Nineteenth Sunday 1996

Nineteenth Sunday 1996

Walking away from our own Jewishness

These readings are very rich, but it’s really hard to connect them, so I’m just going to recommend that everybody, me too of course, spend some time today thinking about this business of the manifestation of God, not in all this fancy, glitzy stuff, but in sheer silence, and then consider these nice things from Matthew where Jesus, as it’s historically depicted here, stands as overcoming the chaos of the world, which is what water normally stands for in Biblical writings. What I’d mostly like to talk about is this passage from Romans. The last three weeks, of course, we’ve had these wonderful texts from Romans: what separates us from the love of God, that great thing from last week; and all things working together for the ones who love God from the week before... It is very important, especially this passage today at the beginning of that long, long middle section of the Ninth to Eleventh Chapter when Paul tries to answer an agonizing question--but I’d like to provide some context because I don’t even think that we know what the question is for Paul.

There are two other texts in the New Testament, one from Matthew and one from John, that have been determinative for much of Christian history, and they both come from the Passion Narrative. Remember in the Passion Narrative of Matthew, we have the Jew saying: "His blood be on us and on our people," and in the Gospel of John you have the Jews again saying: "We have no King but Caesar." Now those two texts, first of all it should be remembered, were not written with the view that they were going to be immortalized; those two texts were written to address certain religious-cultural problems in the latter part of the first century. But those two texts also became determinative for much of Christian history, especially after the Christians became legitimate under Constantine, and became a warrant for a massive persecution of the Jews who were then understood as a God-forsaken people.

Well, what I want to talk about today is how that notion is totally wrong, and the best way to get hold of that is to follow Paul, a Jew, who saw himself as a Jew until the day he died, agonizing over those other Jews who did not accept Jesus as Messiah. He said in this extraordinary passage: "I would be willing to be accursed and cut-off from Christ." This is the same man who said, "I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me." If you don’t get some sense of the intensity of the problem and the depth of this man’s agonizing over this, then try to think of what would be analogous as a parent: you get a lot of it when you see other people in your family going off the rails, and it makes you suffer in a way like nothing else can. That’s basically what Paul is doing here because he can’t figure out, as a Jew who has made a major shift in his life, what’s going to happen to all those Jews who have not made the same sort of shift.

As I said, precisely under the influence of Paul, this so-called Jewish Reform movement moved out of Judaism into the larger world, into the Greco-Roman world... But it’s important to remember that at the bottom of that whole movement Jesus, contrary to what the sisters at St. Mary’s grade school told me, did not come to found a new religion. Jesus was a Jew until the day He died. Jesus came to believe that God was going to act in human history and establish the Kingdom, which meant the reconciliation of everybody, (over the next two Sundays we’re going to have more of the famous Ninth to Eleventh Chapters of Romans and I want to talk about some of the implications of that...) But, basically, we Christians are exactly what Paul says we are in the Eleventh Chapter of Romans: we are the "wild olive branch grafted onto the natural olive," and the natural olive tree is Judaism. As Christians, we are basically a group of reformed Jews, and , like when all struggles such as this happen in a family, when somebody goes one way and somebody goes another, everyone hardens their positions, and that’s exactly what happened here: we’re going to deny everything that’s Jewish in our past. So, what I want to talk about today and for the next two Sundays is this one aspect of the multiple defects that have influenced the growth of the Jesus movement because of that act of denial. I mean, what have we lost in walking away from our own Jewishness?

So, I want to take just three things, one for today. How did the Jesus Movement develop? Well, eventually it got legitimated, but it was an illegal movement, as you know, until the Edict of Milan in 313 under Constantine, Christians were illegitimate. Constantine said: "now not only are you legitimate, but you are the State Religion of the Roman Empire..." So what happened? This Jewish movement took on all the political structures of the Roman Empire. Diocese, that’s a Roman political term, and nobody uses it now except us Roman Catholics and the Anglicans, or, for a Roman jurisdiction, Bishop... In other words, the intensely hierarchical structure, this pyramidal structure of the Roman Empire with the Emperor on top and everybody walking around finding their place in that structure, became normative for Christianity. I mean bosses..., we’ve got bosses. Just as a foot-note here for anybody who followed this extraordinary talk that the Arch-Bishop of San Francisco gave at Oxford a few weeks ago, Arch-Bishop Flynn, said that we’ve got to take the Pope seriously when he says that we’ve got to rethink the primacy of the Roman Pontiff because we have really skewed this thing massively. What does our Jewish heritage have to say about this?

The extraordinary thing about Judaism, of all the other religions of the world, is that it is a non-hierarchical religion... That’s astonishing, but it is a fact. The only time that the Jews attempted a hierarchical kind of religious structure was, namely, during the period of the Monarchy. Most of the time they did not have Kings, and then they got Samuel who was King of the Jews, then they got David who was King of everybody, then they got Solomon who was King of everybody..., then the whole thing got busted. The Monarchy among the Jews was a total catastrophe, an unmitigated disaster. Why? Well, for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them is the sense that with the Jews, everybody is immediate to God. That’s the whole message of the Exodus, the whole message of the prophets... Everybody is immediate to God and, therefore, if you’re going to talk about hierarchy, you have to talk about hierarchy in a massively different way in this religious setting than you do in any other setting. Politically it doesn’t wash. You cannot simply translate normal political hierarchy into this religious phenomenon, and the Jews, of course, have maintained that. Not even the priesthood endured among the Jews, they don’t have it any more because the temple got busted up in the year seventy at the hands of the Roman Army. Judaism is still around, folks, and they don’t have any priesthood.

This is really crucial for us as we come to what it is to be a Roman Catholic and when we try to think about how the Church is built today. Where is our place in the Church? Who are we really? Of course it’s not just political, or sociological, or anthropological data we’re dealing with here; we’re dealing with basically religious data. We’re dealing with the way that people are supposed to relate with each other. Because hierarchies necessarily entail, as that good Catholic Lord Acton said, and that everybody quotes but that no one really believes: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Hierarchy necessarily means a distribution of power, and an uneven distribution of power. It never could work. That’s why you get all this stuff: "the last is going to be first, and the first is going to be last... He who wants to be boss must be the servant of all," and so you get the foot-wash... This is not supposed to be some pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die kind of thing, this is supposed to be a vision of what rules us, how we pray, how we think, how we feel about each other--right now, however badly we feel about it... And we do it badly, we just take it for granted... We don’t do it very well.

That’s the first issue of our Jewishness that we have lost at our own great cost... The Jews were essentially a non-hierarchical religious body, and we, I think at our own cost, have forgotten that.

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