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

Why Did Jesus Die? Pt. 4

Jesus as an Agent of Ransom

The Jesus of our gospels is clear about his mission: “the Son of Man is come to seek and save the lost, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 18:11, Luke 19:10). But it is a mistake here to think that he speaks here primarily of his death.

The two halves of the statement (a typical Hebrew parallelism, as in the psalms and provers) define and modify each other: his way of ‘ransoming’ is to ‘seek and save the lost’ by everything he does, and is. For in him the image of God which is the formative core of our own psyches (defaced as it may be in us) shines with particular intensity; in him the eternally-springing Life of the Divine itself is at work in a fully human nature. And so he is already ‘resurrection and life’ to ‘those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,’ as St. Luke describes the mission. Which is to say he brings ransom by his very life-force, not just his dying.

If you are the leper begging for cleansing along the roadside, he ransoms you, redeems you, right then and there, from the exile of your leprosy. If you are the beloved daughter of the centurion, he ransoms you from your death coma (and highly probable death) by reaching deeply into your soul with such intimate words of love: talitha, cumi. If you are bound by the guilt or consequences of your sin, his startling words of forgiveness and his even more surprising command to take up your bed and walk jolts you out of the dark pit you were in, ransoms you back into active life. After all the word ‘ransom’ means to be delivered from evil of any and every kind, internal or external.

But what’s the payment then? Ransoming captives or redeeming something in a pawn shop involves ‘paying’ the ransom. Work like casting out demons (or working with the insane, if you prefer), like healing diseases, surrounding people with the loving acceptance that releases them from the power of their sins—this kind of work costs. The harder cases don’t work out without ‘prayer and fasting,’ as Jesus tells his disciples who couldn’t heal a convulsive boy.

Such deep dedication can cost one’s very self, the outpouring of one’s soul and spirit, virtually one’s life blood. Ask any dedicated psychologist,psychiatrist, or pastor, any caring social worker, any shamanistic or charismatic healer—even any mother or father knows deep in caring for an infant who needs such care to be ransomed and redeemed from lack of proper brain development.

So Jesus’ death is of a piece with his life. And as the Story is told, his ransoming didn’t even stop when he breathed his last.

Next blog: Bearing Sins