Jesus was a Jew.  That is a fact conveniently ignored by many Christians.  However, I think that the Jewish lineage of Jesus is important.  Jesus taught from the Law and the Prophets, the Jewish scriptures of his time.  He quoted from the Book of Psalms, the Jewish hymnal.  He was a sage in the Jewish Wisdom tradition. Jesus was indeed a rabbi, albeit unorthodox.

The early church referred to Jesus as the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ. They acknowledged him as that shoot from the stump of Jesse upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rested.  They affirmed him to be of the House and lineage of David. Can we understand Jesus as the Christ apart from his Jewish roots?

What did it mean to be a Jew in the first fifty years of the Common Era?  Then, as now, there were many forms of Judaism, each struggling with their status living in an occupied territory of the Roman Empire.  What does it mean to be a Jew today? This is an ongoing debate, and the several Jewish traditions offer different answers.  

For that matter, what does it mean to be a Christian?  There are many and different answers.

 Marc Chagall painted several versions of a fiddler playing on a roof-top.  Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnack used that image as the title for their musical based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories of Jewish life in turn-of the-century Russia.  The life of a Jew was always precarious, “as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.”  I suggest that being a faithful Jew or a faithful Christian in today’s materialistic world is precarious, particularly if one heeds the teachings of the Rabbi Jesus.

When I was in the Methodist Youth Fellowship we invited a professor from what is now UW-Milwaukee to talk about being Jewish.  He thought that the most important teaching of Judaism was Micah 6: 8,

But isn’t that also an essential teaching of Christianity?  We sing those words over and over in several hymns!  We proclaim them when we confront the inequalities of our society.  Can it be that this verse captures the essence of both Judaism and Christianity? Why not?  Jesus was a Jew.