 miles per hour speed limit. Suppose the Lord had said to Moses "Thou shalt not go more than 70 miles per hour on the motorway." The Pharisees are those who would begin to worry. Technically, we can go 69.9 miles an hour, but suppose our odometers are wrong? We might think we're going 69, but looking down from heaven and measuring perfectly, the Lord might see us going 71 miles an hour and be displeased. Therefore, rather than risking displeasing our Maker, we resolve never to go more than 50 miles an hour on the motorway. That way, whatever happens -- bad odometers, sudden sneezes where our foot inadvertantly presses the accelerator -- there is no way that our cars will actually break that 70 MPH barrier. All this is inconvenient for me, I have to get up an hour earlier in order to arrive on time, but I would rather be inconvenienced than come close to disobeying my Lord. This is not evil, this is not legalism, this is relationship and respect and it can be beautiful.

But it went wrong because: (1) they started focussing on the "hedge" of the oral law rather than on the Lord and Torah -- the 50 becomes the important number, not the 70 -- and (2) they started using their own oral law and behaviour as a measure for judging other people -- so, when a car shoots past them on the motorway, they could not mind their own business and obedience, but rather say "There goes someone who does not care whether or not they insult the Lord" even if the car was only going 65. The problem with the New Testament Pharisees was not with their obedience to the details of Torah but in their losing sight of the Lord and their attitude toward others. That's not at all easy for a modern western Christian to keep in mind.

Habits of Holiness
But my third thing is the one I believe to be the most important. It's the one that I hope Messianic Christians will work at teaching other Christians. I've called it the Habits of Holiness, and it follows on from my previous point in some ways. Gentile Christians tend to dismiss Jewish practices out of hand as things that "obviously" no longer apply. But an active Judaism can instill habits of holiness into a person that I think non-Messianic Christians should envy rather than denegrate.

I give the example of my friend Donna in my Creative Writing class at High School in New Jersey. In a scene of her fictional play about a rebellious teenage girl storming out of her parents' house, her character is furious with her father and shouted "G-d damn you!" G dash D. That impressed me. Donna was herself not the most religious of Jews, the character in her play certainly was not. Yet here, even in fiction, even portraying a totally rebellious character, swearing at a moment of blind anger, Donna could not bring herself to write even the English version of the Hebrew divine Name. Now many Christians would find that mere show, almost hypocrisy. They'll say that an act doesn't count unless it's a deliberate conscious act. But I say training oneself is a deliberate conscious act -- shaping a whole life to lean this way rather than that is better than shaping a moment to go this way rather than that.

Gentiles know this with matters other than morality and spirituality: say you've got two football players... one is instinctive and just always gets to the right place at the right time, just a flick of his head or a twitch of his leg and the ball is in the back of the net; the other one is perfect as long as he does what he's told, concentrates and thinks through his decisions carefully; what Gentile football manager is going to say: this is the guy that I want to join the team; I want someone who really MEANS to score goals?

Donna impressed me that day. I want to be more like that. To train myself in the Habits of Holiness so that my first, instinctive, reaction to the events of the day is to bless God rather than curse my luck. Yes, actions need to be intentional actions. Hypocrisy is a real danger. But I was raised believing that the intention to please God had to precede the action. My exposure to Judaism makes me think that it doesn't matter which comes first. A typical non-Messianic Jew thinks he or she needs to make themselves feel thankful and only then give thanks. I want to give thanks and allow that to help me to feel thankful.

And this is a gift I believe Messianic Jewish Christians can give to Gentile believers; to encourage them in Habits of Holiness -- helping them to live not just plotting "what would Jesus do" each step of the way, but to live in the rhythm of the Scriptures -- to be so immersed and affected by it, that becomes the default -- to be a bit more like Donna.

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