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There is a smorgasbord of words on The Passion of the Christ over at Jewsweek.com, including a reprint of the Forward interview with Maia Morgenstern, the Romanian Jewish actress who portrays Mary in the film.

Of special interest, too, is a piece by evangelist-turned-Orthodox Jew Gavriel Aryeh Sanders, who is less concerned about rage against Jews than about Jewish responses to the evangelical possibilities this film will create. He thinks the film is going to cause the goyim to run around uttering Isaiah 53 to unprepared Jews; he finds in the film an opportunity for the Jewish community to renew itself and deepen its spiritual convictions. In the process of making this wake-up call to observant Jews, though, he says something really freaky:

"Unlike Christianity and Islam and a host of other religions, Judaism is not based solely on faith. A Jew's faith rests on a solid foundation of knowledge. This knowledge is the revelation of the one God at Mt. Sinai before more than one million eyewitnesses." ["Answering The Passion with Passion," Jewsweek.com, February 26, 2004.]

My Christian conviction is "based solely on faith"? What's up with that? Is Sanders perhaps just another stiff-necked man with an uncircumcised heart? If nothing else, my faith is built on the same tradition, unfolding with the revelation of the one true God to Abraham, also to Moses at Mt. Sinai, extending through the prophets and the observant faithful of Israel, and continuing through the testimony of the Apostles and the testimony of the living Spirit of Christ, the true Messiah. Such is our passion as Christians. If "faith" is still the issue, he would do well to re-read Hebrews 11, for faith, said the author, is after all what the ancients were commended for.

Stop the presses! Don't change the US Constitution!  This is a matter of spirit and Scripture: God's purpose for man was that the human being should appreciate the gift of humanity specifically through the complementary relationship of man and woman. This was more than Adam's unspoken desire—it was his need. Our Father recognized this and gave him woman to make him complete. And so from the same flesh came two human beings who stand apart as separate and distinct, but also as a unity within God's purpose for man. Pope John Paul II has expressed this message to contemporary Catholics, as has Karl Barth to contemporary Protestants. Says Barth:

"It is incontestable that for male and female both in themselves and in their relationship to each other (through love and marriage or outside this special connexion), it is a question of the actualization of humanity, and this must take place in the realization of the fact that they belong indissolubly together and are necessary the one to the other for their mutual completion. But we have to remember that on this line of thought there is a point where good inevitably becomes evil and sense nonsense if this actualization is sought outside obedience to God's command. There is a point at which the incontestable truth that male and female as such are together man becomes a lie when it is not significantly counterbalanced by the recognition that man as such is male or female and not a third term." [Church Dogmatics, III, iv]

How easy this sounds, really. But what are we to say about the intersexual human? This is not the same as the homosexual, who pretends to be a new species of human, or transsexuals, who attempt to solve their confusion over gender through surgery and pharmaceuticals; nor is it the same as the eunuch, who lacks only testes. The intersexual, the true hermaphrodite, is a genuinely rare, unique difference within humanity. The Intersex Society of North America declares that 1 child in every 2,000 is born an intersex child (although not all intersex children are true hermaphrodites). This group promotes a "patient-centered, rather than concealment-centered" model among physicians, and advocates considered alternatives to gender identification besides the rush to make that choice through complex surgical methods. TIME magazine has a compassionate feature on "The Third Sex" in its March 1, 2004, issue.

I think the issue of the hermaphrodite, the intersexual, is much more than biological. Until we can make sense of the "third sex" we cannot call complete our understanding of God's purpose for man; until we are clear about the place of the hermaphrodite within humanity, we as Christians cannot make decisive contributions to debates over gender, sexual ethics, and how marriage is possible for those who are neither male nor female. Until evangelical theology can comprehend these rare human beings, not only are we unable to speak to their condition but we risk losing them to fringe groups who desire to trace personal identity solely through the wrongful use of the sex organs.

Here's a new count of the international visitors to this blog.  In alphabetical order, the growing list is: Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, United Kingdom, and (predominantly) United States.

With the update, these are now otherwise known as:

                        

A Los Angeles Times article today reported that American Jewish leaders are now questioning whether it might have been a tactical error to lambast Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ as anti-Semitic or as something likely to incite Jewish hatred in the US. It isn't so much that they've also managed to increase the popularity of the movie (even well before its theatrical release on Wednesday), but rather they are finally taking a liking to the movie, with at least one Jewish community leader admitting that "he was most chagrined that the controversy may have torpedoed a chance to use the film as a moment for Christians and Jews to learn more about each other's traditions." Still others recognize that the vociferous Jewish criticism "could be seen as inappropriate meddling in the presentation of Christianity's most sacred narrative."

The people of Uganda need our righteous prayer.  The BBC reported today that Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has attacked a camp for displaced people in northern Uganda, killing 192 and injuring many others. After attacking the camp with assault rifles, artillery, and rocket-propelled grenades, the rebel group burned people to death when they sought refuge in their grass huts. Uganda is a country that is 66% Christian, with Islam and indigenous beliefs in the minority; the life expectancy there is at most 46 years. [CIA Factbook; see also the Human Rights Watch publication on this subject.]

In January (as well as last year in November, October, and August), I mentioned the psychotic Kony and his brutal rebel war in which children are routinely abducted and either killed, mutilated, or made to serve in the LRA itself—boys as soldiers, girls as sex slaves. Children are mutilated by having their lips, nose, ears, hands, or feet hacked off. The LRA wants to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments.

Much ado about Nader?  Ralph Nader, like any American independent candidate, is going to fight a battle on two fronts. I think doing two things at the same time is not always the best strategy, but Nader obviously wants to try this again. The first front is ensuring that there is a vivid alternative to the enriched-white-bread candidacy about to be put forth by the two major parties in the US. The second front is a tougher battle: Here Nader wants to take on the electoral habits of the majority of voting Americans. Now, admittedly, the number of voting Americans is only about 50% of the registered voting population—although that could change under the impetus of an upstart candidate like Nader—but the real issue is not so much whether they vote as their reason for choosing one candidate over another. We saw this issue in the recent carnival of mirrors featuring John Kerry and Howard Dean, where a candidate with backbone is pushed aside for someone more "electable." Americans are coming to believe less in what they themselves desire in a political candidate and more in what someone else thinks. That's why I have less and less confidence in pollster data:

Pollster:   "Sir, who are planning to vote for in this election?"
Voter 1:   "I think Voter 2 over there will vote for Candidate A."
Pollster:   "Voter 2, who are you planning to vote for in this election?"
Voter 2:   "Well, I think it's pretty clear that Voter 3 will vote for Candidate B."
Pollster:   "Voter 3, who are you planning to vote for in this election?"
Voter 3:   "Hmm, you know, I think Voter 1 will vote for Candidate A."

And so it goes ... I think I need to bring this up with pollster John Zogby, who lives down the street from me. American voters (as an aggregate) are no longer voting their conscience. Instead of voting for their candidate of personal choice, they are voting for someone else's candidate. They think they know what the crowd wants, and think they want to same thing—and then complain when the crowd votes for the wrong person.

Nader rightly blames the Democratic Party for the Iraq war resolution that turned Bush into a wartime president, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft's frightening successes, Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, the Medicare fiasco, and many other blunders. Perhaps the best reason we can find for voting for Nader, if we had to find only one reason for doing so, is to ensure that we end up with a Lame Duck Congress.

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