Good News for Gentiles Is Not Bad News for Jews (5th Sunday in Lent; John 19:1-16a; March 18, 2018)

Good News for Gentiles Is Not Bad News for Jews

5th Sunday in Lent
John 19:1-16a
March 18, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

For centuries across Europe villagers gathered in churches on Good Friday. On this day of high solemnity the Eucharist--what some of us call a communion service--was not celebrated. Instead, the people received communion by means of bread that had already been consecrated and was reserved for this occasion. They heard the story of Jesus' arrest, trial, execution, and burial from the version in John's gospel. They prayed, remembering their own moral failings. They received communion. They were sent away in silence. That was how Good Friday was observed for centuries.

Some years were different. In some years events had proven difficult. There was more than the usual amount of suffering. Perhaps the beer went bad, or the cheese wouldn't set properly, or a two-headed calf was born, or there were one too many still births or miscarriages. The whole community would be on edge, looking for and not finding adequate explanations of why these things happened or, more importantly, how to set things right again.

Almost as if by magic or by pre-arrangement, the eyes of Christians turned toward their neighbors, and not just any neighbors. The collective hostile gaze of the community fell on their Jewish neighbors. Ordinarily, the Christian and Jewish communities lived more or less peacefully with each other. Sure, from the perspective of Christians, Jews were peculiar people. They dressed a little strangely. The men all had long, full beards. They wore side-locks. They didn't observe the Christian rhythms of time, the Christian year, and the Christian holidays. Instead, they had their own rhythms. Perhaps most suspiciously, they refused perfectly good food. What after all, could possibly be wrong with people who would not eat bacon?

And then there was what is known to history as Jewish "blood guilt." The classic beginning of this notion is found in Matthew 27. In this passage, Pontius Pilate can find no particular reason to have Jesus killed, but the Jewish crowd has been stirred up and it demands Jesus' death. Pilate, while washing his hands, says, "I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves." "Then the people as a whole answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children.'" (27:25) Here in the story of Jesus' suffering, Jews--both the Jews of Jesus' day, and Jews through all of history--accept the blame for Jesus' death.

So, on some Good Fridays, after the readings, the prayers, and communion, the Christian community turned their hostile and accusative gaze toward their Jewish neighbors. They gathered, not as a congregation, but as a mob. They hurled insults at neighbors with whom they at other times might enjoy cordial relations, neighbors whom they might greet with calls of "Gut shabbas" when they saw them on Saturdays, some of whom greeted them in turn on December 25 with calls of "Merry Christmas."

Sometimes insults were not all that they hurled. Sticks and stones followed words. A Jewish man who resisted might be beaten or even killed. Houses were set afire.

The hatred of Jews by Christians has a long history, a shameful and violent history. We may think of it as culminating in the Holocaust perpetrated by the people who were considered at the time to be among the most rational and cultured people in the world, leaders in science, technology, philosophy, and the arts, the people who brought us Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. The deliberate, industrial slaughter of six million of Europe's Jews stands as the worst manifestation of the hatred of Jews, at least so far. But antisemitism is far from vanished. The last few years have shown us over and over that the hatred of Jews is alive and well in Western Europe and in that most Christian of nations, the United States. Like a bold cockroach it has in recent years crawled out from the dark places where it has been hiding and dares to march in public carrying tiki torches and chanting hate-filled slogans. The haters of Jews have moved into the daylight. Our President can even say that their hatred of Jews does not disqualify them from also being good people.

Hatred of Jews has a number of roots, but clearly, it is deeply rooted in texts that we call holy. Antisemitism draws some of its nourishment from the soil of Scripture. And the Gospel of John is a rich and fertile loam in which that hateful weed has grown particularly well.

I've made mention of it from time to time. But I've been on my way to somewhere and have not wanted to stop, instead noting where antisemitism has taken root here and there, promising to come back to it later. And now it is later. It's time to keep my promise.

The New Testament is in some ways actually less anti-Jewish than it appears. Its writers were all Jewish as far as we know. Paul, James, John of the Revelation, the authors of the gospels, and even Jude were all Jews engaged in a struggle with other Jews to define what being a faithful Jew was really all about. They used Jewish sources, Jewish traditions, and Jewish rhetorical forms to do this. The New Testament is a Jewish document. When these writings criticize "the Jews" they clearly don't mean "all Jews." At very least when they write "the Jews" they mean this as shorthand for "those other Jews, the ones who aren't like us."

Then, too, the Jews who wrote the New Testament were not the only Jews struggling with other Jews to define what it meant to be Jewish. Other writings by other Jews have survived. They use the same strategies and the same rhetoric. Their opponents are called "the Jews" sometimes and sometimes "false Jews." Like Paul does, sometimes the opponents are "Jews" and "false Jews" at the same time in the same writing. If we don't know this, the New Testament looks even more anti-Jewish than it is.

On the other hand there is genuine animosity toward Jews in places like the Gospel of John. I hope we haven't forgotten that John's community had been traumatized. They had found themselves cut off from their own people, officially disowned by what passed for official Judaism in their city, exposed to threat of persecution by the imperial authorities because they could no long claim the privileges of a recognized religion. They could be forced to choose between making a sacrifice to the "genius" of the emperor or being punished with torture, exile, or death for being atheists and traitors.

For my part I don't begin to believe that what John's community was suffering was entirely the fault of the leaders of their synagogue. I suspect that they had been pretty obnoxious synagogue members. I suspect that they lobbied constantly for recognizing Jesus as Messiah against the opinion of the rest of the community. I suspect that their expulsion was also a kind of self-exile, the sort of thing that happens when we find ourselves in deep conflict with our boss and end up unemployed but no one can say for certain whether we quit or were fired.

Traumatized people tend to do two things and both of those things happen in John's gospel. The first is that they are unable to see any mixture of good and evil in those who had perpetuated this trauma. The second is that the circle of perpetrators tends to expand to include anyone who is not willing to join the survivors in their totalizing judgment against the perpetrators. "Those who are not with us are against us."

The Jewish leaders come off really badly in John's gospel. They often not only have bad actions, they have bad motives as well. There is nothing redeemable about them. And this rubs off on the Jewish masses as well, as we see in the crowd scenes.

Trauma becomes a distorting filter. An objective telling of the events is the loser. For example, Pontius Pilate comes off in our reading as a weak man, unable to enforce his will or govern his province. He lets himself be led around by the nose. At the slightest hint that the Jewish priesthood will report him to his superiors as being soft on treason, he caves and allows himself to be manipulated into killing Jesus who, according to him, is no threat to Rome.

This historian rises to say that this is nonsense. In the first place, Judea had a reputation as a province that was difficult to govern. There was never real peace there, only the absence of outright hostilities. Rome knew perfectly well that the only way to govern Judea was with an iron hand. In Pontius Pilate, they had a person who was able to do what needed to be done. Pontius Pilate was given a great deal of latitude for these reasons. He, not the local leadership, held the power.

One example of the humiliating powerlessness of the Jewish leadership was this: On the feast day of Yom Kippur, the high priest had to go into the Holy of Holies and offer sacrifices there. There were special vestments, special robes, that were worn only on Yom Kippur and only by the high priest. These essential vestments were stored, not in the Temple, but in the palace of the governor. The high priest himself was required to walk from the Temple to the Praetorium, to ask “pretty please” for his vestments, and to stand waiting outside the gate until they were brought out.

At most the local leadership were like the Jewish prisoners whom Nazis put in the completely untenable position of running the labor and death camps of the Nazi regime. The priests enjoyed a good standard of living and a little power when it came to matters relating strictly to the Temple (and not a great deal of that, even). In exchange for that they had to satisfy both the Jewish people and their Roman overlords. It was impossible.

John's Gospel goes pretty far not only to blame the Jewish authorities but also to excuse the Romans. And for good reason. Cut off from the synagogue, any hint that they held the Romans responsible for the death of Jesus would have been regarded by the Empire as a treasonable accusation of injustice. So we have the priests stirring up the crowd who demand Jesus' death. And we have a literary Pontius Pilate too frightened to respond as the real Pontius Pilate would have responded to such a breakdown of public order: He would have had his soldiers “disperse” the crowd with swords and spears. He would have had the priests arrested and flogged.

It is completely understandable that John's version is told the way that it is. I think it is even excusable.

What is not excusable is that Christians continue to read John and the gospel stories and conclude that the death of Jesus was brought about by the Jewish authorities. No, Jesus was killed because he represented a threat to Roman power. Period. End of paragraph.

The hatred of Jews has been supported for centuries by failing to read the New Testament correctly. A continuing failure places us--that is, Christians--on the side of the neo-Nazis with their tiki torches, their ugly chants, and the hatred that they want enshrined in public policy. Christians had a chance to resist this deadly ugliness some eighty years ago. We blew it. Six million Jewish men, women, and children were killed as a result.

It is time to recognize that we need a new reading of our foundational documents. It is time to recognize that, if early Christians had any reason to resent their treatment by the Jewish authorities, we have no cause for resentment at all. It is time to acknowledge the Jewish character of our sacred texts, the Jewish tradition of respectful disputation, and the long, sad history of the Christian hatred of Jews. It is time for Christians to recognize our great and unpayable debt to the Jewish tradition and our profound gratitude for the vision and grace that have come to us through the Jesus who was a Jew, born to Jews, raised by and among Jews, whose life and teaching were devoted to justice for Jews. It is time. This time we must not fail.

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