On anti-Judaism, we've not progressed much since 1945

When I worked as a priest at Westminster Abbey I took hundreds - probably thousands - of people around that amazing building.

I often met them at the Great West Door, and they all knew, of course, that inside the door was the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.

They wanted to get there and to snap away with their cameras or set the video whirring.

But I always tried - not always with success! - to stop them in their tracks and to invite them to read the prayer inscribed on the stone to the left of the door:

God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the Church, the Commonwealth and the whole World peace and concord, and to us sinners life everlasting.

It was the last phrase I most wanted them to focus on.

"There's a connection," I'd say, "between that phrase and the tomb you're about to see.

"It's made through that little word: sin."

It's a connection societies have too often lost over the past one hundred or so years because we've been busy pretending that sin isn't as bad as it really is.

Adultery: "Oh that's just a 'bit on the side'."

Fraud: "You know she always sailed close to the wind."

Prostitution and pornography: "Well, boys will be boys."

Domestic violence: "It's the culture you know, 'the way things are.'"

Theft: "He didn't take that much: they can afford to be without it anyway."

It's fair enough that we can't live with our sinfulness: because of course it causes us deep feelings of revulsion and remorse, whatever we say on the surface.

And it's fair enough too to say that the Church has majored much too heavily in the past on sin - especially on sexual sin.

But we can't just dismiss sin, as if it's of no consequence.

We actually need more sinners: more people prepared to own and own up to their sinfulness.

Read the story that dominates this week, for instance, the story of Jesus's passion, suffering, death and resurrection, and you'll perhaps be shocked to notice that sin is deeply embedded within the way the Christian tradition tells its story.

You'll have to get past a lot of stereotypes - the standard view of Pharisees and Jews, for instance, as Satan incarnate.

But see those card-board cut-out characterisations of people for what they are - yes, the tabloid stuff is there even in the Bible - and you'll perhaps have discovered one of its greatest fault-lines.

For this reveals itself almost every time Pharisees and Jews are in fact mentioned, because with each mention nails are driven not into the crucified Christ but into a community which has for far too much of Christian history been mistakenly, cruelly, and with devastating effect held responsible for Jesus's death.

Some Jews, even Pharisees perhaps, and some Romans of course were part of the complex set of decisions that saw the Nazarene crucified on the first Good Friday.

The scholars now pretty-much agree that he died because he threatened the collusive relationship between Jewish temple authorities and the Roman occupying power: the kind of symbiotic relationship of the mutually evil that we see in Harare, for example, between some Anglicans and President Robert Mugabe.

But it's wrong - and plain sinful - to take that polemical story-telling and to say, as the Church has so often threateningly said, that all Jews are responsible eternally for his death.

Wrong, because it's a historical nonsense and an insult to living Judaism.

And wrong because there's a link between saying this and the terrible persecution that Jews have suffered across their history at the hands of so-called Christians, whether that's Jews walled up in York in the thirteenth century, Jews sent to Auschwitz in the twentieth, or the exhibition Anne Frank + You desecrated in Liverpool Cathedral in the twenty-first by people wanting to perpetuate misinterpretations, lies and exaggerations - yes, there are some of those in the Gospels too.

People like me must realise that the crucified Lord, whilst a symbol of suffering love to Christians, is a potent and terrifying sign of ill-treatment and possible death for Jews.

As an institution, living in the shadow of the Shoah, the annihilation - as Jews prefer to call the Holocaust - much of the Church has come to see that the way in which the New Testament is written - indeed the way Christians talk about new versus old, as if old is outworn and superseded - comes from a time when the 'new' Christian reality was trying to establish itself over-against the 'old' Jewish tradition.

As in any move from adolescence to maturity, the push for independence leads the child - Christianity - to say things to and about the parent - Judaism - which are the kind of horrid, exaggerated things you say in the heat of teenage tantrums with their overly-bold assertion that 'I'm right' and with their equally clear implication that 'You're wrong.' But understandable though this rhetoric of hatred is, it has not been simply a passing adolescent phase, it's devastated Jewish lives down the centuries - some 6 million of them down the centuries.

Which is why, as the Rabbi at the Passover supper in the cathedral tonight begins to tell the old, old story of a people brought to freedom in the promised land from slavery in Egypt, and crossing the red sea to get there, I'll be praying that my Christian tradition can move further to free itself from the negative consequences of the manner in which it's interpreted God's saving love in Jesus Christ.

I'll ask that we can be as self-critical of our religious tradition as was Jesus of his - remembering that as a symbol of this the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom on Good Friday.

That's what needs to happen. For the divine grace and love that emanates from Calvary - and later from an empty tomb - wasn't given at the expense or to the detriment of my Jewish neighbours.

It was given so that all might be free.

I'll also pray for courage to recognise this sin and to remove any lingering traces of it because, frankly, though we've made much headway since 1945, we're far from free of anti-Judaism or its wicked twin, anti-Semitism.

Indeed, despite the way in which the Roman Catholic Church has so often led the way in these matters, the present Pope has himself has fallen fowl of this Christian fault-line in his stubborn refusal to remove all anti-Judaism from the Latin prayers for Good Friday when he recently had them revised.

We have a long way to go. But we can now, thankfully, travel the road as fellow 'sinners' - Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha'i, Zoroastrian, Humanist, Agnostic and Atheist even - as those prepared to take responsibility for our mistakes, to own and own up to them, and to ensure that never again will we project them onto another target group.

Which is why today at the cathedral we also welcome Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee, since the latest such target seems to be Muslims, and we know only too well from the Jewish experience where that targeting could chillingly lead us, and more importantly, them.

• Moazzam Begg is in conversation with Canon Chris Chivers, Anjum Anwar MBE and Canon Michael Hunn in Blackburn Cathedral today from 1.05-1.55pm.