Remembering those who stood against evil and saved thousands of lives in the Holocaust is essential to saving lives today.
“The Righteous Gentiles”
John 19:10-15
I recently took a short course on the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer is most known for his challenging view of Christian discipleship and for his participation in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was a young up-and-coming academic in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. His grave concern for the rise of the Third Reich put him in a distinct minority. His views of discipleship, the use of power by the state, and the evils of nationalism set him apart from his contemporaries.
Virtually the whole church was enthralled with Hitler. While many would like to forget the role the church played toward normalizing the rise of fascist nationalism, its actual part cannot be overstated. It was nearly universally supportive of him.
The Confessing Church, of which Bonhoeffer was a part, stood alone as the only denominational group in any way opposed to Nazism. And to what degree that opposition actually existed is quite debatable. Hitler’s nationalism was quite popular within even this lone opponent.
The Confessing Church’s public opposition was weak and erratic, and in the end, mounted too late. Much of it was destroyed by the Nazis and its leaders exiled or killed.
Uniquely Heroic
I share this perspective so that we can see just how unique the people we are celebrating today are. They stood squarely against the dominant worldview of passivity and trust in norms to protect justice. Their friends and family, maybe even spouses no doubt rejected these actions of conscience as “the wrong approach,” illegal, or treasonous.
This, of course, is the allure of nationalism. Not just that we ought to feel proud of our country—but that we are right to put our needs first.
Consider the origins of that moment.
At the end of the 19th Century, Germany, France, and England had entered into a relative peace, maintained through intermarriage. But a small bit of German military priority was forgotten: mobilization means war. In other words, threats of war amount to a declaration of war.
In the tangled mess of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the collected posturing led to the bloodiest conflict in world history, spanning the whole of Europe. The world placed all its hope for resolution in the hands of the American president, Woodrow Wilson. Who, it would seem, was wrought with the great flu.
The negotiations ended with the humiliation of Germany. An end which may have been averted if Wilson were well enough to exercise even a bit of his diplomatic skill.
The seeds of reprisal bubbled quickly.
Justification for retribution was placed on the altar of restoring German national pride. They desired for the world to see Germany as the truly great nation it was. The former center of the world’s esteem, it grew angry at seeing people flock to Paris rather than Weimar or Dresden.
It is easy, of course to scapegoat—to not only point fingers at specific people or blame specific decisions for the whole. This is, in fact, the desire for the scapegoat—to pin all of the problems on a single (often innocent) animal. To bear the whole burden so that our consciences might be cleaned.
This approach would lead us to do the same twisting that justified the start of the Great War. And justified the retribution by France and England at its conclusion. The same impulse that led to Nazis and then the Holocaust. Then the same impulse to make the Nazis alone as the face of all evil.
History is full of such frightening ignorance.
Jesus came to banish that impulse to scapegoat. The impulse to dehumanize, decontextualize, and arrogantly declare our supremacy.
Nationalism is, in every way, idolatry, hubris, and a work of evil.
Which brings us back to “the righteous among the nations”. People who stood up against the forces of evil to protect the lives of thousands of innocents.
And this is why we read a Gospel story that is often twisted toward antisemitism rather than anti-nationalism. A project that would once again make our Jewish siblings into a scapegoat to remove responsibility from our own shoulders. But what the scripture condemns is the use of the faith to defend state-sponsored murder.
So we pray today, in the aftermath of the first federal execution in 17 years—the state-sponsored murder of Daniel Lee. A killing that appears to have been illegally executed. And as I record this message, we are awaiting the process of a second, Wesley Purkey, who has dementia.
And we’re praying today in the rise of nationalism in Brazil and Poland and Germany and England and the United States. An ideology that is unChristlike. Believing that some people are to be greater than others. That selfish action for one’s personal (or national) benefit is just regardless of its consequence.
We are wrestling with monuments to torture, enslavement, and selfish division to protect the right for some people to own other people. And the use of indigenous caricatures to sell tickets while stealing land for monuments and oil pipelines.
Not Normal
And at the center of all of this is an image of Christian acceptance of evil as normal. Just. Or simply “how things are.” Christians who profess “Jesus is Lord” on Sunday and then vote for nationalism on Tuesday are slaves trying to have two masters.
The church supported Hitler as eagerly as it did the Crusades. It endorsed fascism as a natural consequence of democracy. They reveled in the feeling of superiority that came with scapegoating the Jews, Gypsies, LGBTQ, and foreigners and tolerated the breaking of norms by their leaders while feeling constrained to adhere to norms themselves.
And yet…
Yad Veshem honors 23,000 people as righteous. While the churches and their people either salivated at their chance at greatness or endured murder in their name, thousands upon thousands of faithful people stood up to tyranny. That number isn’t 3. Or 23. Or even 230.
The enemy isn’t other people. It isn’t us. The enemy is not a person, whose life can be ended. It is the will to end life. To play God.
It is fear and temptation. Desire for peace and prosperity. The path which receives the sower’s seeds to watch them snatched away. And the will to judge and execute.
The good stands against the evil robed in the trappings of normal power, greatness, and honor—to save the lives of the powerless. These are the only righteous ones on Earth. And these could be many. They could be us.