19th Sunday

Here is Paul, the Jew

19th Sunday

1 Kings 19.9, 11-13; Rom. 9.1-5; Mt. 14.22-33

Today is one of those rare and happy occasions when the readings, all three of them, are really powerful. However, there is no obvious connection between them. So what I'd like to do is to focus on the central reading from Paul to the Romans, because it says something to us of which we in all of the Christian churches, have only within the past 20 - 30 years become even modestly aware. It is that we are really reformed Jews. Contrary to what I was taught as a kid, and in the seminary, Jesus did not come to found a new religion or found a Church. Jesus came to reform the Judaism of his time. That's what he came to see as his life's work. That's what he did and that was one of the reasons why he was killed.

One of the reasons that we are not aware of this is the fact that, historically, most scripture scholarships, the most powerful scripture scholarship, was done in Germany. And, of course, Germany has a long history - together with the rest of Europe - of anti-Semitism. And this is certainly one of the major contributing factors whereby our Jewishness simply got eclipsed. We in the Roman Church, of course, have worked out our own strategies for denying that. The supercessionist school of thought, for instance, says that the Jews as deicide are basically God-damned. Therefore there is no help for them and so we can declare open season on them.

So that's the context. But what Paul is talking about here, in one of the most poignant passages in the entire Bible has to do with his new kind of Jewishness and his cutting himself off from those Jews who did not accept Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Remember last week's reading where we heard those stunning words: nothing in the world - death, life, power, principalities...nothing is going to separate us from the love of God in Christ. This was Paul's sense of himself. But please note it is immediately after that he looks to his fellow Jews. This is what he is anguished about: if nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ, what about my fellow Jews?

An extraordinary response from this man who said "I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me." and " I seek to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified and the power of his resurrection." Here is this same man saying, I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ.

Astonishing. It is astonishing that this man would say that: " For the sake of my own people." Amazing. Amazing. Here is Paul, the Jew, wondering about those other Jews who did not see Jesus as Messiah and certainly, above all, and this was the crucial point, as a suffering Messiah. Because that was the great neuralgic point.

In the 12th century of our era the Jews were an occupied people and Messianic expectation was not particularly high. And then Jesus comes along and complicates the thing whereby people might see he was the Messiah. But He didn’t make sense because the Messiah is not supposed to suffer and die. So this created a problem. A problem that I suggest, and have suggested for years, that we Christians have never really come to terms with ourselves. I mean, we too want a triumphant Jesus too. We want a Jesus who wins. We don't want a suffering Messiah either, either as individuals or as institutions.

So what happened? How did all 19 century and 18 century German scholarship say little about the Jesus the Jew until Albert Schweitzer, in 1901, wrote his remarkable book about the search for the historical Jesus? Well, all you have to do is look at the New Testament. Look at the gospels, above all, of Matthew and John which were basically written to address this great fissure in Judaism. Some Jews took Jesus as Messiah. Some did not. So you have the paradoxical depiction of Jesus in both those gospels, where in Jesus is the most Jewish of Jews, and, at the same time the "Jews" are hypocrites, a brood of vipers etc. etc. You remember the gospel of Matthew has the Jews saying at Jesus' trial - "His blood be on us and on our children." and according to the gospel of John we have "the Jews" saying -"We have no king but Caesar." Which is to say that we simply abandon our own religious heritage. Did the Jews say that? No, they did not. It is simply a device used in the first century to discredit the Jews who did not buy Jesus as the Messiah. But the situation gets worse.

Let me go back. This is not a history lesson. But unless we understand this we are going to miss a lot of our own would be Christianity. In the year 54, the emperor Claudius threw all the Jews out of Rome. Why? Because they were fighting over some guy named Christos. This is evidence of the very thing that I'm talking about. By the year 313 of course, Constantine, for whatever reason - largely political I suspect - declared Christians legitimate and not only that , but they became the official religion of the Empire. So we were winners. We were winners and that's why Christianity takes on all kinds of coloration of the Roman Empire. The pope, the Bishop of Rome, is given the same title as the Roman emperor - the pontife maximus. The great bridge builder. The church is divided as the Roman political world was divided - into dioceses, with an overseer in each of the diocese. But in a very, very short time the antagonism between the Jewish people who followed Jesus and the Jewish people who did not follow Jesus had become intense.

The stakes were raised when Constantine said that the Christians were legitimate. Let me read you a couple of passages from a set of sermons preached by St. John, Bishop of Antioch in Syria, about the Jews: "Of what to accuse the Jews? Of their rapine, their cupidity, their deception of the poor, thieveries, and huckstering? Indeed a whole day would not suffice to tell it all. How can Christians dare have the slightest converse with Jews, most miserable of all men? Men who are lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits. Are they not inveterate murderers? Men possessed by the devil whom debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of the pig and the lusty goat. They know only one thing - to satisfy their gullets, get drunk, to kill and maim one another. Indeed, they have surpassed the ferocity of wild beasts where they murder their offspring and emulate them to the devil. "

This was preached in his cathedral church at the end of the fourth century and further, he said, "The synagogue. Not only is it a theatre and a house of prostitution, but a cavern of brigands, a repair of wild beasts, the domicile of the devil, as is also the soul of the Jews. God hates the Jews and always hated the Jews. And on judgement day he will say to Judaisers - depart from me because you have had intercourse with my murderers. It is the duty of Christians to hate the Jews. He who can never love Christ enough will never have done fighting against those Jews who hate him." (You can find the original Greek in the Huron library if anybody is interested.)

What have we done? In the middle ages, of course, Jews were famously libeled as well poisoners and ritual murderers of Christian children. This is our history. The synagogues continue to be defaced. Anti-Semitism is not dead and anti-Semitism is the pure creation of us, reformed Jews.

And I've asked over and over in many of sermons here, how much we have lost by not understanding our Jewish past. The Jewish notion of truth for example. The Jewish notion of authority. The Jewish notion of community.

So where do we go? What do we do with all this? Just feel bad? "I don't hate Jews. Some of my best friends are Jews." Well, just a couple of little suggestions. What we see here in Christendom is the terrible danger of demonizing those who disagree with us. It is a normal tendency. This is one thing, I think, which we learn here. But perhaps more to the point, there is another thing . The crucial issue with Jesus is that he was killed by Romans who saw he was a threat to imperial power. "Is this the king of the Jews?" And he was a threat to some Jews. Why? Because he opened up Judaism in a way that it had not been opened. To prostitutes, to women, the handicapped, sinners, the poor. This man was available to all these people, who were considered impure. So, what I'm getting at is simple. What we can also learn is to be warned by that example against our normal tendency to exclude the other who is different from us. God is known now, as in today’s passage from the Book of King's, in the silences; not in our self-righteous propositions and laws and routines and sets of order and procedure. God is known in the silences and therefore that God is not nearly as accessible as canon law would have us believe. Or even systematic theological tracts would have us believe. Are they necessary? Yes. Canon law, theology and dogmatics? Yes. They are necessary. But what we have frequently done is to use them to erect barriers around ourselves and of course demonize those who stand outside those barriers.

So, we're going to hear Paul's frail attempt to make sense of this terrible problem he had Paul will say: "They are my people. God has come to them. The Messiah has come from them. The law has come from them. Everything good. God's will to save everybody has come through the Jews." And so, here is he stuck with this enormous problem and next Sunday we skip to the eleventh chapter of Romans to see his kind of goofy attempt to make sense of this. But that's next week. Now we have to think about these texts.

"I would willingly be cut off from Christ." And this is the last thing that we can learn. That kind of sensibility. "I would willingly be cut off from Christ for the sake of my fellows."

Amazing.

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