34. The Lament Tradition — Permission to Cry Out

The Christian Statement

One of the most important things the disciple can offer a Jewish person wrestling with the Shoah is not an argument but a text: the lament Psalms.

The Hebrew Bible's lament tradition — Psalms 10, 22, 44, 88, the book of Lamentations, the book of Job — models the posture of a people who cry out to God in the midst of suffering with complete honesty. "Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" (Psalm 10:1). "Why have you rejected us forever, O God?" (Psalm 44:23). "You shrouded yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can get through" (Lamentations 3:44, NET).

This is not the language of people who have lost faith. It is the language of people who are furious at God precisely because they believe He is there and that His presence or absence matters. The lament tradition gives permission to cry out — to accuse God of absence, to demand an answer, to bring the full weight of human suffering into the presence of God and refuse to let go until a blessing comes.

The disciple who can say to a Jewish person "Your own scriptures give you permission to be furious at God" — and mean it, and sit with the fury rather than trying to resolve it prematurely — is the disciple who has understood something that most Gentile Christians never reach.

35. The Cross and the Gas Chamber

The Christian Statement

The connection between the cross and the Holocaust is one that Jewish theologians have found deeply offensive when made by Christians — and the offense is understandable. The cross has been used as an instrument of persecution against Jews for centuries. To now invoke it as the answer to the Holocaust's suffering sounds like a fresh wound.

The disciple must be aware of this and must make the connection with extraordinary care, if at all.

What can be said — gently, and only in the context of a relationship that has established genuine trust: the cross does not explain the Holocaust. But the God of the cross is not a stranger to the gas chamber. He is a God who has been murdered by a state. Who has been stripped and hung. Who has experienced the worst that human evil can do. And who, in the resurrection, demonstrated that the worst that human evil can do is not the last word.

The resurrection does not undo the Holocaust. Six million people who were murdered are not brought back by a theological argument. But the resurrection claims that death — however unjust, however monstrous, however final it appears — is not the last word. And that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is the same God who said "I will be your God and you will be my people" to Israel — an irrevocable promise that even the Shoah cannot annul.