cover image Jesus and the Holocaust: Reflections on Suffering and Hope

Jesus and the Holocaust: Reflections on Suffering and Hope

Joel Marcus. Doubleday Books, $14.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-385-48765-8

Collected in this little book are Joel Marcus's meditations, delivered originally on Good Friday, 1995, at St. Mary's Cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, examining the connections between Christ's death and the deaths of six million Jews that occurred more than 2000 years later. Marcus, an American Jew by birth who in his early 20s converted to Christianity, reflects upon scriptural passages, poetry, photographs and Holocaust narratives to explore what for him is the ""mysterious relation"" between Christ's crucifixion and the Holocaust. Marcus, a lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Glasgow, is well aware of the dangerous ground he treads. Among the questions he asks in these meditations are: Was the Holocaust God's will? Can we still believe in a good God after such a horror? How can we forgive those who perpetrated these awful crimes? Marcus approaches the answers to his questions by pointing to the redemptive act of Jesus, who forgave his murderers. In the words of a 19th-century rabbi, God himself suffers when the innocent suffer. Building on this idea, Marcus notes that ""...God suffers in all human misery, and in the brokenness of the world."" And Marcus points to the ""mystery of God's own suffering in the suffering of his Son"" as a way of approaching the mystery of the suffering of the innocents. His own understandings of the ways that God works in the world are wrought out of the fabric of deep struggle to reconcile the answers offered by both Judaism and Christianity in these religions' attempts to justify the ways of God to man. (Apr.)