2002-01-01
Good Morning Dear Ones,
When I was a child, I asked the question: If recalling the Holocaust makes everyone so sad, why do this every year? It wouldn’t surprise me if a Christian child asked the same kind of question regarding the events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion and the crucifixion itself. The answer is the same in both cases. The adults with wisdom understand that there are valuable lessons that in these events that should never be forgotten. Haven’t you wished at some point that mankind would learn something from the mistakes made in the past? I know as an adult and a student of history I certainly have asked that question. The example of the Holocaust presents some interesting considerations in discussing why it should be remembered. I’m old enough to remember first-hand some of the events of its immediate aftermath, both their impact on my family and their impact on the world community in general. My mother was very committed to helping me know something about our family’s history. For Jewish people to do a successful genealogical search is very difficult. That is because the persecution of the Jews has caused many Jewish relatives to escape and burn records of who they really were behind them. Many of them took up false passports or changed their names in an effort to make it impossible for their pursuers to locate them as they escaped the countries of their births. Mother had precious pictures of some of the relatives who died before I was born. She and I spent a lot of time identifying who these people were and how they were related to me. I labeled these pictures with the names, dates, and places where they lived wherever I could.
It was during this activity that I first really became aware of the portion of my family who died in the concentration camps and the portion that survived. In a previous devotion, I spoke about two of the survivors, who were cousins of my father’s. These were cousins that he never knew existed until that day back in the 1950’s when they walked into his medical office in San Francisco. You will remember that this lady who wanted to become a patient of my father’s noticed a picture of his mother that sat on his desk. When she asked who that was, and my father told her. In utter astonishment, she made the connection and identified to him who she really was. This chance event that happened 7000 miles from where my cousin Elsa had been born in Austria led to the revealing of her story about how she ended up the sole survivor in her family, because she had gone to England to take a job. The Nazis had come and taken her parents and her six brothers and sisters, all of whom came to their demise in a concentration camp gas chamber. I believe it was a God-driven event that my father and his cousin would be brought together. For the rest of her life and that of Elsa’s husband, we remained in contact with them.
I am also old enough to remember the discovery of Adolph Eichmann, his extradition to Israel, the trial that followed, and the carrying out of his death sentence. These are first-hand experiences for me, ones which were the subject of many dinner table discussions as I was growing up. We had television then, so I remembered listening to the testimony in the Eichmann case. It was hard for me to comprehend the degree of evil that man is capable of, but I was learning. If you ask why I relate these personal experiences, it is because I realize that young people growing up now don’t have these first-hand memories and must learn about these events from reading about them in history books or from the second-hand accounts of their teachers. Many of the teachers themselves are too young to have learned about them any other way. Herein exists the opportunity for lies to be interjected or for people to rationalize the purpose for the evil persecutions that went on in the past. I even met a group of people who were convinced that the Holocaust never happened! That is how warped their view of things was.
Why mention this? I mention this, because that is how some people rationalize denying the spiritual gravity of the events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion. That is the same reasoning that unbelievers might use to deny Christ’s very deity! So, that is why these sad events must be recounted every year, whether we are speaking of the Holocaust or whether we are speaking of the commemorations of the Lent/Easter season. We must accurately recall these events year after year, so that our children will be taught the lessons encased in them and so that mankind will never forget.
It was all of this that was on my mind when I stood up to sing from the “Messiah” # 24 “Surely He Has Borne Our Griefs” with the rest of the chorus I was in at the time. Here are the words we sang plaintively and quietly with intensity: “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him.” That was followed by # 25 for chorus, “And With His Stripes We Are Healed.” These two sections of Handel’s “Messiah” are based on IS 53:4-6. Now let me cite these words in more modern form from my Bible. “But He endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that His suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins He was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment He suffered, made whole by the blows He received. All of us were like sheep gone astray, each of us going His own way. But the Lord made the punishment fall on Him, the punishment we all of us deserved.” Those innocent Jews led to their slaughter by being gassed in the concentration camp chambers no more deserved their suffering than Jesus Christ deserved His. By rationalizing the evil of what was done to them, by neglecting to retell the truth of their stories, we allow their lives to have been lived in vain. By neglecting to recount these sad stories, we do our children and ourselves a great disservice. If there is ever any way of preventing mankind from repeating the mistakes of the past, it will be because we used the wisdom God gave us in recounting these events accurately and regularly. The truth is the best defense against lies and rationalizations.
PRAYER: O Lord, part of acting with the wisdom and maturity You gave us is doing what we can to prevent lies and rationalizations from distorting the truth. You have given believers the idea to recall the events of the Holocaust and the Lent/Easter season in an effort to keep the truth of them and the lessons contained in them alive. You commanded us to teach our children to love You and have given us the idea of following this practice to that end. We dedicate ourselves to obeying that command and to allowing the light of Your truth to pierce the darkness brought on by human lies and rationalization. The underlying truth of all of this is Your enduring, patient, compassionate love for us. We adore, praise, and thank You, Dear Lord, for making this grace available to us. In Christ’s name, amen.
Perhaps, the greatest project of Stephen Spielberg’s life is his on-going effort to make first-hand video accounts spoken by the Holocaust survivors themselves of their harrowing ordeals in the Nazi concentration camps and of their family losses. While we can’t have that kind of record of Christ’s last weeks on earth and His crucifixion, we can take the accounts of these found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and every year recall them in the commemoration of Lent and Easter. Passon plays, books written, archeological digs studied, and accurate historical accounts like that of Flavius Josephus can all bring these events to our attention. Our responsibility is to not take any of them out of context, not to alter them to fit some human construct, and to retell them precisely and regularly, so the lessons in them can never be forgotten.
And now you may be ready to ask one last question: How does this practice bless our lives? You will remember that I have often cited JN 14: 21 in these messages. “Whoever accepts My commandments and obeys them is the one who loves Me. My Father will love whoever loves Me; I too will love him and reveal myself to him.” Teaching our children to love the Lord is one way that we obey Him and show our love for Him. When we take the time to show our young people how God uses our circumstances to convey His lessons for us, we are obeying that directive. When we learn from the human mistakes of the past and choose not to repeat them, we are obeying God. When we uncover the methods by which those in unbelief bring the darkness of lies and rationalizations into our lives, we are equipped by God to do the spiritual warfare necessary to defeat them. Take comfort in knowing that by obeying God, you are given a way to show your love for Him. Take comfort in knowing that He has equipped all of us who believe to be victors in spiritual warfare over the devil. God has empowered believers to overcome anything that Satan hurls at them. Those are the actions of a God who loves us beyond human comprehension. Hallelujah! Peter and I also send you our love.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn