By Mark L. Carlton
Gandhi once observed, that on paper Christianity is the greatest of all religions but it has a fatal flaw, Christians.
Jesus could have explained this flaw to him. He said that His Kingdom would be comprised of both wheat and tares and that the two would grow together until the end of the age. Then, Jesus said, He would, “send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness.” Peter wrote that because of the presence of tares among us, “the way of life will be maligned.”
Any one who has read history can point to many examples of failure by those who have called themselves Christians. The crusades, the inquisition, anti-Semitism, the defense of slavery, all of these things and many more like them can be pointed to by those who would malign Christianity.
That these things happened, that they were perpetrated by those who call themselves Christians and that scripture was often used to defend them cannot be denied. How tragically true the words of Christ and the apostle have proven to be. There have indeed been stumbling blocks and those who commit lawlessness within the Kingdom of God.
But that is only part of the story, because in the midst of the tares there has also been wheat. I saw an example of this when my wife and I visited Vad Yashem (the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem) many years ago. It is impossible for a person of conscience to visit Vad Yashem without being deeply stirred by the record of the crimes of the Third Reich and the suffering of the Jewish people. Any honest Christian who passes by its exhibits has to do so with a sense of shame, because the record of the church during those dark hours is not good. Anti-Christians can rightfully point to the fact that Hitler could never have come to power without the support or acquiescence of the German church. It gave him both.
But when we left Vad Yashem there was a beautiful avenue lined on either side with locust trees. It’s called the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles. Here a tree has been planted in memory of every gentile Vad Yashem has been able to document who risked or lost his or her life to save the life of a Jewish person during the Holocaust. It is a field of trees. It could just as easily be a field of wheat. Because almost every tree there is planted in memory of a Christian — a real Christian — who risked and in some cases lost everything to love their neighbors as they loved themselves.
Historian Martin Gilbert has written a book to tell some of their stories, it’s titled, “The Righteous.” The crimes of those who call themselves Christians cause us shame, but the stories of the righteous gentiles make us proud. These are the rest of the story that our critics somehow never seem to discover in their reading of history.
Let me share just one of them with you. It is the story of David Prital. David was forced to flee for his live when the Nazis came to his Ukrainian village. At first he didn’t know where to go. He was sure the Orthodox church would offer him no sanctuary, but then he remembered that there was another group of Christians in the area, a small group that was despised almost as much as the Jews. In our country they would have been called fundamentalists or evangelicals. They were the Baptists, amd Prital somehow sensed that they would give him sanctuary.
David hid until he saw a Baptist farmer coming in from the fields. He didn’t have to approach him because when as the man saw the frightened refugee and recognized him as a Jew, he approached him. Prital writes that he comforted him with tears in his eyes and immediately invited him into his home. (An act that would have resulted in his own execution had he been caught.)
As they entered the home this kind man told his wife, “God [has] brought and important guest to our house. We should thank God for this blessing.” And as the amazed Prital watched, the couple kneeled on the floor and prayed. This is Prital’s own account of that event:
“I heard a wonderful prayer coming out of their pure and simple hearts, not written in a single prayer book. I heard a song addressed to God, thanking God for the opportunity to meet a son of Israel in these crazy days. They asked God to help those who managed to stay alive hiding in the fields and in the woods. Was it a dream? Was it possible that such people existed in the world?”
“They stopped praying and we sat down at the table for a meal, which was enjoyable…before the meal, the master of the house read a chapter from the Bible. Here it is, I thought, this is the big secret. It is this eternal book that raised their morality to such unbelievable heights. It is this very book that filled their hearts with love for the Jews.”
Yes, those who call themselves Christians have not always been worthy of that title, but the twisting of the scriptures by those who seek to justify their lawlessness, or the cynicism of those who point to these abuses and seek to slander us all, should not blind us to the fact that in the midst of a world filled with tares there is also wheat, beautiful, fruitful wheat, men and women — true Christians — whose lives speak to the reality of the faith they profess.
