2. The Cross Used as a Weapon — A Specific History

The Christian Statement

The cross is, for the Christian, the instrument of salvation. It is, for Jewish people across many centuries, a symbol of persecution and forced conversion. The disciple must understand this before using the cross as an apologetic image.

The specific history of the cross as an instrument of oppression against Jewish people includes:

• Crusaders bearing crosses massacred Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley before their departure for the Holy Land
• The forced baptism of Jews under the sign of the cross, which Jews experienced as the choice between cultural annihilation and physical death
• The wearing of yellow crosses — a predecessor to the yellow star — required by church councils to identify and humiliate Jewish people
• Pogroms often conducted on Christian feast days, particularly Good Friday and Easter, when anti-Jewish preaching in churches reached its peak
• The cross displayed over the entrance to concentration camps, in a territory whose churches were largely compliant with the regime that built them

This history does not make the cross theologically less central. It makes the disciple's obligation to contextualize it more serious. The Jewish person who sees a cross does not necessarily see salvation. They may see the history above. The disciple who ignores this is not being bold. They are being careless.

The approach is not to hide the cross but to restore it to its actual meaning before presenting it. The cross, in its actual meaning, is the place where the God of Israel bore the suffering of His people. It is not the place where Gentile power exercised itself over Jewish weakness. Those who used it that way were not following the Jesus of the cross. They were betraying Him.

3. The Silence That Must Be Broken

The Christian Statement

There is a temptation, given the weight of the history above, for the disciple to conclude that the right response is silence. To say nothing about Jesus to Jewish people, out of respect for the suffering done in His name. To let the Jewish community be Jewish, and the Christian community be Christian, and leave the conversation alone.

This position feels humble. It is not.

It is, in Paul's account, the abandonment of the Jewish people to a partial blindness that the apostle considered an urgent and personal grief. Paul did not respond to Jewish resistance to the Gospel with respectful silence. He wept. He argued in synagogues. He was beaten for it. He considered the Gospel to be, in his own words, "to the Jew first" (Romans 1:16) — not least, not optional, first.

The silence that masquerades as respect is, in practice, the abandonment of the most important relationship the Gentile church has. The church received the scriptures from the Jewish people. The church worships the Jewish Messiah. The church's entire theological inheritance is Jewish. And it proposes to repay this debt by saying nothing about what it received?

The broken silence is not the silence of the Crusader. It is the silence broken by Paul:

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is God's power for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek." — Romans 1:16 (NET)