APRIL 18, 2005

KEEPING KOSHER
by Pastor George Van Alstine

Usually, the Jewish Passover celebration is quite close to the Christian Good Friday/Easter holidays. Of course, that’s because Jesus was a religious Jew, and it was while he was observing Passover that he was arrested and crucified in Jerusalem.

But the Jewish calendar and the Christian calendar are different, and the dates of the holidays move, relative to each other, from year to year. This year they are as far apart as they ever get—just about a month. This gives us a chance to look at what Passover means to Jewish people, without looking through our Good Friday/Easter glasses. And it also gives us an exposure to Jewish faith and practices in the 21st century.

I was recently talking with our local rabbi about how Jewish people observe kosher food laws. After he answered a number of my questions, he pointed out an interesting fact. “Keeping kosher” is for Jews, not for everybody. Judaism, for instance, doesn’t teach that eating ham is evil in itself, only that eating ham is sin for a Jew.

In fact, the very point of the kosher practices God gave as commandments to the Jewish people is that they are a mark of their differentness. There are other moral laws that are binding on every human being. But kosher laws are, by their nature, arbitrary—neither moral nor immoral. To a Jew, the only true answer to the question “Why should I not eat ham?” is “Because God said so, and we are his people.”

This caused me to think about what “keeping kosher” would mean for modern Christians today. We feel “liberated” from the Jewish kosher laws, but Jesus seemed to indicate that the moral requirements on us are even higher; “You have heard that it was said to them of ancient times . . . ” “. . . but I say unto you . . . .” (Matthew 6:21-22, 27-28, etc.) The expectations Jesus had for his disciples were higher than the demands of a kosher lifestyle.

And I wonder, by analogy, if these high expectations follow the pattern of kosher observances in that they are not for everybody, but specifically for the people of God, who are to be a light to the world. The word “church” literally means “called out ones.” We think of this as meaning called out from the world. But maybe it means called out for the world, that is, to be an example for the world, even a sacrifice for the world.

If this is true, our major moral mission should be focused on ourselves, in radically following the call of Jesus to differentness. It seems strange that so much energy is spent by evangelical leaders today in trying to change the moral behavior of unbelievers by effecting the political process, when we ourselves are so far from the radical model Jesus gave us. At the same time that we are waving banners calling for moral changes in society, we are doing as much as we can to erase the differences between ourselves and unbelievers in our materialistic values, our selfish ambition, and our indulgent lifestyle.

This would be similar to an observant Jew demanding that everybody in the restaurant turn in their ham plates, then secretly nibbling on the ham as the plates pass by.