“Certainly you brought
about a disastrous thing whereby the heavens are almost split asunder and the
earth is split and the mountains fall crashing down that they attributed
a son to The Merciful. It is not fit and proper for The Merciful that He
should take a son to Himself! There is none at all in the heavens and the earth
but he be one who arrives to The Merciful as a servant.”
(19:89-93, Maryam)
Tziporah:
Yasmina, I was intrigued by your remark last week that both Jesus and his mother, Mary, are considered examples of righteousness and uprightness in Islam. Chapter 19 of the Quran begins with the birth of John the Baptist and goes on to describe Jesus' birth, and to praise Mary, Abraham, Moses and a host of other prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The chapter concludes, however, with explicit descriptions of the punishment that awaits those who do not believe in The Merciful. I stumbled when I read these verses, which strike me as especially anti-Christian and seem to contradict the universalism of Islam. Since I cannot read classical Arabic—and because the Quran is written in poetic and homiletic form—I realize that I cannot fully appreciate its meaning. I was hoping that you could help me by elaborating on this passage.
Yasmina:
Earlier in this same chapter,
Jesus [Peace and Blessings be upon him] is quoted as saying: “I am a servant of
God; He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.” (19:30). Another chapter describes a conversation that will take
place between God and Jesus [Peace and Blessings be upon him] on the Day of Judgment,
when God will say, “O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people, ‘Take me and my mother
as deities besides God?’ He will say, ‘Exalted are You! It was not for me to
say that to which I have no right.’”(5:116) We learn from these verses that Muslims
believe that Jesus [Peace and Blessings be upon him] was a prophet who served
God and embodied honorable values that all humans should follow, including the
worship of God alone. Since Jesus [Peace and Blessings be upon him] is held in
such high regard and altering his message is considered especially egregious,
the end of Chapter 19 warns future generations from straying from the
path prescribed to them by His messengers.
This universal warning is directed toward all those who deny God’s
One-ness and ignore His command to worship Him alone, as well as toward those
who attribute to Him that which is not befitting His Glory and Majesty.
Therefore, God’s message here is not anti-Christian but anti-Trinitarian, aimed
at reminding us that He transcends all His creation.
Grace:
You’ve made a good distinction, Yasmina. However, the passages from the Quran that you cited seem to imply that Christians worship Jesus as a second deity. I suspect that a strictly literal interpretation of the phrase “Son of God” in Christian scriptures gives rise to this misconception—an understandable misconception, I might add, as Trinitarian doctrine has provoked convoluted arguments even within Christianity! In The Gospel of John, Jesus is quoted as saying, “The Father and I are one….Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (10:30, 14:9b) These statements, taken out of scriptural and historical context, will surely sound blasphemous or heretical. Yet I hear these words as revelatory of Divine Mystery; they point to God’s humility, through which God becomes exalted. Through my understanding of them, I believe that God is approachable and accessible; and that God’s love is so great—even for a terribly imperfect me and for all of human-unkind—that God will give God’s very self to us. In Jesus, Christians attempt to understand the unfathomable: Immanuel—God is with us, here, now.
