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LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Jay Rock talks with his hands.
At the moment he’s talking about something to which he’s devoted a lot of time — Jewish-Christian relations.
He’s writing a guide for Presbyterians to use in connection
with a project of the Union for Reformed Judaism (URJ): Open
Doors, Open Minds: Synagogues and Churches Studying Together.
The URJ’s idea is to get people talking about what it means to be faithful Christians and Jews.
As a Christian, Rock has been in dialogue with Jews for years, but the conversation has been pretty heady; this time he hopes it will be more from the heart, more about faith than religion.
“I just think we’d get further if we talked from the beginning point of what is dear to us,” he says. “What are really the central commitments that we have? Not just commitments we have in our heads, our core beliefs, but also the things that really convict us. That get to us. That move us.”
He puts down his cup of tea to give gestural emphasis to that word, “moooove.”
Rock believes the Presbyterian supplement he’s writing will be ready shortly after the General Assembly ends on July 3. He is working with the URJ’s booklet and a video produced jointly by U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Synagogues, and thinking about how to really talk about faith.
Rock, the new coordinator of the PCUSA’s Inter-Faith Relations Office, held a similar position with the National Council of Church of Christ (NCC) for 16 years, appointed there as a PC(USA) mission worker.
He has had plenty of conversations about the problems that have plagued Jewish-Christian history. About anti-Semitism, about helping Christians read the Bible without blaming Jews for Jesus’s death, about how Jews and Christians can more authentically depict each others’ religions in educational materials for children.
It isn’t as if the PC(USA) hasn’t had a voice in those conversations.
In 1987, the General Assembly approved a research paper, A Theological Understanding of the Relationship Between Christians and Jews, a careful effort to articulate how God’s relationship with Christians relates to God’s relationship with Jews. (This paper is available in Adobe Acrobat format at http://www.pcusa.org/theologyandworship/passion.htm. For a more general statement of Presbyterian views on Jewish-Christian relations, visit http://www.pcusa.org/pcusa/wmd/eir/jews.htm. For a statement on the PC(USA)’s position on violence against Jews, visit http://www.pcusa.org/oga/newsstories/anti-semitism-statement.htm.)
The 1987 document says Christians and Jews ought to be in dialogue, affirms God’s special relationship with the Jewish people, and argues that Christians and Jews have a distinct but mutual witness, bound by separate covenants that have never been undone.
As he talks, Rock picks up a stone — how’s that for irony? — from a table in his office. On it is carved a single word — “Remember.”
The familiar adage, he says, also is a religious imperative for Jews and Christians alike.
“Religion is a very emotional business,” he says. “We Presbyterians are pretty intellectual; we’re committed to study, to having the Word explained, to trying to understand what it means. But there is a dimension of our faith that is very deeply emotional. It moves us. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
Remembering is one important piece of the puzzle of Jewish-Christian relations. Remembering enables worshippers of both faiths to re-enter an event and re-experience faith. “This time of the year, with Passover and Easter, these are both opportunities for remembering,” Rock says — for Jews, remembering the Hebrews’ liberation from Egypt; for Christians, remembering their liberation from death.
“There is so much more. It is so powerful,” he says. “In the Passion of Jesus, what happens to us as Christians, our faith is re-affirmed, our baptismal vows are re-affirmed, and we come to life all over again. We enter into the whole mystery of Jesus giving up his life and God bringing him out of death … and bringing us out of death.
“This is incredible. It is incredible to re-enter, re-vivify this whole reality.”
He acknowledges that some of that powerful emotion has been misdirected against Jews, through centuries of pogroms and persecution, the result of a skewed understanding of Jesus’s death.
“If any of us have ever been to a Seder (a Passover ritual commemorating the Hebrews’ deliverance from Egypt), we can understand the powerful imagery going on in the Jewish community ... where God delivers an entire people out of bondage through a series of miracles,” he says. “Brings them into the desert and then out of the desert. For the Jewish community, the emotion is the same. To re-member ... the core narrative.”
Rock puts down his mug and smiles, adding: “What if we could talk about what it means to live within these core stories? It make the conversation more personal. And it could help us talk ... about our struggles, our joys.”
Rock, a 1973 graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, has a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Claremont, CA. He worked as a PCUSA pastor in northern California for seven years.
He can be reached by phone at (888) 728-7228, ext. 5289, or by email. |
