Preaching practice against antisemitism

Preaching practice against antisemitism is a guideline for reading and proclaiming Luke-Acts without converting its polemics against particular Jewish people into hostility toward Judaism or Jews. It asks preachers to name the texts’ historical conflicts and theological shortcomings, resist inherited caricatures, and use preaching to interrupt rather than renew a cycle of anti-Judaism.

Scope and historical setting

Luke-Acts presents the mission of Jesus and the church as emerging from Israel’s story. In Luke’s account, God intends to bless all peoples through Israel; the church’s welcome of gentiles continues that purpose rather than rejecting Judaism. Its leading figures, including Jesus, Peter, and Paul, are generally represented as faithfully Jewish. The movement is not portrayed as a separate religion that simply replaces Judaism, but as an extension of Israel’s mission in the last days.

That continuity does not remove the conflict in the narrative. Luke-Acts criticizes many Jewish people who do not affirm the mission of Jesus and the church, and it implies that those who resist the movement toward the Realm face condemnation at the apocalypse. The commentary distinguishes this bias against many Jewish people from systematic hatred of everything Jewish, but it emphasizes that the portrayal can still be harmful. Preaching must address the difference without using it to excuse the text’s negative depictions.

The conflict is best understood in its historical setting as a dispute over what it meant to be faithfully Jewish, not as a simple contest between legalistic Judaism and liberating Christianity. Many Jewish people in Luke’s time also believed they lived in the last days and sought to be ready for salvation. They agreed that gentiles should believe in the one living God, repent, and adopt core Jewish attitudes and practices; the dispute concerned whether gentiles also needed full initiation into Judaism, including dietary practices and circumcision. Luke argues that they do not. A preacher who reduces this dispute to Judaism’s supposed legalism obscures the shared setting and reproduces the very caricature the guideline warns against.

Recognizing polemic in the narratives

The commentary applies this caution to speeches as well as plot. Acts’ speeches, in the view of most scholars cited, express Luke’s theology more than they preserve the historical speakers’ exact words. Peter’s Pentecost speech, for example, accuses Jewish listeners of conspiring with gentiles to put Jesus to death. That charge belongs to Luke’s polemic against many Jewish leaders; it should not be repeated in a way that assigns collective guilt to Jews or treats the episode as a warrant for Christian hostility.

The account of Stephen’s arrest, defense, and death makes the danger especially visible. Luke presents Stephen as falsely arrested and as interpreting Israel’s history in a speech that calls many Jewish people stiff-necked. The crowd then kills him by vigilante violence, in an episode the commentary says violates the Jewish legal system. The narrative offers Stephen as a courageous witness, but it also pushes its negative portrayal of Jewish leadership to a new low, depicting the crowd as repeating the hostility shown toward Jesus at his trial. The guideline therefore requires both parts of the account to remain in view: Stephen’s example should not become a means of treating Jews as collectively violent or spiritually obstinate.

Luke’s polemical framing also extends through the vineyard imagery that connects Jesus’ parable in Luke with Stephen’s death in Acts. The parable describes messengers and an heir rejected by tenants, while Acts depicts certain Jewish people killing Stephen, a representative of the heir. Luke interprets the conflict as a transfer of the vineyard’s witness-bearing purpose to the church, with the destruction of the Temple presented as evidence of that shift. The commentary does not ask preachers to turn this theological claim into a contemporary indictment of Judaism; it identifies the claim as part of a historical family fight that need not be carried into the present.

Preaching and critical interpretation

A preacher’s common temptation is to set a negative picture of Judaism against a positive picture of Jesus, Christianity, and the church. The guideline rejects that contrast. Preachers should explain the circumstances that produced Luke’s negative caricatures and may need to say plainly that Luke is theologically or ethically mistaken in some passages. Critical engagement is not a dismissal of scripture: it makes visible how a text’s claims operate and prevents inherited polemic from being mistaken for a timeless judgment on Jewish people.

This approach also changes how preachers handle listeners’ identification with biblical characters. In the account of the apostles’ witness, a congregation may recognize its own failings in the actions attributed to Jewish leaders. But that recognition can slide into a generalized negative association with Judaism. The preacher should name the narrative’s selective representation of the Jewish community and help the congregation repent of caricature, rather than invite a simple transfer of blame from ancient characters to a whole people.

The same work applies when preaching Stephen’s story. Its account can encourage a congregation facing hostility to imitate Stephen’s thoughtful defense, courage, confidence in God, and concern for opponents. At the same time, the preacher should identify the account’s polemical construction instead of allowing its portrayal of Jewish people as persecutors of prophets to reinforce anti-Judaism or antisemitism. The narrative’s pastoral use and its ethical risk are inseparable; responsible preaching acknowledges both.

Contemporary responsibility and lasting effects

The commentary treats preaching as an opportunity to break an inherited cycle, not merely to avoid a careless phrase. A congregation can examine the historical conflict represented in Luke-Acts, ask how the text shapes perceptions of Judaism, and recognize its own anti-Judaism. When a passage supplies no positive point of contact, the preacher can still make the interpretive conversation itself a corrective, especially when the text is read in ways that reinforce negative perceptions of Judaism today.

This responsibility reaches beyond an individual sermon. The commentary describes Christian anti-Judaism as self-perpetuating across two millennia and calls on preaching to help the church repent of its part in that history. It does not erase the conflict recorded in Luke-Acts or require its readers to adopt Luke’s judgments. Instead, it distinguishes ancient polemic from present ethical responsibility: preachers can take the text seriously enough to explain its setting, challenge its harmful generalizations, and refuse to reproduce the family fight in their own time.