Christians throughout the centuries have used the word “cruciform” (literally “cross-shaped”) to describe a life patterned after Jesus’s self-giving love.
A cruciform faith is one shaped by the self-giving love of Jesus revealed on the cross. It embodies a way of being in the world characterized by humility rather than dominance, sacrifice rather than self-promotion, mercy rather than vengeance, and reconciliation rather than retaliation. To live cruciformly is to allow the pattern of Christ’s cross (suffering love, poured-out compassion, enemy-embracing forgiveness, and trust in God) to form our character, guide our actions, and reshape how we see others and ourselves.
“A cruciform life is patterned after the self-giving love of Christ’s cross.”
A Cruciform Witness Against Antisemitism
There are wounds so ancient and so deep that they seem woven into the soil of history. Antisemitism is one of these wounds. It’s older than the church, older than the modern West, older even than the languages we use to name it. It’s as ancient as Pharaoh’s fear, as persistent as Babylon’s exile, as violent as Rome’s occupation. It’s changed shape across millennia (religious, racial, political, conspiratorial). Still, its intent has remained the same: to diminish, distort, and destroy the dignity of Jewish people made in the image of God.
For followers of Jesus, opposing antisemitism isn’t optional. It’s a matter of discipleship. To follow the crucified and risen Lord is to stand with every people who have endured contempt, violence, and exile. But with the Jewish people, the Christian responsibility is even more intimate. The One we confess as Lord was born into Jewish flesh, prayed Jewish prayers, kept Jewish feasts, lived as a Jewish rabbi, and still bears in his resurrected body the Jewish wounds he received at the hands of empire. There is no Christian identity without Israel; no gospel without the promises made to Abraham; no salvation history without the faithfulness of a people who carried the covenant through fire.
And yet, across history, Christians have often turned the cross against the very people of Jesus. We’ve forgotten our own story. We’ve forgotten that the Messiah we worship came not to erase Israel but to fulfill God’s covenantal love for Israel and, through Israel, to bless every nation on earth. When Christians forget this, antisemitism flourishes. When we remember, something healing and holy becomes possible.
This is a call to remember.
This is a call to repent.
This is a call to take up a cruciform posture (a posture shaped entirely by Jesus’s self-giving love) and confront antisemitism with clarity, courage, and compassion.
This is a call to stand with the Jewish people in a wounded world, not as an act of political partisanship, but as an act of discipleship to the crucified and risen Christ.
“A cruciform life refuses to let fear become a theology or prejudice become a liturgy.”
Naming the Wound: What Antisemitism Is
Antisemitism is hostility, hatred, discrimination, or violence directed toward Jewish people as Jews. It takes many forms: blaming Jewish communities for social or economic problems, denying or distorting Jewish identity and history, spreading conspiracies about supposed Jewish power, desecrating synagogues, cemeteries, and sacred texts, denying or minimizing the Holocaust, targeting Jewish individuals or institutions with harassment or violence, and holding Jewish people collectively responsible for the actions of any government.
Antisemitism isn’t merely an opinion or a political stance. It’s a sin against the God who created every Jewish person in the divine image. It’s a rejection of Jesus’s own humanity. It’s a wound in the Body of Christ.
And crucially:
Antisemitism isn’t the same as critiquing the actions of the State of Israel.
Nations (any nation) are accountable to moral scrutiny. Policies can be unjust. Governments can oppress. Leaders can sin. Christians committed to justice must be able to lament the suffering of Palestinians, name wrongdoing by the Israeli government, and advocate for the dignity and rights of all people without falling into antisemitic tropes or dehumanization.
The problem arises when criticism becomes demonization, when legitimate critique collapses into conspiratorial blame, when protest is mixed with hatred of Jews as a people, or when the language of “they” and “them” conjures the old ghosts of racialized suspicion.
“Scrutinizing the actions of any government is responsible citizenship; demonizing an entire people is sin.”
We must learn to walk with discernment: defending Jewish dignity without excusing injustice and defending Palestinian dignity without feeding the ancient hatreds that have murdered generations.
This is possible, but only with a cruciform imagination shaped by Jesus.
A Brief Christian History of Antisemitism: Confession before Action
Before Christians can speak prophetically against antisemitism, we must speak truthfully about our own history. This history isn’t peripheral; it’s central to why the church must now stand with clarity and humility.
Christian antisemitism has taken many forms across the centuries: patristic writings that demonized Jews; medieval laws that segregated and impoverished Jewish communities; forced conversions and expulsions throughout Europe; crusaders who massacred entire Jewish towns; passion plays that portrayed Jewish people as Christ-killers; the silence or complicity of churches during pogroms; the theological soil that nourished European racial antisemitism; the failure of many Christians to resist the horrors of the Holocaust; and the postwar rise of Christian nationalism that continued to marginalize Jewish neighbors.
This isn’t ancient history. It lives beneath the surface of Christian memory. It shapes attitudes, sermons, political rhetoric, and imagination. Our task isn’t to wallow in guilt but to practice confession. Confession restores truth. Confession breaks denial. Confession opens the door to healing.
A cruciform church is a confessing church.
A church that refuses confession turns the cross into an empty symbol instead of a living power.
Cruciform Vision: What Jesus Teaches Us about Antisemitism
The antidote to antisemitism isn’t first political; it’s theological. It begins with Jesus.
(a) Jesus Was Jewish, Is Jewish, and Remains Jewish
This truth alone destabilizes antisemitism at its root. The incarnation isn’t accidental. Jesus enters history in a particular people with a specific story.
To reject or demean the Jewish people is to deny the flesh that God chose to bear.
To follow Jesus is to honor his people.
(b) Jesus Reveals God’s Covenant Fidelity to Israel
Jesus doesn’t replace Israel; he fulfills God’s promises to Israel. The New Testament is unintelligible apart from the story of Israel’s covenant, law, prophets, temple, exile, return, and longing for redemption.
God’s faithfulness to Israel isn’t revoked. The church doesn’t cancel Israel; it’s grafted into Israel’s story.
Christians who grasp this can never participate in antisemitism.
(c) Jesus Confronts the Powers that Devour People
Antisemitism isn’t just hatred; it’s a principality, a spiritual power that feeds on fear, projection, and violence. Jesus confronts such powers, not by mirroring their violence, but by exposing and disarming them at the cross.
The cross is God’s definitive rejection of scapegoating.
A cruciform people can’t scapegoat Jewish communities (or any communities) for the world’s problems.
(d) Jesus Teaches Us to Love Our Neighbors and Our Enemies
This includes Jewish neighbors and Palestinian neighbors. It includes Israeli families living in fear and Palestinian families living under violence or occupation.
The command to love can’t be selectively applied.
“The gospel never gives Christians permission to hate; it commands us to love even where history groans.”
Love isn’t agreement. Love isn’t silence. Love isn’t sentimentality.
Love seeks justice for all, dignity for all, safety for all.
(e) Jesus Names and Heals Our Implicit Bias
Whenever we dehumanize, stereotype, or generalize about any people group, Jesus places a mirror before us. The Spirit reveals the prejudice we’ve inherited, absorbed, or tolerated. True discipleship requires letting this mirror change us.
“The cross teaches us that hatred of any people isn’t merely wrong, it’s a betrayal of the One who stretched out arms of reconciliation for the whole world.”
Distinguishing Critique from Contempt: How to Speak with Moral Clarity
Christians must be able to critique any nation’s actions (including Israel’s) without falling into antisemitism. This requires moral discernment and spiritual maturity.
Legitimate critique includes opposing unjust policies, grieving the deaths of civilians, advocating for human rights, resisting the pull of nationalism and militarism, and calling for peace, equality, and dignity for all.
Antisemitic patterns include blaming “the Jews” as a collective, invoking conspiracies of secret control, denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, comparing Jewish self-determination to totalitarian evil, demonizing Jews as Christ-killers, using Nazi imagery irresponsibly, and ignoring the history and trauma carried by Jewish communities.
Christians must hold two truths at once:
Israel’s government isn’t identical with the Jewish people.
The suffering of Palestinians doesn’t justify hatred of Jews.
To walk this line requires cruciform humility, not ideological certainty.
A Theology of the Cross Against Antisemitism
The cross is the center of Christian imagination. It reveals how God confronts evil and how disciples are called to respond to injustice.
Here are the cruciform principles that speak directly to antisemitism:
(a) The Cross Exposes Scapegoating
Jesus was executed by an imperial government using the logic of scapegoating: “It’s better that one man die for the people.” This logic fuels antisemitism. The cross unmasks it as a lie.
Any ideology that makes the Jewish people a scapegoat stands condemned by the cross.
(b) The Cross Reveals that God Stands with the Persecuted
Jesus’s death aligns God with victims of violence and prejudice. Jewish communities, who endured centuries of persecution from Christian societies, are therefore not on the “outside” of God’s concern: they are near the heart of it.
(c) The Cross Teaches Nonviolence, Not Revenge
Antisemitism is often rooted in grievance, real or imagined. The cross reveals that vengeance destroys the one who wields it. The cross calls us to resist evil without mirroring its methods.
(d) The Cross Forms a People of Compassion
A cross-shaped community is tenderhearted, not hard-hearted. It listens to trauma. It honors memory. It refuses to weaponize pain.
The cruciform church protects the vulnerable: Jewish and Palestinian, Israeli and Arab.
(e) The Cross Requires Truthfulness
Antisemitism thrives in conspiracy and lies. The crucified God calls the church to ruthless honesty. Truth is cruciform: humble, self-emptying, and courageous.
A Scriptural Vision for Christian Solidarity with the Jewish People
The Bible gives Christians a framework for rejecting antisemitism and standing with the Jewish people.
(a) Genesis: Every human bears the image of God
Dehumanization violates the first truth of Scripture.
(b) God’s Covenant with Abraham
Christians are grafted into Israel’s covenant, not the other way around. We owe gratitude, not contempt.
(c) The Prophets: Justice, Not Prejudice
The prophets confront injustice in Israel because of love for Israel. Christian critique must follow that pattern: rooted in love, never in disdain.
(d) The Gospels: Jesus within Judaism
Jesus’s mission is unintelligible apart from his Jewish identity. Every Christian prayer invokes a Jewish Messiah.
(e) Romans 9–11: The Irrevocable Calling
Paul’s vision is unequivocal: God’s covenant with Israel is unbroken, and the church must never boast over the branches.
(f) Revelation: A New Jerusalem
The final hope of the Bible is a redeemed humanity gathered around the God of Israel.
If Christians truly believed these texts, antisemitism could not survive among us.
What Christian Spirituality Offers: Practices for Purifying the Heart
Rejecting antisemitism isn’t only intellectual; it requires spiritual formation.
(a) The Practice of Confession
We name prejudice in ourselves and in our communities. We renounce inherited sin. We reject the “little jokes,” the stereotypes, the casual cynicism.
Confession disarms the hostility lodged in the heart.
(b) Contemplation and the Purification of Perception
Contemplative prayer quiets reactivity. It allows the Spirit to reshape our gaze so we see Jewish neighbors not through the lens of politics or history, but through the eyes of Christ.
(c) Lectio Divina with the Hebrew Scriptures
Reading the Hebrew Scriptures slowly and prayerfully reconnects Christians to the spiritual ancestry we share.
(d) Fasting from Contempt
Christians can fast not only from food but from the habits of speech that perpetuate hatred. A fast from contempt may be one of the most needed spiritual disciplines of our age.
(e) Intercessory Prayer for Jewish Neighbors and Communities
Prayer forms affection. Prayer builds bridges where ideology builds walls.
How Christians Can Practically Resist Antisemitism Today
A cruciform approach includes explicit, concrete action.
(1) Challenge antisemitic tropes in conversation, churches, and online spaces.
Don’t remain silent. Silence protects hatred.
(2) Build relationships with local Jewish communities.
Attend events when invited. Visit synagogues. Listen. Learn. Offer friendship with no agenda.
(3) Preach and teach about Israel’s role in salvation history.
This roots Christian identity in gratitude, not supersessionism.
(4) Advocate for the safety of Jewish communities.
Support security measures, oppose harassment, and publicly condemn threats.
(5) Distinguish clearly between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
Draw boundaries. Teach nuance. Form disciples who can lament Palestinian suffering without vilifying Jews.
(6) Support peacebuilding efforts in Israel–Palestine.
A cruciform posture longs for safety, dignity, and flourishing for both peoples.
(7) Use Scripture responsibly.
Reject weaponized interpretations. Refuse to frame Jews as spiritually blind or cursed: interpretations with deadly consequences.
“Wherever contempt rises, the church is called to kneel: to embody the humility of Christ that breaks cycles of suspicion and scorn.”
The Witness of a Cruciform Church
When the church stands against antisemitism, it bears witness to Jesus by embodying his love in the world.
A cruciform church refuses to be captured by political echo chambers, resists narratives of vengeance, defends the dignity of every human, and seeks justice with tenderness. It remembers the wounds of history and dares to face the truth about its own failures. It loves its Jewish neighbors with concrete fidelity, not abstraction, and labors for peace in a world shaped by violence.
This isn’t a political stance but a Christ-shaped one.
The church doesn’t exist to mirror the world’s divisions; it exists to reveal God’s reconciling love.
When Christians stand with Jewish communities, we aren’t choosing one side of a worldly conflict.
“The crucified Messiah invites us into a way of being where no one is made an enemy and every neighbor becomes a sacred trust.”
We are choosing the side of the crucified God, who binds up the brokenhearted and calls every people beloved.
A Prayer for Christlike Solidarity
O Christ, the wounded healer,
born into the house of Israel,
faithful Son of Abraham,
teacher of mercy, bearer of truth,
bridge between heaven and earth,
teach us to walk your cruciform way.
Deliver us from the blindness
that turns neighbors into threats.
Cleanse our hearts of prejudice,
resentment, and inherited contempt.
Let the sins of our ancestors
be confessed, not repeated.
Give us courage to confront hatred,
wisdom to discern truth from ideology,
and tenderness to stand with all who suffer.
Let our love be wider than our fear,
our justice deeper than our outrage,
our speech gentler than the world’s noise.
And gather your peoples together,
Jew and Gentile, Israeli and Palestinian,
enemy and friend,
beneath the shelter of your peace.
For you are our reconciliation,
our hope,
our center,
our Lord.
Amen.
Bibliography
Jewish Community Relations Council. “Criticism of Israel vs. Antisemitism.” https://jcrc.org/blog/criticism-of-israel-vs-antisemitism/
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Working Definition of Antisemitism.” https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
See All My 20+ Books
See my books at this link: Graham Joseph Hill books
