Jesus was a radical Jewish prophet, teacher and charismatic healer and leader, preaching and demonstrating an utterly authentic interpretation of the message of Judaism and its prophets: NO ONE is expendable; EVERYONE is a child of God.
His message was not rejected because “the Jews” were unwilling to hear him. He was not crucified because “the Jews” were cruel and lacked compassion.
He was crucified because he challenged the existing power structure – Rome and its client Temple Priesthood – during a period of intense ferment in Judea. He really did present an alternative to Roman rule – the Kingdom, or authority, of God – not just any God, but the God of the covenant at Sinai, the God who frees slaves and protects the powerless, the God who demands justice and decries the abuse of power by human rulers. The God of the Jews stands in direct opposition to Pharaohs of any age, and any stature. Judaism promotes a fundamentally skeptical, even jaundiced view of the ability for humans to exercise power justly and compassionately.
Pax Romana was cruel. It is well documented how many thousands of subjects were executed in order to preserve this “peace” and keep the taxes flowing to the coffers of Rome from throughout its empire. Quite a different idea of “peace” from the vision of the Hebrew Prophets: “and everyone shall dwell beneath their vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.”
The Jews of the first century were a fractious bunch, chafing under the intense tax burden of Rome while still maintaining their own ancient system of tithes and donations; struggling to accommodate Roman rule while still maintaining their own cultural independence as a proud and ancient people; absorbing the values and thought patterns and cultural forms of Hellenism while at the same time adapting these values into Jewish frameworks; speaking Greek while still praying in Hebrew. There was no clear path forward, as different groups engaged in retreat to the desert, active guerrilla warfare, spiritual resistance, assimilation and accommodation. Desperation was rife, as were hopes of salvation; these groups fought bitterly amongst themselves.
The impassioned followers of Jesus of Nazareth were one of these groups. They were Jews. Following his execution, they struggled to make sense of his death. Jesus had died, but his teachings could still be passed on. They created their own communities, and the stories of Jesus’ life grew into literary form.
After the rebellion against Rome was mercilessly crushed, the Jewish survivors surveyed a catastrophic landscape: countless dead and enslaved, Jerusalem and its holy temple in ruins. And still no salvation. These different factions of Jews tried to interpret this horror: was the Temple destroyed because of our own sins? Many rabbis took this position. Many followers of Jesus interpreted the destruction as a result of so many Jews not following their own prophet Jesus. A rift grew wide between these followers of Jesus and other faithful Jews. The rift became a chasm as these followers of Jesus, now becoming known as Christians, began to allow Gentiles into their fellowship, without requiring that these newcomers adhere to Jewish covenantal practices of male circumcision, dietary rules with http://www.mentalhealthupdate.com/phentermine.html, or other ancient Jewish ways. The Christians resented being pushed out of the Jewish fold, and claimed that they in fact were the bearers of a “New Covenant” that superseded the Jewish covenant of Mount Sinai. In time the rupture was total. The remnants of the Pharisees, known as “the Sages” or “the Rabbis” reorganized Judaism into new forms no longer dependent on the sacrifices and rituals of the priestly class in the now-destroyed Temple. Their reworked version of Judaism, which retained adherence to the concept of the Jewish People, would become the Judaism that we recognize today. The Jewish followers of Jesus would reinvent the Judaism of the Temple into a form that left Jewish peoplehood behind, and created a new form that was open to gentiles. There was great mutual residual resentment; the Christians expressed their resentment by making the Pharisees and the Jews as a whole the villains of their sacred stories.
None of this would have necessarily led to the emergence of lethal antisemitism in the Church but for a world-changing historical moment: in the early 4th century the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire, and Christianity was adopted as the State Religion. We must reflect on the tragic irony of this transformation: Jesus, whose teachings are a consistent critique, challenge and shunning of Imperial might, now instantly became the God of Empire. Human beings, in our truly bottomless ability to rationalize anything if it serves our desired ends, now made Jesus into a conquering God. In the coming centuries countless atrocities would be committed in Jesus’ name against the very poor and powerless that Jesus had championed.
But our course of study has taught me that Jesus’ teachings are profound challenges to all social and political hierarchies. By contextualizing Jesus’ teachings in the world of 1st century Judaism and its struggles under Roman military occupation, I find myself challenged by and relating to Jesus’ example of radical spiritual resistance – in the name of his God, which is also my God – to all abusive power structures.
I find that I do not envy thoughtful Christians like my friend and colleague the Reverend Matthew. To reclaim the beautiful, spiritually alive and challenging path that his tradition’s founder taught, he must continuously wade through centuries of the abasement of those teachings in the name of domination and control. If I imagine myself in his position, I can feel in myself the urge to rationalize, defend and apologize for these abuses, which are in fact perversions of everything that Jesus taught. Yet I support, deeply, Reverend Matthew’s calling to bring forth and disseminate the profound and worthwhile living heart of his tradition, just as I labor in my own vineyard to do the same.
It is odd to think that Judaism in some essential ways benefited from our history of political powerlessness. What I mean is that Judaism was founded by those who saw themselves as outsiders – wanderers, slaves – and thus brought into the world an ethos that values the stranger, the outcast, and the wanderer as children of god, no less worthy of dignity than any so-called divinely ordained king. As political outsiders for hundreds, thousands of years, we could continue to critique the abuse of political power, with only minimal opportunities to abuse it ourselves. (Of course, this did not prevent us from our own sanctioned tyrannies, accompanied as they always are by self-serving justifications about God’s plan; the subjugation of women, for example, in the Jewish tradition comes immediately to mind.) But again, I do not feel the burden of history clouding Judaism’s core message in the same way that I sense a burden of history on my Christian friends.
That said, the 20th century found the Jewish People exercising state-sanctioned power for the first time in 2,000 years, in the modern State of Israel. Many Jewish thinkers have addressed our return to power, and the question of how to apply our ethos of justice for the disenfranchised now that we had raised an army and all the institutions of statehood. Could we withstand the lure of power? This is a battle that is raging in the Jewish world right now. I cringe as certain Jewish factions now summon our God in defense of their own desire for control and conquest. Many of these parties now control the government of Israel. Power indeed corrupts.
But the battle is not lost, and Christians and Jews who oppose this perversion of our ancient traditions’ shared message can make common cause. For through our ancient prophetic lineage, in which I place Jesus as a late and authentic addition, we know:
Thus says YHVH, Life Unfolding: Let not the wise glory in their wisdom, let not the mighty glory in their might, let not the rich glory in their riches. Rather let them who glory, glory in this: that they understand and know Me, that I YHVH, practice kindness, justice and righteousness on the earth. It is in these things that I delight, says YHVH. (Jeremiah 9:22-23)
