Passiontide Storytelling: What To Do With “The Reproaches”?

Across the centuries on Good Friday, a haunting Gregorian chant called the faithful to come forward and venerate the “wood of the cross on which the salvation of the world was hung.”

“My people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Answer me.
I brought you out of Egypt but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.” (1)

The “The Reproaches” continue in many Roman Catholic and high-church Lutheran and Anglican parishes, paralleled in the liturgies of the Orthodox churches. In poignant terms, God is pictured confronting his people about the death of Jesus—a theme that became central to medieval and even modern sermonizing.

Along with these verses, the fixed Good Friday prayers prayed for the conversion of the “perfidious Jews.”  Such prayers played a big part in inciting holy week violence against Jews, from early medieval times until the end of the 19th century in many places.

Post-Holocaust Changes

Since the Holocaust, an increasing number of Christians have awakened out of this anti-Judaic delusion, horrified at the “final solution” the piety of centuries helped foster when the Nazis transformed it into a chillingly thorough national agenda.  (2) Many liturgical churches now shy away from using them at all because of their unsavory historical associations.

Still others go so far as writing the High Priests out of the story entirely, shifting the blame entirely onto the Romans—a move which I find unconvincing and unnecessary, to say nothing of the fact that the Temple authorities take an integral role in the Scriptural drama (3). That some Jewish authorities felt that the nation was threatened by a man and a movement they perceived as bound to lead to insurrection is, quite simply, the way human authorities respond.

I rejoice that others seek to redeem and revision traditional readings, bringing out the implicit human universality in the Passion narratives, which is the way I always understood them. God’s “people” — Christians, Jews, all humanity can and does resist God’s purposes for the world. Offloading guilt onto scapegoats—humanity’s historical default category—insulates us from all the ways, great and small, that we, and humanity itself, “crucify God” and God’s creatures in our injustice, environmental degradation, and mistreatment of each other. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels bear witness to this, to say nothing of daily news reports.

Liturgical Re-visioning

A fine example of liturgical re-visioning of The Reproaches can be found in the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship Book, which imagines God addressing not just Jesus' persecutors, but the church:  “O my people, O my church, what have I done to you?” No longer is "my people" them but us—which is how I always understood it.  The new Lutheran Reproaches also include very specific repentance:

O my people, O my church, what more could I have done for you?
I grafted you into my people Israel, but you made them scapegoats for your own guilt, and you have prepared a cross for your Savior:
R. Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal One, have mercy on us.  (4)

Likewise, the liturgy prays that Jews, "called and elected as Your own may receive the fulfillment of the covenant's promise,” a studiously Anglican-style ambiguity, but far from the ancient “perfidious.” I take it personally to mean that I stand in solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters as we both await the age of Messianic fulfillment.

Holy Week tells us we are all “standin’ in the need of prayer.” Why not stand together, even if we live in distinctly different traditions, all of which deserve respect?
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1. For a complete text of the contemporary Roman Rite version see: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/activities/view.cfm?id=1040

2.  See the account of Pope John Paul II's Liturgy of Repentance in Rabbi David Rosen’s address at Georgetown University: http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b=8451903&ct=12477353

3.  As in previous posts, I feel that conjectural reworking of the reported facts of the story will never have the weight in history of Scripture itself. Thus it remains crucial how we understand, preach, liturgize and teach texts themselves, which most of the Christian world believes are "revealed."

4.  See Evangelical Lutheran Worship, ELCA, 2006

The Passion Narrative: Who Are These “Jews”?

The Jews, the Jews, the Jews—hoi Iudaioi in Greek—are everywhere in the Holy Week readings. But who they are is not as simple as the surface of the texts suggests.

Many, if not all preachers know that “the Jews” is used in many different ways. It doesn’t always mean the whole Jewish people. Very few parishes, however, use translations that make this clear, especially on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Church-goers easily get the impression that "the Jews"en mass rejected Jesus. In past centuries, such distortions led again and again to religious murder. No less.

Diverse groups of "Jews"

Hoi Iudaioi means, in its most basic sense, the Jewish people as distinguished from other tribes and tongues. But those Jews who followed the Jewish man Jesus, of course, didn’t reject him. The “great crowds” of Jews at Passover “heard him gladly” and mourned his death (Mark 13, Luke 22; see blog #3 in this series). When the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel tells the Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews,” he takes his stand firmly in the tradition of Moses and the Prophets, as remembered by the Jews, a.k.a. Judeans, who returned from the Exile (John 4:22).

But while “many of the Jews...believed in Jesus,” others reported the incident to the authorities, who are also called “the Jews” in many verses (John 11:45-46). These Iudaioi, those Judean leaders and their followers who get into verbal brawls with Jesus in John’s gospel, are the target group Jesus accuses of being blindly resistant to the light of God, not all those other Jews (1).  It is from this leadership group and their supporters alone that the disciples huddle behind barred doors after Jesus execution “in fear of the Jews" (John 20:19).

The Odd Rigidity of Most Modern Translations

While the Fourth Gospel clearly uses hoi Iudaioi in different ways, an oddly rigid refusal to paraphase these words seems to possess most translators. The NRSV translators, for example (who paraphrase a great many other words to aid reader understanding) stick doggedly to “the Jews” in these gospel passages. They know about the different uses, but refuse to indicate them. Is the weight of historic Christian scorn for "the Jews" so strong that it lingers still in their work, however unconsciously? Because of such bloody history, this matters.

Some, however, seek to make the truth clear. Consider the different message these two translations of John 7:11-13 deliver.

NRSV: The Jews were looking for him at the festival and saying, “Where is he?”...While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” 13 Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.

New Living Translation: The Jewish leaders tried to find him at the festival and kept asking if anyone had seen him....Some argued, “He’s a good man,” but others said, “He’s nothing but a fraud who deceives the people.” 13 But no one had the courage to speak favorably about him in public, for they were afraid of getting in trouble with the Jewish leaders.

“Judean leaders” or even “the leaders” would be better, in my opinion. But these translations  support the historical and spiritual reality: Jesus wasn’t against Judaism as such, but against the hypocrisy, resistance to God and abuse of power that can arise in any religion, nation, or group. They too often flourished among Christians themselves! 

The New Living Translation is a giant step in the right direction, as are a few others.  Pray God the day comes when all the Holy Week lessons are read from translations that make clear what “The Jews” means. Soon.

Next: What to do with "The Reproaches"?
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1.  John's version of Jesus' verbal brawls with opponents are most likely influenced by the violent hostility between some Jews and the emergent Jesus movement in the decades after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.

Perils and Pitfalls of Passiontide Storytelling

I heard it from the pulpit in another state just a couple of weeks ago: “Jesus taught a religion of freedom and love to counter the oppressive Jewish religion of fear and law.”

The sermon, in this liberal, progressive congregation, went on to describe the elaborate pettifogging burden of “613 detailed laws” that Jews had saddled themselves with by Jesus’ day, and Jesus’ genius in boiling them all down to two: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  No mention, of course, of the rabbinical sage Hillel the Elder, the real author of this alleged “simplification,” or of the fact that Jesus himself surely knew that a lion’s share of those 613 Torah commandments applied to temple and judicial officials rather than to daily life.

But there it was, hanging in the air, this age-old stereotype, confirming life-long impressions of many of the hearers. A stereotype peddled by a theologically sophisticated, even avant-guarde Protestant minister, and repeated in a variety of ways in both liberal and conservative churches to this day, on occasion fueled by some “liberationist” readings of the Gospels.  Jesus vs. “them,” the Jews—or, at the least, the Pharisees. 

The Holy Week Drama

Jesus, of course, had opponents, and eventually, enemies. Every return to Holy Week, the most emotionally intense part of the Christian Year, promises to sharpen stereotypes of this adversarial relationship, from the supposed fickleness of the Jerusalem crowds to the reasons for Jesus’ death.  Holy Week, therefore, has been, and can be still, a perilous time for re-telling this story, for it is so very easy to fall into time-worn stereotypes of both Jews and Judaism, especially in an attempt to make this tragic—and triumphant—tale more dramatic.

Much teaching and seminary training in recent decades has blunted the sharp edge of Christian anti-Judaism a great deal. But these stereotypes still roll all too often from the tongue of preachers and rise up too easily in the minds of Bible-readers, even those with no desire to denigrate Jews or Judaism. The narrative reflex is old and deep.

In this short series of blog essays I plan to share what I’ve learned in almost five decades of intense Jewish-Christian dialogue and reading of texts both Jewish and Christian. This bears on the Gospel narrative, especially on Palm Sunday and Holy Week preaching, teaching and meditating. The foci will be three, though the essays may be more than that: 1) Stereotypes about Second Temple Judaism;  2) The Passover crowds on Palm Sunday and Easter; 3) “The Jews” and the death of Jesus. 

Real-life consequences, then and now

Necessity drives such stereotype-purging. Not so very long ago in historical time, Holy Week served as prime time for attacks by Christian mobs on Jewish towns and neighborhoods. An elderly Jewish man told me recently that he knows Jews in cities like New York who still steer clear of even walking near churches in Holy Week. Here is an inherited reaction to almost twenty centuries of ugly Holy Weeks, reinforced by vivid memories of bullying in childhood by Christian kids calling them “Christ-killers.”

The Christian world, even the “enlightened” section of it, has not yet fully outgrown some of its deeply inherited misunderstandings. In a second post tomorrow, I’ll begin by taking on that preacher and his all-too-easy sermonic flourish, (hoping that, for most of my readers, I will only be confirming what they've already learned).

Next: Law vs. Love or Law the Means of Love?

Why Did Jesus Die? Part 6

Ordinary Brutality

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow....

Today is a day of quite ordinary brutality. A man is dragged through the streets of a city, then impaled on an instrument of torture until he’s dead. This sort of thing happens all the time, every day, somewhere in the world.

I used to weep for Jesus, but now I weep for the world, for all the victims of ordinary brutality. If we “look and see” we must look in two directions: to the Crucified one, and to the world’s brutalities, both overt and subtle, that find their deep meeting-place in him.

I dare hope that my tears are somehow part of Jesus’ own tears for the same world which he loved; that they are even connected with God’s own tears for the dark despoilation of soil and souls, of forest and family in this still glorious creation, full of so much good.

How can anyone who believes that the creation is fundamentally good not recognize the insidious power of evil that arises from, and through the human heart to misuse earth and its creatures in destructively self-aggrandizing ways? How can anyone who believes that human beings are made in the image of a great Goodness not realize that the seeds of that goodness—our capacities for love, generosity, mutuality, cleverness, creativity and assertiveness—can grow up in crooked ways that blur and twist that image into sinister patterns?

Good Friday unmasks the face of the world and of our human nature, such an organic part of creation—a face dark with ugliness and evil as well as radiant with goodness and beauty.

There is a deep strand of Christian piety that would, perhaps inadvertantly, isolate Jesus’ suffering as some magical transaction between God and Jesus that floats above the world, “saving” it in some hidden metaphysical sense. I do not deny any truth that may be in metaphysical musings, but for me the story of Christ’s suffering points out in all directions to the ordinary brutalities and injustices of the world. His Way of responding to this brutality is not his special possession, but an open path and power for those who would inhabit this world redemptively.

Our salvation comes not simply and solely from Christ dying on the cross, but from the way Christ died, which is of one piece with the way he lived. This is a way he “opens for us in his flesh” and draws us into participation in it through the Spirit. Thus the life-blood of his own Way, his very Spirit, begins to circulate through us for the healing not only of the world, but of our own divided souls.

The Family of Jesus and his Radical Movement

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 5

....and Mary pondered all these things in her heart. (Luke 2:19)

What if we “post-critical” readers of the Bible considered that the Birth narratives might contain important historical clues about the origins of the ministry and mission of Jesus?

Granted, the stories in Matthew and Luke are heavy with symbolism and are clearly the product of careful, midrashic crafting, and contain amazingly miraculous events. That is not my concern, however. I leave all that aside for readers to consider according to their sense of God and the possible.

What interests me here is hints about the family and people they knew or encountered. Might these stories have deeper historical roots than modern sophisticates usually consider?

What I mean is this. What if Jesus were born into a family that was part of the “third force” in Second Temple Judaism, not part of the establishment of Sadducees and Pharisees who were represented in the Sanhedrin. This was the disenfranchised melange of messiah-expecting, sometimes revolutionary groups that ranged from the Dead Sea Scroll community on the one hand to the Zealots on the other. What if these stories are about a child who was considered, by that family and their co-religionists, a special lad—a ‘child of destiny’—destined for leadership? *

The first century Jewish ‘eschatological’ community

My first clue to this possibility came from pondering the verse in Luke where we’re told that the prophetess Hannah “spoke of the child to all those in Jerusalem who were waiting for the Redemption of Israel” (Luke 2:38). Who were these folks? The extensive scholarship now available about Jewish sects in this period gives a solid historical context to Luke’s comment.

Those “waiting for the Redemption” expected a wide variety of complementary and contradictory “redemptions,” all the way from a military leader like David to the descent in human form of an angelic redeemer; and there’s tantalizing new evidence that one expectation was of a ‘Great High Priest’ after the order of Melchizedek who would offer a once-for-all atonement for Israel’s sins.** The adult Jesus walked into a maze of archetypal images just waiting to be applied to him and his mission.

The stories speak of a mother who “pondered in her heart” some special identity for her son. Is that so implausible? She would hardly be the first mother in history to feel and foster in her child a sense of special identity and destiny—more especially so if she were one of those “waiting for the redemption of Israel.” Nor is it implausible that she dreamt some startling dream about the boy. After all, modern bookshelves are filled with tales of angel dreams, angel appearances, whatever one might think of such phenomena.

Jesus, errant 'wunderkind' of a movement?

If Jesus came from a family that already had a sense of being part of God’s move to turn Israel in a different direction, this would make a lot of sense of the family’s clear distress about the direction Jesus’ ministry takes. They feel he’s not exercising leadership the way they think he should, just as John the Baptist reportedly felt.

His mother is pictured bugging him to make a self-disclosing move at a clan wedding. (John 2:1-11). We’re told a whole party of “his own people” goes off to bring him back by force because they think he’s “beside himself” (Mark 3:21). And the Fourth Gospel pictures Jesus being taunted by his brothers for not declaring himself more openly. Might “they did not believe in him” be better translated “they did not trust him” (John 7:5), that is, to do things right?

Mother Mary, brother James and “the brothers” are certainly right there on the scene in the weeks after the resurrection appearances, and James puts himself forth powerfully as a major leader of the movement’s Jerusalem commune. They seem to have a stake in his movement.

Yes, the stories are patently loaded with theological symbolism, and influenced by who Jesus became and was believed to be. But Luke does claim he consulted “eyewitnesses” who had been with the movement “from the beginning” (Luke 1:1-3). ***

For my money, at least, these speculations make clearer sense of the adult Jesus’ reportedly strained relationship with his family, and demonstrate that, at age 30, he didn’t have a sudden “break” with a more normal childhood and young adulthood, but rather an evolving sense of how he might serve the God he had been told had special plans for him.

And, of course, such “speculations” have the added merit of actually hugging the shape of the Story the first generation of Christians told about the man and his birth.

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* In fact, just such ‘child of destiny’ scenario emerged among non-establishment spiritual types in the early 20th century in India. The noted Indian spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo was dubbed a ‘child of destiny’ and groomed to be the Great World Teacher of the Theosophical Movement by leaders like Annie Besant. In adulthood, Aurobindo broke with his handlers and struck out on his own as a less exalted spiritual teacher.

** See Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest

*** Ancient historians were likely more interested in the facts than some modern scholars seem prepared to believe. See the chapter on ancient historiography in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham. See also Margaret Barker, Christmas: The Original Story**