Category: Unpacking Antisemitism

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“You in me and I in you”: Many voices on the interbeing of God and all things

Medieval manuscript page featuring a blue figure (Jesus) standing in golden concentric circles

Year A, Sixth Sunday of Easter, John 14:15-21 & Acts 17:22-31 through a queer & interfaith lens.

Both the John 14 and Acts 17 readings for this Sunday depict a God who is wholly interconnected within Godself and with all humanity (and all Creation). Paul references two Greek poet-philosophers to describe this state of interbeing. We too can respectfully draw from various traditions to get a better picture of what that means.

Key points

  • Jesus promises not to leave his disciples orphaned, or “fatherless,” and names that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Exploring this “father” language alongside other terms Jesus uses for himself across the Gospels, we uncover something of the limitations of human language for relationships both human and divine. Jesus, like many queer found families, is taking the words he has available to him and ascribing them with deeper meaning.
  • The concept that Jesus is in the Parent as the Parent is in Jesus, and that we too are in Jesus as he is in us, has parallels to the Buddhist concept of interbeing. Paul’s reference to a classical Greek philosopher-poet’s words, “In [God] we live and move and have our being,” reiterates this inextricable interconnectedness, or mutual indwelling.
  • Paul quotes two Greek poet-philosophers to carry Christ’s good news to the Greeks. When we gather as many voices as possible at the table, we are granted grander glimpses of the divine in whom all things “live and move and have their being.”
  • I’ll be posting an article on one of those references, Epimenides of Crete, soon, exploring the queer resonances in this sixth century BCE sage.
Page from an illuminated medieval book featuring Hildegard's Universe. Yellow petal-looking flames form a vulvic shape. Inside is a border of red "flames," inside which is a blue sea of white stars and red and yellow starbursts. At the center of this is a round mound of moutains / hills, waters, fields.
“The Universe” by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165 in Scivias. The vulva-shaped cosmos is enfolded in divine fire, which “descended from heaven to earth and…gave help by showing heavenly things to people while they were in their souls and bodies… These people living in their souls and bodies raised the Word up with faithful joy.” Between divine fire is a “globe of reddish fire” that is the “light of burning Love”: “every creature is illuminated by the brightness of the Word’s light.” For more, listen to this.

John 14:15-21

The lectionary continues right where it left off last week, with Jesus’s tender reassurances to his disciples that even though he must soon leave them, he will not abandon — or, as he says here, orphan — them.

“I will ask the Parent, [who] will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth…You know hir because xe abides with you, and xe will be in you.
I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Parent, and you in me, and I in you.” – John 14:18-20

The picture Jesus paints here is a queer one, blending relational language and dissolving boundaries.

The limitations of relational language

Shortly, Jesus will tell his disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends — which moves him from a higher status of master (the Greek kyrios means master as much as it means lord) to the mutuality of friendship (John 15:15). Meanwhile, Jesus frequently names himself as Son of the Parent God throughout the Gospels. Yet here he promises not to leave his disciples orphaned (from the Greek ὀρφανός, orphanos). The Septuagint uses this Greek word to translate Hebrew’s yāṯôm, “fatherless” — it describes those left bereft and vulnerable due to the loss of either both parents or their father (in biblical iterations of patriarchy, losing your father opened you up to more insecurity and potential exploitation).

If Jesus’s absence could be described as the disciples becoming “fatherless,” then that becomes yet another way to describe his relationship with his followers. He is teacher, friend, father, mother hen, master, servant, bridegroom, God.

In traditional human relational structures, no one person could be all those things to another! But some queer relationships come closer to achieving it. In queer found families, the same person might serve as mother and sibling and even lover all at once. To be clear, this is not incestuous! What we are doing is repurposing traditional terms because there are no words in the mainstream lexicon that exactly match what we mean; we use limited language to describe queerly unlimited ways of experiencing each other

…Of course, these queer ways of being in relationship aren’t truly unlimited. But Divinity’s connections both within its Triune self and with its created world might just be!

Jesus as Father or Parent as well as sibling, servant, friend makes perfect paradoxical sense, both through a queer lens and in light of the picture he continues to paint: That he is in the Parent and the Parent is in him.

Another medieval manuscript page featuring golden concentric circles around a blue figure of Jesus, who has long hair and is beardless.
“The True Trinity in True Unity” by Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1165. “Unlike the usual triangular-shaped examples, this one involves nested circles of light. The Trinitarian nature of the divine is hidden under His unity and the emergent figure is God as One.”

And then we are in Jesus as he is in us, which by implication means we are also in the Parent and the Parent is in us — an interconnectedness that would be difficult to draw on paper, as each being involved is both holding and is held by each other being! You might even call this…interbeing!

Interbeing, or the interconnectedness of all things

Interbeing is the term beloved Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh coined to describe what East Asian Buddhists call perfect interpenetration, complete interfusion, or (and this one sounds very much like Christ’s “I in you and you in me”) — mutual inclusion. Whatever it’s called, this interconnectedness envisions every single thing (every phenomenon, every living being, every atom, etc.) simultaneously and entirely containing andbeing contained by all other things. Or, as Thích Nhất Hạnh puts it after inviting the reader to consider a sheet of paper:

“Everything—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat, and even consciousness—is in that sheet of paper. Everything coexists with it. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone; you have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.”1

Another metaphor for this complete interfusion is that of Indra’s net, which originates from the Atharva Veda and thus was part of Hindu cosmology before also being adopted by Buddhism:

The net is said to be infinite, and to spread in all directions with no beginning or end. At each node of the net is a jewel, so arranged that every jewel reflects all the other jewels. No jewel exists by itself independently of the rest. Everything is related to everything else; nothing is isolated.2

A kind of dizzying spread of blue "netting" on a black background, almost kaleidoscopic.
An artistic rendition of Indra’s Net by Ganesh Rao; click here for the entire gallery. You might also imagine a spiderweb with beads of rain all along it.

Triune interbeing

It’s notoriously difficult to talk of the Trinity without committing one heresy or another (whenever I try, these two grumpy Irishmen pop in my head grumbling That’s modalism, Patrick!). But I think that this concept of interbeing can be employed to get across some of the Trinity’s key aspects: first, that while the Persons of God are indeed three distinct Persons, they are also inextricably One.

Trying to eff the ineffable, we label the three Persons of God things like “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” or “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer” or “Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.” (Note how, as with queer found family, these names sometimes seem to clash “incestuously” — how can Father and Son also be Lover and Beloved? But it’s because we’re using limited human terms to describe the ineffable. The words fail as much as they succeed in helping us grasp God; for instance, “Father” and “Son” traditionally indicates hiearchy and difference in age, neither of which is accurate for the Persons of the Trinity.)

These names certainly describe elements of our Triune God, including some of the distinctions between each Person. However, if we solidify these distinctions too much, attempting to keep the Trinity neat and tidy with firm boundaries between each Person, we cease to speak of a God who is One. No one Person holds sole “dominion” over one quality of the Divine; each Person expresses all qualities. For example, the “Son” also has creative power; the “Father” also sustains all things; the Spirit also brings liberation; and so on.

Some of the earliest Christians employed a Greek term to describe this Triune interfusion, or mutual indwelling: perichoresis (from peri, “around,” and chōreō, “come” or “go”). Modern theologians have drawn from this concept the allegory of Trinity as a dance between three partners spinning together so perfectly harmoniously that they begin to blur.

[…P]erichoresis invites us to think in a new way about the very meaning of ‘one’ and ‘personal.’ The oneness of God is not the oneness of a distinct, self-contained individual; it is the unity of a community of persons who love each other and live together in harmony. And ‘personal’ means by definition inter-personal; one cannot be truly personal alone but only in relation to other persons.

Such is the unity and personal character of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is a deep, intimate, indissoluble unity between them. They are not three independent persons who decide to get together to form a club (or a dance group!) that might break up if the members decide to go it alone. They are what they are only in relationship to each other. Each exists only in this relationship and would not exist apart from it.

…Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one social person, for each is with and for the other so intimately that they can be said to live in and through each other.

– Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine

painting on a yellow background of three figures circling each other in a whirling dance
“Perichoresis” by Jutta Bluehberger

Interbeing between divinity, humanity, and all creation

The Son is in the Parent is in the Spirit is in the Son is in the Spirit is in the Parent is in the Son ad infinitum; together, they are a perfect community, a perfect relationship.

Yet God chose to create, to let that perfect, self-contained love overflow beyond Godself! Thus we are invited into this perichoresis, this interbeing, invited to recognize the truth of Jesus’s words: “I am in my Parent, and you and me, and I in you” — all bound together with the Spirit, our advocate (or, as the CEB translates, companion) whom God is sending (v. 17) and who has been here all along, from the Beginning.

That’s the picture Jesus paints in this John 14 passage: the distances of time and space melt away; the boundaries between beings merge and mix!

It’s fitting that the lectionary pairs this passage with Acts 17, in which Paul notes that “God is not far from each one of us” (v. 27b) and that

“In [God] we live and move and have our being.” – Acts 17:28

Acts 17:22-31

The verses of Acts 17 leading up to this week’s passage recount Paul’s flight from alleged persecution3 to Athens, where he spends weeks engaging not only with Athenian Jews, but gentiles as well. Due to their love of new and interesting ideas (v. 21), the gentile Athenians take an interest in his proclamations about Jesus. They lead Paul to Areopagus, where he gets the chance to give “the fullest and most dramatic speech of [his] missionary career.”4

Paul starts by appealing to the Athenians’ spirituality, noting all their altars and shrines — including one dedicated to “an unknown god” (v. 23). He explains that this “unknown” deity is actually the God who “made the world and everything in it” — the Abrahamic God.

Paul, a Roman citizen as familiar with Greek things as Jewish things, smartly finds ways to connect renowned Greek poet-philosophers, quoting two of them:

For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are his offspring.’ – v. 28

The latter half of the verse, “We too are his offspring,” most likely comes from the Stoic philosopher Aratus, who opens his great work Phaenomena thus:

Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken.
For every street, every market-place is full of god.
Even the sea and the harbour are full of this deity.
Everywhere everyone is indebted to god.
For we are indeed his offspring …

Paul sure knew how to pick the perfect reference, selecting one that not only supports his point about divinity’s pervasiveness, but is even set in the same scene he and his audience inhabit! Of course, the poem is talking about Zeus, while Paul is winding up for his pitch about the Abrahamic God raising Jesus from the dead.

Meanwhile, in describing a God in whom we “live and move and have our being,” Paul seems to be paraphrasing the sixth-century BCE sage Epimenides of Crete. I have grown short on time to dive into the queer resonance of this prophet; I’ll put out another article soon on how for the Greeks, this sage embodied both the awe and horror of one who is “unnatural” — just as Christ does in exploding the binary between life and death.

Subscribe to be notified when I put out the article on Epimenides!

stone altar with Latin inscribed, which is translated below
While no altars to an agnostos theos, an unknown god, have been unearthed in Athens, this altar was unearthed on the Palantine Hill. Its inscription reads, “Whether sacred to god or to goddess, Gaius Sextius Calvinus, son of Gaius, praetor, restored this on a vote of the senate.” When purifying Athens of plague, Epimenides ordered the erection of altars in various locations to “whichever god” was god of that location.

At least some of the early Christians recognized this reference to Epimenides, including Clement of Alexandria, who noted that Paul was willing to “attribute something of the truth” to a Greek, a gentile” and was “not ashamed, when discoursing for the edification of some and the shaming of others, to make use of Greek poems.”5

There is somewhat of an air of condescension in both Paul’s and Clement’s words, but I do appreciate the biblical precedent in quoting voices from other religions and cultures. If God truly is the one in whom we all move and live and have our being; if we truly are all interconnected like jewels in a net or raindrops in a web, then the divine pervades all peoples. God’s Spirit, God’s Breath “blows wherever she wills” (John 3:8). Only when we invite all voices to the table do we begin to catch a grander glimpse of God.

Footnotes

  1. Thích Nhất Hạnh, In The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries, 2017. For more on Buddhist conceptions of interconnectedness, check out this article. ↩︎
  2. https://pragyata.com/the-vedic-metaphor-of-indras-net/ ↩︎
  3. For information on Acts’ depictions of Jews as violent persecutors of Paul and other apostles and how these depictions have motivated antisemitism across Christian history, give this video a watch. ↩︎
  4. Mikael C. Parsons, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-acts-1722-31-5 ↩︎
  5. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Book 1, chapter 14, c. late second century. ↩︎
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“How can we know the way?” From exclusivity into God’s home of many rooms

Print of a building set up like townhouses, narrow but tall units all pressed together. Each unit represents the religious building of a different religion.
Yes, I’m reusing this image from last week. It fits better here anyhow! “In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions” by Irving Amen

Year A, Fifth Sunday of Easter.
Using a queer lens + addressing anti-Jewish supersessionism.

This Sunday’s readings explore what it means to be followers of the Jesus Way. Is this an exclusive path? Do we supersede the Jewish people as God’s chosen people? (Spoiler: hell no!)

Taking these passages together, we can paint a picture of a Way wherein we dismantle standing structures in favor of building up with living stones, with the rejected stone as the chief cornerstone — creating a Kin-dom home that has room enough for all.

Key points

  • The passages from Acts 7 and 1 Peter 2 embody the tension present in so many parts of scripture: They offer gorgeous glimpses into God’s Kin-dom, and they lay the groundwork for later Christian antisemitism.
  • I urge preachers and teachers to name the danger in these texts, rather than simply skirt around it. Address these verses so that your audience won’t fill the void of your avoidance with the assumption that “we” agree with this rhetoric.
  • At the same time, these two passages can help us explore what it means to be followers of the Jesus Way. We open ourselves to the multitudinous ways God speaks to us through diverse voices. We celebrate the people rejected by the upholders of unjust structures and systems. We commit ourselves to unpacking our biases and learning how to be in solidarity with oppressed peoples, even when we mess up.
  • And we remember that, as Jesus promises us in the John 14 passage, God’s home has room enough for us all. Everybody belongs. Everybody feasts.

Acts 7:55-60

Queer meditation

But filled with the Holy Spirit, [Stephen] gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him.

– Acts 7:56-57

How do we respond to divergent interpretations of our shared faith? Are we open to and interested in mutual dialogue, eager to potentially glean new wisdom — or do we cover our ears in horror? Do we let ourselves sit in the discomfort of possibly being wrong (or at least not wholly right) — or shame and shun the “heretic”?

One of my partners grew up in a fundamentalist household in which new ways of understanding God and scripture were received as threats.

Once when he was a teen, he dared to wonder whether every single sentence in the Bible had to exactly reflect God’s will — or whether it might make more sense that human biases entered the text. His father flushed beet red, face twisting as he pointed a shaking finger at his child: “Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare blaspheme God under my roof.”

There was rage in his father’s voice — but more than that, there was fear. A real, ferocious terror in what could happen if his child were to rebel against what he believed were God’s truth and will.

Maybe something deep inside him recognized that his faith in a punishing God who despises queerness, deputizes whiteness, and demands perfect obedience was actually quite flimsy — that it was utterly dependent on this understanding of scripture as the literal and inerrant Word of God (with very specific interpretations of said scripture); and that if he were to allow himself to start asking questions, his entire belief system would crumble around him and leave him floundering. And wouldn’t that mean that his whole life had been empty, shameful, wrong? He simply had too much to lose to risk even a shred of doubt or questioning.

…Maybe that’s where his fear came from, maybe not. I think also of the flip-side fear: the terror of growing up being told God hates you, has no options for you but a hollow life or hellfire.

Drawing of stormclouds from which a huge pale hand holds a person dangling by one foot over a huge crevice of hellfire. A gaunt / skeletal being stands with arms raised looking up towards the figure. Text from Edwards' sermon is also on the page, as is notes on the sermon's "Purpose: to frighten the crowd into religion..."
Art by student Lucy Wright based on Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God”

Sometimes the good news of God’s expansive and unconditional love, the holy truth that humanity is intentionally, divinely diverse — how else could we be in the Image of an infinite God? — is received with trepidation rather than relief. Could it be true, or do I just want to believe it’s true to “justify my sin”?1 What happens if I embrace my queerness and it turns out I’m wrong?

We can turn to Thomas Merton and his beloved prayer of unknowing (which matches the John passage we’ll get to later very well):

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust You always, though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me,
and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

We can live in fear of new perspectives. Of admitting we were wrong. Of punishment. Of exclusion. Of a scarcity of love and grace.

Or we can place our trust in Divine Wisdom to guide us, in Christ’s mercy to cover us — and take the plunge.

Naming anti-Jewish rhetoric

The above meditation takes the Acts reading as it is laid out for us. But context matters, and Acts 7’s is rather troubling.

So to start with, I urge preachers to provide context for the lectionary passage by summing up the events of Acts 6 as well as Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, especially its closing lines in verses 51-53.

After all, the lectionary passage severs the alleged reason that the Jerusalem Council supposedly stoned Stephen. It’s not just that he’s a Jesus-follower. It’s that he accused them of setting themselves against God’s Spirit (v. 51).

Painting of Stephen, with pale skin and light brown hair pointing heavenwards as he stands in a fancy chamber with the Council, who are covering their ears and looking horrified or ferious. The Council are designed with stereotypically large, hooked noses. A speech bubble has been added so that one of them says "Them's fightin' words!"
“Saint Stephen Accused of Blasphemy” by Juan de Juanes, 1560s. This is just a silly meme, but the artist’s choice to give the Council members exaggerated noses while depicting Stephen, who is likewise Jewish, with more “European” features certainly highlights the effectiveness of Acts’ rhetoric in distancing Stephen and the other Jewish Jesus-followers from their kin.

When Stephen adds perceived blasphemy to that accusation, proclaiming Jesus stands at “the right hand of God” — that Jesus is himself divine — it’s enough to spur them to violent action.

…Or is it? Did the stoning of Stephen really take place? And if it did, did it occur exactly as the author of Acts recorded it?

As is so often the case, it’s important to note is the possibility of anti-Jewish polemic in this text — inherent to the text, and/or easily produced by our interpretations of it. I recommend this YouTube lecture on the stoning of Stephen, which draws heavily from Shelly Matthews book Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Creation of Christian Identity. Starting especially around 25 minutes into the video, a shift is pointed out between more positive depictions of the Jerusalem Jews in the first 6 chapters of Acts, and the vilification of non-Christ-following Jews after the account of Stephen’s martyrdom. From that point on, Jewish people are no longer described as the People of God.

Stephen’s own speech highlights this rhetorical distancing of Jesus-followers from other Jews; he opens his speech by naming “our ancestor Abraham” (v. 2), yet ends with:

“You continuously set yourself against the Holy Spirit, just like your ancestors did. Was there a single prophet your ancestors didn’t harass? …” – Acts 7:51-52a

While Stephen is most likely a Hellenized Jew, e.g. one who speaks Greek and holds a lot of Greek culture and values, he is a born Jew. These are his ancestors too! But here the author writes Stephen as setting up an us and them binary in which Jews with no interest in Jesus are “those people,” stiff-necked and murderous enemies of God Themself.

It’s important to recognize the biases in the NT texts, the context that caused these anti-Jewish polemics. We can recognize that the majority of the NT writers were Jews, that this was for these earliest Christians largely an intra-community conflict, while also naming the harm these texts have done and continue to do. We can experience these scriptures as sites where God’s Word speaks to us, while acknowledging their imperfections as human-written documents. In so doing, we refuse binaries of good and bad, us and them, that don’t leave room for the messiness of human realities.

1 Peter 2:2-10

Continuing to address antisemitism

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…

1 Peter 2:8b, 9a

The author of this epistle has such a gorgeous vision of the margins being made central, which I’ll get to in a minute; the tragedy is that he turns that vision into polemic, using his words to sever the Jewish people from their status as “God’s own people” and bestow that title upon Jesus-followers instead.

With passages like these in scripture, it’s no wonder supersessionism — the notion that Christians replace, or supersede, Jews; that our covenant through Christ renders their covenant through Abraham null-and-void — is so prevalent and deeply-rooted in Christianity.

I urge preachers and teachers to name this rhetoric, rather than simply skirt around it. Address these verses so that your audience won’t fill the void of your avoidance with the assumption that “we” agree with the letter writer’s point of view.

Like all of us, the Bible’s authors contained multitudes — their transcendent glimpses into the divine are weighed down by worldly ideologies that say God’s love is a finite resource; that life is a competition; that there can only be one “first,” one “beloved”; that to uplift one group is necessarily to sideline another.

Let’s keep naming that truth as we seek to follow Jesus in ways that bring justice and joy, rather than harm.

And central to the Jesus Way is the declaration that the ones rejected by human structures and systems are the very ones God works in and through! This too is something 1 Peter’s author recognized, as the next section explores.

Queer stones

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house…
For it stands in scripture:
“See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
a cornerstone chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame”
[…and]
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the very head of the corner.”

– 1 Peter 2:4-7

This passage is very queer indeed. A stone rejected by the builders becomes the chief cornerstone! The ones who fabricated the structures that enclose us all are not the ones with the final say — God is!

The God of the stranger, Liberator of the oppressed, the One who always chooses to stand outside any dividing line we draw between “us” and “them,” finds that castoff rock and makes it central, indispensable:

[The] members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable… God [gives] the greater honor to the inferior member.

– 1 Corinthians 12: 22, 24b
Two panel comic. The outline of a church holds a bunch of white sheep telling a rainbow sheep, "Sorry but you're just not welcome here." Second panel shows the rainbow sheep walking out the church door with Jesus by its side as the white sheep go, "Hey, where'd Jesus go?"
Comic by NakedPastor.

We the shunned and shamed ones, we who are considered to be “no people” (v. 10) — nobodies — become the living stones with which Divinity constructs a new Creation.

We whom dominant cultures despise create our own cultures — queer culture, Black culture, disability culture, and more — where our unique gifts and ways of manifesting God’s love to the world are uplifted.

We are Christ’s hands and feet on earth, helping usher in a Kin-dom in which the last are first, the margins are drawn to the center, and all dividing walls are dismantled, piece by piece.

Babies in Christ: we learn along the way

Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

1 Peter 2:2

When we taste that God is good, we grow hungry for more. One major way we taste that divine goodness is when we look to the poor for God’s good news and join in liberation movements with the captive and oppressed (see Luke 4:18-19). By becoming co-conspirators with those “living stones” God centers in the building up of Their Kin-dom, we are submerged in Spirit.

Peter doesn’t elaborate on “spiritual milk” in this chapter, but Paul does in his first letter to the Corinthians:

…I could not speak to you as spiritual people but rather as fleshly, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, for you are still fleshly. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not fleshly and behaving according to human inclinations?…

– 1 Cor 3:1-3
Meme in a two column format. There's "talking about gender with trans people," showing a detail from that famous painting of Greek philosophers conversing; versus "talking about gender with cis people," showing an adult guiding a baby with a toy.

This old-school trans meme identifies a truth about what it’s like to start down the road of solidarity with any oppressed group to which we don’t belong: We are like babies! (But babies with capacity to cause harm.)

As we unpack the presumptions, prejudices, and skewed perspectives we’ve been absorbing since birth, we’re left with big gaps in knowledge. We finally know how little we know.

And as we live into a commitment to true solidarity with the oppressed, we mess up. To step up is to mess up, over and over — and remain committed to making amends and continuing to show up.

Back to John 14

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

– John 14:5-6a

As we devote ourselves to uplifting the stones rejected by the builders and keepers of our unjust systems, as we grow in our purpose as the living stones God uses to build up Their Kin-dom, how do we know we are headed in the right direction? What happens if we get it wrong?

I think again of my partner and his father. The feral fear of fire and brimstone awaiting the ones who believe wrong, let alone do wrong.

But God doesn’t await us with hellfire. God waits to welcome us into Their home with open arms:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

– John 14:1-3

I hear so much tenderness in Jesus’s voice here. He knows his friends are anxious and uncertain about what the future holds, so he paints them a picture of where their journey is headed: Past the terror and trouble, there is a beautiful home where a place has been prepared for us. For you! for me! — and not just for “us,” but for “them” as well.

Here we find the antidote to the supersessionism in the story of Stephen’s martyrdom and Peter’s first letter. In those two readings, there is an assumption that God can have only one favorite. Only one people. That as the divide between the followers of the Jesus Way and Jews with no interest in Jesus grew, it necessarily required a dethroning of Jews as God’s chosen people so that that title could belong to Christians.

That myth of scarcity sure has been around a while, huh?

Jesus tells a different story: God’s home has rooms, has room, for everyone. Everyone!

The very nature of God is overflowing love — infinite love, love enough to go around and still spill over. Just like we saw last week, Jesus ushers in life abundant — there is plenty for all.

No one gets scraps — everybody feasts!

Thanks be to God.

Illustration on a red background of a Black fem person with a curly blue afro, a medical mask, a crop top and skirt, wielding a staff while striking a cool pose. A quote from Audre Lorde reads "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"
Art by Ayeola Omolara Kaplan. Audre Lorde’s powerful words can help guide us as we deconstruct and rebuild: We do not dismantle unjust systems by using the same tools of exclusion and exceptionalism, purity and punishment, suspicion and shame that built them in the first place. Thus antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and other key components of the white supremacist project have no place in the Kin-dom God is building with and in and through us.

  1. So many of us get told we’re “reading into” the Bible what we want to see there. But there are other ways of understanding our relationship to the Bible! Visit here for my framework on understanding scripture — particularly the last section, “You’re just reading into it.” ↩︎
Categories
bible study easter LGBT/queer Queer Lectionary Unpacking Antisemitism worship-planning

Liberative lectionary: John 20’s enfleshed, disabled Christ

Year A, Second Sunday of Easter.
John 20:19-31.
Trans & disability theologies; addressing antisemitic implications.

Page contents:

For the Easter Season, I want to offer brief * commentary on each week’s lectionary readings through a liberative lens — largely from my perspective as a trans, disabled Christian scholar, but also drawing from other liberationist traditions. The goal is not to write my own extended essay each week, but to prompt preachers and other worship leaders to incorporate some of these ideas into Sunday worship.

*…I say brief, but John 20:19-31 is my favorite Gospel passage to preach on so this one’s gonna get a little lengthy!

Worship materials

Hymn suggestions:

Liturgy suggestions:

Key point

In rising with a physical body that retains its crucifixion wounds, Jesus demonstrated once and for all that our flesh is good, is part of what it means to be in God’s image; and that stigmatized bodies — especially disabled bodies — are not incompatible with divinity, but rather are intimately entwined with divinity.

Ink drawing of Jesus rolling down a street in a wheelchair, arms extended outward and a radiant halo behind his head
“Wheelchair Christ” by Rachel Holdforth.
Visit her website for information on this piece and others.

Embodied theology

Presumably Jesus had the power to rise in spirit alone, but instead he keeps his wounded body. Why?

Having entered the material world, Jesus understands the human need for evidence we can experience with our senses. All throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus made use of things people can touch and taste and see – water and bread, vine and branches, baptism and the washing of feet – to embody the less tangible aspects of himself.

Jesus fed and cared for people’s bodies as well as their spirits, because he too is human, he too knows that sometimes we need to reach out and touch the Divine in order to believe. So Jesus holds out his hands, he offers his side, so that Thomas can see, can touch, can then proclaim “My Lord and my God!”

I believe Jesus also kept his body so that he can keep experiencing, with us, all that comes with having a body. He’ll still feel the breeze on his sweaty brow, feel the tug of hunger and the satisfaction of a full stomach, laugh and weep and sing with friends who hug and hold him.

He keeps his body to remind us that physicality is good. He keeps his body for the sake of all who have been told that they should hate their body, should punish it, should avoid its natural pleasures and healthy desires.

If Jesus — who is goodness itself, who is God themself — retains his body, we must conclude that physicality is part of our goodness. We are not spirits trapped in flesh prisons — we are embodied spirits, inspirited bodies.

And if that’s the case, then we cannot avoid learning to love our own bodies and learning to celebrate the amazing diversity of our species with the excuse that it’s all transitory! Our diversity is vital to our humanity. Embodiment is here to stay.

And what about the fact that Jesus not only retained his flesh, but retained the marks of crucifixion upon it?

Disability theology: The resurrected God is disabled

Blue ink drawing of Jesus, naked except a loincloth, with a large hole, or stoma, in his side.
“Jesus with a Stoma” by Rachel Holdforth
Black ink drawing of Jesus walking down a path with braces on his legs, holding two canes
“Braced Christ” by Rachel Holdforth

Across the Roman Empire, crucifixion was a shameful death, a criminal’s death. For Jesus’s people, those “hanged on a tree” were cursed by God (Deuteronomy 21:23). And this is how the God incarnate, the Creator of the universe, died!! No wonder Paul describes Christ crucified as a scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor 1:23).

For many Christians, disabled bodyminds are a site of scandal and shame. Drawing on the Gospels’ healing narratives, disabled persons may be accused of not having enough faith if and when efforts to miraculously remove their disabilities fail. When we envision the Kin(g)dom of heaven, do we imagine disabled people front and center? Or do we see disabled bodyminds as signs of a fallen world, things to be eradicated in the world to come?

While both mainstream Christianity and mainstream society view disability as brokenness, many disabled scholars argue that disability is fundamental to the human experience.1 It therefore stands to reason that Jesus, being fully human as well as fully divine, experienced disability.

In her foundational work The Disabled God (1994), Nancy Eiesland describes how through his crucifixion Jesus took on disabling wounds — nail holes that would have impaired his mobility and the use of his hands; a spear in his side that would have caused him chronic pain.

Other authors over the years have joined her in this vision of a disabled Christ. For example, John M. Hull supplements it through the theology of kenosis — how, in the Incarnation, God the all-powerful emptied Themself, in other words disabled Themself, so that “in [Christ] God accepted finitude, the limits of our humanity, our sufferings and our death.”2 I also recently heard someone describe the bruise that would have been left by the cross heavy on Christ’s shoulder as a symbol of invisible disabilities and trauma — the wounds people don’t see.

So ultimately, I believe Jesus kept his wounds for us — for all of us who don’t live into society’s paradigm of the “perfect body.” The glorious body of our God bears wounds, wounds that became for Thomas — and for all of us! — a site of blessing.

What are the implications of a disabled God for our own time and place? Eiesland points out the dissonance that exists in churches that fail to accommodate and accept persons with disability while at the same time accepting “grace through Christ’s broken body” – how is it that we celebrate how Christ’s body became impaired for our sake but judge and cast out the bodies of disabled people in our midst? To worship this God who willingly emptied Themself, who chose to rise from the dead with disabling wounds intact, we must rethink our conceptions of disability and transform our communities into spaces where disabled people fully belong — not just in the pews, but in positions of leadership.

Mural on a blue background and lots of people gathered at a long table with a white tablecloth piled with food. There are persons of many different races and cultures and with various disabilities, including several in wheelchairs or with canes or crutches, several who have down syndrome, one with a service dog, and so on. Jesus stands near the right end of the canvas, conversing with a child of color in a wheelchair and an older Black man in a wheelchair.
“Luke 14 Banquet” by Hyatt More.

Trans theology: Christ embraces stigma

The Christian term for Christ’s crucifixion wounds, stigmata, is the same Greek word from which we get the term stigma. It means “mark,” and it refered to a mark cut or branded into the flesh of a soldier or enslaved person — the visible, painful sign that their bodies were not their own.

Like other oppressed groups, trans people know what it is to be stigmatized in the eyes of society. Our chosen names and pronouns, our choices in clothing and haircuts, the scars of gender affirming surgeries and full-body tranformations via hormone replacement therapy all mark us as worthy targets of shunning, shaming, and violence. Our non-normative bodies become a site of spectacle, where everyone feels entitled to gawk at our bodies, to know every detail of our medical histories. In our efforts to live into our God-given identities, we face obstacles across every sphere of life — from the legal and medical to religious and social — that remind us that many powerful people aim to strip us of agency and ownership over our own bodies.

Yet many of us revel in the very marks of our Otherness, our defiance of the status quo! My top surgery scars make me feel like me; they are visible marks of the wonder of God’s works, of God’s invitation to join in our own co-creation.

Photograph of four figures staged to imitate Caravaggio's famous painting of Thomas touching Christ's side wound. In this version, the person playing Jesus has top surgery scars, which his three friends marvel at. He is guiding the hand of one friend so that the friend's pointer finger rests just under the scar.
From Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin’s 2017 exhibit, “id:TRANS.”

Caveats: John 20’s anti-Jewish implications

This lectionary reading opens with a verse that can contribute (and historically has contributed) to anti-Jewish sentiments:

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’” – John 20:19

This phrase, “The Jews,” shows up 195 times in the NT — 71 of those times are in John’s Gospel. Frequently, “The Jews” are set up in the text as “the enemies of Jesus, and thus of God.”3 That dynamic has been utilized throughout Christian history to malign and persecute Jewish people, often with accusations of deicide.

Because “the Jews” are only mentioned briefly in this passage, preachers may be tempted to gloss over the potential for antisemitism here: naming it won’t relate to the rest of the sermon; it’ll take too much time! Greg Garrett admits to feeling similarly for many years:

“Looking over a dozen years of preaching on Easter 2, I see that there were years when I skipped straight over the fear of the Jews on the way to doubt or faith or epiphany or commitment or any of the other big spiritual lessons that that particular community seemed to need on that particular second Sunday of Easter.

But in the past few years, anytime we encounter one of these parenthetical statements about “the Jews” in a Gospel reading (particularly in John) I have taken to highlighting them, at the very least, as major sources of Christian antisemitism, and sometimes I have devoted substantial space to correcting bad readings and refuting this prejudice…”4

If you aim to be a good neighbor to our Jewish contemporaries, consider taking the time to name the anti-Jewish readings of John, even if it feels like a “tangent.” (At the very least, you might consider including a footnote in the bulletin / worship handout on the topic.)

Some options for addressing the issue on Sunday

  1. State plainly that “ ‘fear of the Jews’ is a ridiculous and inaccurate statement of why the followers of Jesus are gathered behind locked doors in the Gospel lesson. These men are themselves Jews. All of them. Peter is a Jew. Thomas is a Jew. The risen Jesus, the Anointed One who steps miraculously into their midst, is a Jew…”5
  2. Provide some historical context — that by the time the Gospel of John was being written, there had been a major falling-out between those Jews who confessed Jesus as Lord and those who did not. Many progressive Christians suggest that Jewish Jesus-followers had been “expelled” from synagogues; this is possible, but Jewish NT scholar Amy-Jill Levine notes, “we have no examples of such excommunication from antiquity; to the contrary, Paul is disciplined from within the synagogue system, and centuries later, John Chrysostom complains about church members attending synagogue programs.”6 As with so many things, it’s hard to know exactly what was going on so long ago, and the truth involves nuance. Thus, if you go this route, take care to word things in a way that does not place all the blame for this falling out on the Jews who didn’t follow Jesus. Ultimately, what we know is that this was an intra-community conflict, and whatever tensions there were between Jesus-followers and other Jews can help explain (though not justify) John’s language around “the Jews.”
  3. Consider altering the translation from “the Jews” to “Judaeans,” “the Judaean elite,” or something of that nature. The Greek word typically translated “the Jews” throughout the Gospels is Ioudaios/Ioudaioi. If we alter how we translate the term, it becomes clear that “the Ioudaioi in John were neither today’s ‘Jews’ nor the ancient world’s ‘Jews.’“7 When hearing “Judaeans,” worshipers will be less likely to imagine a conflict of Jew vs. Christian; instead, the conflict is between the Galilean disciples — everyday impoverished Jews from a backwater region — and those elites in Judaea/Jerusalem who collaborated with the Roman Empire (e.g. the Sadducees; the Pharisees did not collaborate with Rome).
  4. What other tactics have you taken in addressing anti-Jewish or supersessionist readings of scripture?

Footnotes:

  1. See Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s essay “Becoming Disabled.” See also my introduction to disability basics, which explores disability as a natural part of the human experience and discusses the idea of Disability Culture. ↩︎
  2. John M. Hull, chapter 3 of Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource, 2014. ↩︎
  3. Wes Howard-Brook, “Why We Need to Translate Ioudaioi as “Judeans”, chapter 10 of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews: Reflections for Christians in Lent, ed. John M. Sweeney, 2020. ↩︎
  4. Greg Garrett, “For Fear of the Jews: Antisemitism in John’s Time and Ours,” chapter 13 of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews. ↩︎
  5. ibid. ↩︎
  6. Amy-Jill Levine, “If not now, when?”, afterword of Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews. ↩︎
  7. Wes Howard-Brook, “Why We Need to Translate Ioudaioi as “Judeans.” ↩︎
Categories
advent bible study Holy Days Multifaith Other search markers Unpacking Antisemitism

Addressing Advent Anti-Judaism

Two contemporary paintings side by side. The first is of Isaiah receiving a burning coal to his lips by an angel. The second is the angel appearing before Mary.
"Isaiah" by Richard McBee; "The Annunciation" by Daniel Bonnell

During the season of Advent, Christians traditionally read Luke’s and Matthew’s Nativity stories alongside the book of Isaiah. It makes sense to do so, as Matthew himself makes the connection:

22 Now all of this took place so that what the Lord had spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled:

23 Look! A virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son,
        And they will call him, Emmanuel. (Matthew 1:22-23)

– Matt 1:22-23, referencing Isaiah 7:14

But when we read Isaiah only in service to our Christian story, we do harm to our Jewish neighbors with whom we share these scriptures. To utilize the Hebrew Bible (= “Old Testament,” the Jewish Bible) solely as a promise fulfilled through Christ is to suggest that these scriptures are incomplete without and dependent upon Jesus — and therefore that Jews’ interpretation of their own Bible is incorrect and irrelevant.

So how do we simultaneously honor our Advent traditions, draw from Isaiah’s wisdom, and respect the vibrant, living faith of our Jewish neighbors?

Dr. Tyler Mayfield provides some excellent options in his 2020 book Unto Us a Son Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Jewish Neighbors.

The purpose of this post is to share some of the wisdom from Mayfield’s work, and to urge pastors, teachers, and others who help shape the Advent experience for their communities to check out the entire text for even more invaluable commentary.

A photo of Tyler Mayfield, a white man with short graying hair and short gray-brown beard smiling in the woods. To his right is the cover of his book

Contents of Unto Us a Child Is Born:

  • An introduction that, well, introduces the issues with current Christian uses of Isaiah and suggests a bifocal framework as remedy
  • Chapter 1: Using Our Near Vision During Advent
  • Chapter 2: Using Our Far Vision to Love Our Jewish Neighbors
  • The remainder of the chapters delve into each of the Isaiah passages offered by the Revised Common Lectionary for the Advent season.

This post will survey key points from the intro and first two chapters, and close with actionable ways to incorporate Mayfield’s message into Sunday worship and classes. Preachers and teachers will find it immensely helpful to read the rest of the book’s chapters as lesson/sermon preparation for each week of Advent.

The Bifocal Lens

Image of one side of a pair of bifocals, with the smaller, near lens fused in the larger, far lens. A line connects the larger lens to "Far Vision: Openness to our religious neighbors; paying attention to ways we may cause harm." A line drawn from the near lens leads to "Near Vision: Our sense of identity; e.g. worship rituals, cherished hymns"

In order to maintain our Christian traditions without monopolizing the Hebrew Bible, Mayfield recommends a bifocal view:

  • Our near vision focuses on our worship practices and liturgical celebrations, grounding us in our living religious tradition;
  • Our far view pays attention to the ways those practices affect those not in our communities and “compels us to critique and reject some aspects of this tradition, those that are hurtful, inaccurate, and derogatory toward our religious neighbors” (intro).

Using Isaiah and other Jewish scriptures responsibly during worship is not merely a scholarly endeavor; as Mayfield reminds us, reading and interpreting the Bible is a matter of ethics:

[…L]iturgy and ethics are not easily separated. In her excellent and provocative book on racism and sexism in Christian ethics, Traci West notes, “The rituals of Sunday worship enable Christians to publicly rehearse what it means to uphold the moral values they are supposed to bring to every aspect of their lives, from their attitudes about public policy to their intimate relations.” …We want our worship to spur us to live out our ethical claims. (Introduction)

Using Mayfield’s bifocal lens, we can ethically navigate “the tension between identity within a particular faith tradition and openness to the faith traditions of others.”

So what are some of the ways that traditional Advent worship can lead us to do harm to our Jewish neighbors?

Supersessionism

Supersessionism, also called replacement theology, claims that Christianity has replaced or supplanted Judaism; that our covenant through Christ cancels out Jews’ covenant through Abraham and Moses (hence the labeling of the two parts of the Christian Bible as the Old and New Testaments, from the Latin word for covenant).

Synagoga et Ecclasia, two statues on the Notre Dame cathedral representing the Jewish and Christian faiths. This juxtaposition of crowned Church standing strong next to the Synagogue who is “blind to Jesus,” the ten commandments almost falling from her hand, is unfortunately depicted in numerous artworks of Medieval Europe.

Mayfield brings in Susannah Heschel’s description of supersessionism as a “theological colonization of Judaism“; she defines it as:

“The appropriation by the New Testament and the early church of Judaism’s central theological teachings, including messiah, eschatology, apocalypticism, election, and Israel, as well as its scriptures, its prophets, and even its God, while denying the continued validity of those teachings and texts within Judaism as an independent path to salvation.” (Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, 2008)

The seeds that the early church planted have born violent fruit across the centuries. This attitude of judgment and/or pity has led both to ideological violence — “render[ing] Jews invisible or irrelevant or as incomplete Christians” (intro) — and immense physical violence through to the segregation, scapegoating, forced conversions, expelling, and flat-out murder of the Jewish people across multiple continents.1

Medieval painting of figures gathered around a fire on which a book is burning. One person presses a poker onto it, while another person holds up a book to throw it into the fire. There are piles of books around this figure
Detail from Pedro Berruguete’s “Saint Dominic and the Albigensians” (1490s), depicting a Medieval “trial by fire” in which potentially heretical texts were determined to be “false” if they burned.

There are multiple instances of the Talmud — the central text of rabbinical Judaism alongside the Jewish Bible — being likewise gathered and burned across Medieval Europe due to the anti-Jewish belief that the Talmud was the primary obstacle keeping Jews from converting to Christianity. In 1242, for instance, King Louis IX of France ordered the burning of “24 cartloads” — something like 12,000 volumes — of priceless, scribe-written copies of the Talmud. This event devastated France’s Jewish community, which had been one of the seats of Jewish scholarship. Louis also followed up the book burning with a decree to expel all Jews from France: violence against Jewish scripture goes hand-in-hand with violence against Jewish bodies.

All this to say, the views we shape through worship and elsewhere truly do have real-world implications.

Mayfield argues that it is possible — indeed, necessary — to share scriptures respectfully. After all, he says, Judaism and Christianity are siblings.

While Christianity is often envisioned as the “shoot” growing from the dead stump of Jesse in Isaiah 11:1, a child who has improved upon the parent, in reality Judaism and Christianity are more like two branches extending from the same tree. They “grew out of the same milieu,” developing from the religion depicted in the Hebrew Bible during the chaotic era of that first century CE:

While early Jesus followers were formulating an identity distinct from Christ’s Jewish origins, Rome’s 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple spurred on new iterations of Jews’ own religion; following the Pharisees,2 they recentered faith around local life rather than the temple. In this way, the two religions are around the same age, growing from the same foundations! We are sibling religions; and we are neighbors. The problem is that we Christians have frequently behaved as very poor neighbors indeed.

Why Jewish “Neighbors”?

In Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors, Mayfield has opted for the term neighbor to describe the Christian relationship to Jews in the present day. Why? For one thing, love of neighbor is a central tenet of both Jewish and Christian tradition, originating in Leviticus 19:18 and emphasized by Jesus in Mark 12:31 and Matthew 22:39. Reading scripture through the ethic of love thy neighbor, we must ask, “If a particular reading of Scripture leads us to think badly of Jews, then is this reading Christian?” (chapter 2).

Furthermore, Mayfield continues,

I also use the concept of neighbor because neighbors do not always agree. In fact, they sometimes disagree and have to take seriously one another’s perceptions, feelings, and opinions. Being neighborly is being attentive and listening well to the concerns of others. It is realizing that your actions affect those around you. Christians act neighborly when they take seriously Jewish critiques of Christianity and Christian teachings, just as Jews act neighborly when they offer these critiques. (Chapter 2)

In reconsidering how we read and teach scripture, we can imagine that scripture is the fence we share with our Jewish neighbors, even while we dwell in different “geographies.” But when we accept supersessionist theology, we deny Jews their side of the fence; we colonize it.

Let’s look at how supersessionism manifests specifically in the ways we use Isaiah during Advent.

Resisting a Christian Isaiah

Mayfield describes how, over the past two millennia, Christians have disconnected Isaiah from his ancient Jewish context and Christianized him, even going so far as to call this eighth-century BCE prophet’s book the “fifth Gospel” alongside Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John (intro).

ID; ancient mural of Mary on a throne with a young Jesus in her lap. To her right is Peter holding a key. To her left is Isaiah holding a scroll on which the Latin for "Behold, a virgin will conceive and birth a son" is written
The Virgin Mary and Jesus, flanked by Isaiah (right) and Peter (left).

In lifting Isaiah from his seat among Jeremiah, Amos, and all the Hebrew Bible’s prophets, we sever him from his original ancient Jewish audience and deny his relevance to our Jewish neighbors today.

We hear Isaiah (and Handel in his Messiah) proclaim: “For unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6) and everything in our tradition preps us to assume that the “us” in question is us Christians; that this child must be Jesus!

In our presumption that Isaiah’s prophecies are all about Jesus, we render this prophet irrelevant to our Jewish neighbors, denying the validity of their interpretations of this biblical book. But if we dig into the historical context, we can broaden our ways of understanding these texts and thus learn how to better share these scriptures.

A Christ-exclusive interpretation of Isaiah misunderstands what biblical prophets did.

We hear the word “prophecy” and think of foreseeing the future, often the distant future. But the prophets of the Bible, from Joel to John the Baptist, were largely focused on their own here-and-now:

The prophets of ancient Israel (and ancient Mesopotamia) did not see their sole activity as foretelling. They were also “forthtellers,” speaking to the religious and political issues of their day with courage and strength. As mediators between God and the people, prophets delivered messages, oracles, and visions to audiences that included kings and commoners. They interpreted the past, analyzed the present, and spoke of the future but were undoubtedly more concerned with events of the present than events several hundred years in the making. …

[T]he notion of prophecy as foretelling renders the prophet’s words irrelevant to, and uninspired for, the first hearers and readers of these messages. (Chapter 1)

There’s another historical issue with reading Isaiah’s prophecies as exclusively about Jesus as his people’s anticipated Messiah:

At the time of Isaiah in the 700s BCE, the concept of the eschatological Messiah had not yet been developed!

While the Hebrew Bible does describe figures like David and Cyrus as anointed ones (which is what the Hebrew word mashiach, “messiah,” means), the concept of The Messiah who would usher in an age of justice and peace was most likely a later development of Second Temple Judaism (516 BCE – 70 CE).

We only see The Messiah in Isaiah’s descriptions of a “Wonderful Counselor…Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6b) and a just judge on whom God’s spirit rests (Isaiah 11:1-10) because of our own bias: “We think we know what we will find before we look” (chapter 1).

Learning about a passage’s original context helps us interpret the text more faithfully as we seek its relevance today. What is more, we can and should consider its multiple historical contexts, the whole breadth of what it has meant for different groups in different eras:

Texts in Isaiah have an entire history of interpretation, which includes the “originating” context in ancient Israel, their reuse and interpretation in Second Temple Judaism perhaps, their Christian context in which some Isaiah texts became christological, the Jewish context in which some texts became messianic, and then later Christian context, that is, when these texts were attached to Advent.

The book of Isaiah was composed by ancient Israelites over several centuries, from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE. These authors wrote for their ancient Israelite audiences with no comprehension of later events such as the life of Jesus and the growth of Christianity. Thus, the book of Isaiah does not predict the birth of Jesus. (Chapter 1)

Recognizing the long history of a piece of scripture helps reduce our sense of ownership over the text; we realize that its messages are not for Christians alone, but for faithful Jews and Christians (and Muslims, to an extent) across the millennia and today. This recognition is vital for unpacking biases and beliefs we often don’t even realize we carry deep in our psyches — and that some of the tools we use reinforce.

A Complicit Lectionary?

A key concern Mayfield explores throughout Unto Us a Child Is Born is how the lectionaries we use can guide us towards supersessionist readings during Advent. He focuses on the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) because of its popularity: Denominations ranging from the UCC to the Roman Catholic Church make use of it; overall, a huge portion of all sorts of Christians (largely in Canada and the USA) use it. 

Mayfield explains that for each Sunday, the ecumenical team that created the RCL selected the Gospel reading first, and then selected an “Old Testament” text (plus a psalm & Acts/epistles/Revelation passage) to complement that Gospel reading.

The theological ramifications of always prioritizing the Gospel in this way include an unbalanced dialogue: If we imagine the readings in conversation with each other, the Gospel always gets to choose the topic; the “Old Testament” only ever gets to respond.

Actionable Ways to Be Good Neighbors

After learning about Advent’s supersessionist pitfalls, you might be tempted simply to drop Isaiah in an effort to avoid the issue entirely. But Mayfield argues that that is a mistake:

We need Isaiah to celebrate Advent. The book’s treasures are too marvelous to set aside as ancient history or consign to another liturgical season. As we begin the liturgical year, we need to hear of swords beaten into plowshares and of barren lands blooming. …To use only the Gospel readings during Advent limits our theological reflections while also insinuating that only those four biblical books are worthy of public reading and proclamation. (Chapter 1)

Instead of ditching Isaiah, Mayfield offers practical suggestions for using the prophet responsibly:

First, we can open readings of Isaiah in church with an explicit statement: “Today we hear words from a book held sacred by both Jews and Christians.” As Mayfield explains, “This simple and accurate statement…compels us to recognize our religious neighbors even as we worship” (chapter 2).

Going further, a preacher can remind congregants that “As Christians, we understand Isaiah through our histories and theologies, but Jews do not read Isaiah this way.”

(My own thought: A pastor can even take time in an Advent sermon to acknowledge some of the history of misusing Jewish scriptures / debunking common presumptions about Isaiah’s role in the Nativity story. A Sunday School teacher has even more space to explore that history and context, and to invite attendees to imagine how Isaiah speaks to us today.)

Beyond simple statements and one-time mentions, Mayfield urges us to commit to always interpreting scriptures through a paradigm of “do no harm” — to “share as good neighbors.”

A key part of this paradigm is an intentional shift from “a more linear approach to the narrative of Scripture (in which we read the biblical books as a progression both in time and in theological depth) to a more back-and-forth conversational approach (in which we allow various texts to speak to one another).” This conversational framework creates space for the Bible’s many voices and refuses to let “New Testament” voices dominate.

An outdoor statue of two women sitting side by side. Both are robed and crowned. One holds a large torah scroll; the other an open Bible. They are smiling and looking at one another's texts.
A new representation of Synagoga et Ecclasia, mutually crowned and learning from each other. Statue by Joshua Koffman for St. Joseph’s University, commissioned in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1965 Nostra Aetate declaration, which repudiated past anti-Jewish doctrine and actions and called for more respectful relations.

Here’s a longer excerpt from Mayfield describing how to put this paradigm into practice while remaining true to ourselves:

So, how do we, as Christians, continue to affirm one of our central claims of Jesus as the Messiah while also allowing space for the dismissal of that claim? Perhaps we are helped by returning to the tension between identity and openness.

Christians maintain strong identities in the claim of Jesus as the Christ while also remaining open to other visions of the messianic kingdom, thus realizing that the full realm of God has not come. It is vital to our identity to claim Jesus as the Messiah, and we are also open to other formulations of messiah.

One meaningful way forward along this challenging path is not to claim too much: to be careful, considerate, and humble with our messianic notions. For example, instead of holding to a messianic or christological reading of Isaiah as the only valid notion, Christians could admit openly and explicitly that these texts provide some of the necessary elements that will constitute notions of messiahship in first-century Judaism, notions Jesus and his biographers took up and used. However, these texts do not point immediately to Jesus; there is just not a straight line — historically or theologically — between Point A, Isaiah, and Point B, Jesus.

This sort of admission presents real possibilities for neighborly engagement since it ties the Christian claim about Jesus more closely to sacred texts that are used only by Christians. It does not predetermine the meaning of Isaiah for all traditions, but it allows Jews and Christians to interpret Isaiah’s prophecies based on their respective traditions, with neither tradition holding ultimate authority over the biblical text. …We could go even further to say that the Jewish reading is an important and necessary one from which Christians could learn. (Chapter 2)

More Benefits of Interpreting Responsibly!

Ultimately, a paradigm of respect and mutual conversation bears rich fruit not only in our relationship to our Jewish neighbors, but to our own faith. Letting Hebrew Bible texts stand on their own merit opens us to how a given passage speaks to us here and now, rather than limiting its prophecies to a closed loop of prophecy-fulfilled-in-Christ. Mayfield quotes Ellen Davis’ comment that

“We like to keep the frame of reference for prophecy within the ‘safe’ confines of the Bible, by reading prophecy solely as illuminating what has already happened—the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ—and not allowing it to meddle much in the current lives of Christians” [and Jews!]. (Chapter 1)

We are not called to play it safe; we are called to let scripture breathe, and to welcome in God’s mischievous spirit! Making room for many interpretations, for multiple messages from Isaiah for different times and contexts, liberates scripture to speak to us in new, challenging, relevant ways today.

Doing so also helps us live into the tension of Advent’s dual theological themes: Incarnation and eschatology. As Mayfield notes,

These two foci do not naturally cohere. The emotions invoked by Advent call us to “prepare joyfully for the first coming of the incarnate Lord and to prepare penitently for the second coming and God’s impending judgment.”3 Joy and penitence. …We are pulled in different emotional directions. (Chapter 1)

Churches tend to lean towards the joy — but we can’t ditch the solemnity, can’t “alleviate the tension,” without robbing ourselves of “the incredible richness and grace that result from the annual eschatological collision in the weeks before Christmas.”4

As someone who centers my ministry around breaking binaries, reveling in the in-betweens where God does Their best work, I appreciate this insistence on the “both/and” of penitence and joy — as well as of Isaiah and Matthew/Mark, and of a prophetic message for Isaiah’s time, and Jesus’s time, and for us and our Jewish neighbors today.

Two contemporary paintings side by side. The first is of Isaiah receiving a burning coal to his lips by an angel. The second is the angel appearing before Mary.
“Isaiah” by Richard McBee; “The Annunciation” by Daniel Bonnell

Closing

In Advent, past, present, and future queerly coalesce:

“We have hope in what the incarnation brings to our world each day, even as we hope for the setting right of things with the culmination of history.” (Chapter 1)

Though the details certainly differ, we can thus proclaim that “even though the Messiah has come, we wait with Jews for the ‘complete realization of the messianic age'” and that in this interim time, “it is the mission of the Church, as also that of the Jewish people, to proclaim and to work to prepare the world for the full flowering of God’s Reign, which is, but is ‘not yet’”5 (chapter 2).

This Advent claim “takes the unique identity of Christians seriously as ones who have seen in Jesus our Messiah yet remain open to the fullness of that claim in the future” (chapter 2).

It is possible to shape Advent into a season wherein we don’t perpetuate harm against our Jewish neighbors, but rather grow in our respect for and mutual relationship with them. The remainder of Unto Us a Child Is Born: Isaiah, Advent, and Our Christian Neighbors is overflowing with more knowledge and advice that further enables this aim. I highly recommend checking it out. If you need help obtaining a copy, hit me up.

Have a blessed, pensive, and joyful Advent.

  1. For a thorough history of antisemitism, and how to be in solidarity both with Jews and Palestinians, I highly recommend Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. ↩︎
  2. Pharisees were cool, y’all; go learn from the fabulous Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about what Pharisees believed, how Jesus may have been a Pharisee himself, and the context around the Gospel writers’ negative depictions of them ↩︎
  3. Mayfield’s quoting Gail R. O’Day, “Back to the Future: The Eschatological Vision of Advent” (2008) ↩︎
  4. Mayfield’s quoting J. Neil Alexander, Waiting for the Coming (1993) ↩︎
  5. Mayfield is quoting Mary Boys, Has God Only One Blessing? (2000) ↩︎
Categories
advent Holy Days Hymns Other search markers Unpacking Antisemitism

“O Come Emmanuel” revised for Palestine’s plight

Painting depicts the wall that divides Bethlehem, with Joseph walking beside a donkey carrying Mary in the foreground, and a star shining above Bethlehem in the background.
Painting by Zaki Baboun, a Palestinian Christian who lives in a suburb of Bethlehem.

This Advent, some progressive Christians have discussed whether to table one of our religion’s most ancient hymns: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” When we sing of God coming to “ransom captive Israel,”
will our congregations recognize we don’t mean the modern Israeli nation?

Honestly, a conversation around this song is long past due (and many have had it over the decades). The truth is, it’s always been laden with supersessionist implications. Depicting the Jewish people as living “in lonely exile here / Until the son of God appear” perpetuates the idea that Jews’ relationship with God is incomplete because they “didn’t accept” Jesus as their Messiah.

How do we resist both antisemitism and Zionism, while seeking to maintain a connection to Christians who came before us? One option may be to reimagine the songs we cherish so that, instead of perpetuating deep-seated hate and Christian supremacy, they challenge us towards joining God in solidarity with the world’s oppressed.

In that spirit, below is my reworking of “O Come Emmanuel” to center the plight of Palestinians (and that removes, I hope, the supersessionism — let me know if I missed any). May our worship songs plant in us a deep desire for justice, and spark our action towards a future where all peoples, all religions live in mutual relationship and respect.

Please feel free to use and share around — just credit Avery Arden of binarybreakingworship.com.

__

O come, o come compassionate Divine,
And ransom captive Palestine
That mourns with tears that will not be soothed
Till empires fall and nations’ hearts are moved.

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

O come, o bright and ever-burning star;
Bring Gaza comfort from afar!
Dispel from her the shadow of death
That murders dignity and chokes out breath.

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

O come, o Wisdom from on high,
Take up the outcast’s cause, the captive’s cry.
Guide us to build your kingdom on earth
Where all faiths flourish, and the last are first.

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

O come, o King of Peace and Justice, break
All weapons down, and from them ploughshares make.
Let all tears dry, all peoples respond:
“We are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Rejoice! Rejoice! God’s justice is at hand
To liberate the people and the land.

Categories
bible study Holy Days lent Other search markers Unpacking Antisemitism

Jesus Flipping Tables: Unpacking antisemitic readings of the “Temple Cleansing”

Lent is one time of year we talk about Jesus marching into the Court of Gentiles, sitting down and braiding a whip, and proceeding to wreak havoc upon money-changers’ tables and sacrificial animal cages.

It’s a weird, fascinating, fun story (that you can read in Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 2)! Progressive & leftist Christians like myself have a particular love for it, pointing to this story as evidence that sometimes our “meek and mild” Jesus used violence to combat injustice. If you hang around progressive Christian spaces online, I bet you’ve seen this meme more than once:

A portrait of Jesus wielding a whip in the teple, with tables overturned and people on the floor looking confused or afraid, with text overlaid that reads "If anyone ever asks you What Would Jesus Do? Remind him that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibility"
Image description in alt text.

He did indeed break out a whip, according to the Gospels! But why? What exactly was Jesus’s purpose for causing a ruckus in the Temple?

A common progressive interpretation of the story is exemplified by this Tweet by ELCA pastor Eric Clapp:

"Just a reminder that the only time Jesus flipped tables is when religious people put a bustling economy over the well-being of their neighbor."
ID in alt text. Click here for the original Tweet.

Hey, I’m all for a reminder that God calls us to care for human beings over economic gain — and that religious leaders often find ourselves in prime positions to make some money ourselves. But before embracing this interpretation, we need to pause and consider what assumptions about Temple goings-on are present within it. For starters, this reading assumes:

  • that the selling of animals for sacrifice right on the Temple premises was inappropriate and even unjust;
  • that Temple leaders did so in order to line their own pockets;
  • and that they charged exploitative prices to the detriment of the poor.

So what’s the problem here?

Well, according to Jewish scholar of the New Testament Amy-Jill Levine, these assumptions about Temple corruption have no historical backing to them. As this post will get to in a bit, both within the Gospel narratives and in extra-biblical sources, we don’t have any reason to believe that money changers were cheating anybody in the Temple, or that Jesus was protesting such a thing!

Even worse, such readings easily lead into antisemitism that impacts our Jewish neighbors even to this day. For example, I can easily imagine the above list of explicit assumptions yielding various implicit ones:

  • that Jewish leaders were greedy & money-obsessed — hmm, doesn’t that sound uncomfortably like an antisemitic stereotype that’s pervaded centuries?
  • that one of Jesus’s priorities in his ministry was to shut down the Temple system and institute a brand new religion that would replace the “legalism” and hypocrisy of Judaism with a “law of love” — a foundational concept of supersessionism, or the idea that Christianity supersedes (replaces) Judaism; click here for information on the pervasiveness of supersessionist views in our churches today & why such views actively harm our contemporary Jewish neighbors.
  • (And if you don’t think this Bible story promotes supersessionism, pause and ponder why we traditionally call it “The Cleansing of the Temple” — implying the Temple, which was at that time the hub of Jewish religious & political life, was unclean.)

I used to hold the same assumptions expressed in the above meme and tweet. Jesus flipping tables to protest exploitative economic and religious systems is a compelling story! It’s relatable to our own activism, it showcases a countercultural Jesus — but is it worth fueling anti-Jewish theologies?

Those of us who claim to care for the oppressed need to rethink our readings of this story, in order to prevent its misuse as a weapon against our Jewish neighbors.

Thus I am grateful to Dr. Amy-Jill Levine for sharing historical context that can help us with our re-readings, and for offering her own interpretation of why Jesus really decided to weave that whip and flip those tables.

The rest of this post is me sharing excerpts from Levine’s book Entering the Passion of Jesus at length (and then ending with further resources, for those interested).

The images I share below condense her argument into concise bits that you could easily share on a church Facebook page or website, or at a Bible study. They can stand on their own as helpful conversation material; but I’ve also interspersed them with longer excerpts from Levine that provide even more information. (If you want a post with just the images and not the lengthy excerpts, click here.)

If you do share these images, please simply credit back to this site! Also, each one has an image description in the alt text; if you share them online, I request that you keep that alt text to make them accessible to people who use screen readers.

Images show slides with text and illustrations based around the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus flipping tables and wielding a whip in the Temple. This first slide shows one such illustration, with Jesus as a middle eastern man with black hair and beard wearing yellow and blue robes with traditional tassels looking angry and wielding a whip, surrounded by frightened looking people and animals escaping their cages, with an overturned table by his side. Text reads “Jesus flipping tables: Dr. Amy-Jill Levine’s Interpretation” and “In Entering the Passion of Jesus, Levine unpacks traditional readings of the “cleansing of the Temple” and offers an alternative that resists antisemitism and applies biblical & historical context…”

The incident known as the ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ is described in all four Gospels. Most people have the idea–probably from Hollywood–that this is a huge disruption. When we see this scene depicted in movies, we find Jesus fuming with anger, and we inevitably see gold coins falling down in slow motion. Everything in the Temple comes to a standstill. …But we are not watching a movie: we are studying the Gospels. …

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
a detail from a painting of the Jesus MAFA series where Jesus is depicted as an African man in a traditional Cameroon marketplace; he’s got deep Brown skin and close-cropped hair, a red robe, and likewise wields a whip and looks angry as people run frightened around him. This image will repeat on every other slide from now on (all slides that include bullet points summarizing Levine’s points). This slide’s text reads, “What follows is a summary of the points Levine makes in her chapter on the “cleansing of the temple”: - Jesus’s whole table flipping, whip-wielding stunt is more symbolic than practical (echoing similar performances by his people’s prophets). - Jesus’s anger isn’t about gentiles being excluded from Temple life; they weren’t.”

Here’s what we know about the actual setting. We begin by noting that the Temple complex was enormous. It was the size of twelve soccer fields put end to end. So, if Jesus turns over a table or two in one part of the complex, it’s not going to make much of a difference given the size of the place.

The action therefore did not stop all business; it is symbolic rather than practical. Our responsibility is to determine what was symbolized. For that, we need to know how the Temple functioned.

The Jerusalem Temple, which King Herod the Great began to rebuild and which was still under construction at the time of Jesus, had several courts. The inner sanctum, known as the “Holy of Holies,” is where the high priest entered, only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to ask for forgiveness for himself and for the people. Outside of that was the Court of the Priests, then the Court of Israel, the Court of the Women, and then the Court of the Gentiles, who were welcome to worship in the Temple. …

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
a detail from a painting, showing a flipped tables and a mess of coins and sheep and doves. There’s another quote from Levine reading, “Pilgrims…would not bring [sacrificial] animals with them from Galilee or Egypt or Damascus. They would not risk the animal becoming injured and so unfit for sacrifice. The animal might fly or wander away, be stolen, or die. …One bought one’s offering from the vendors. And…there is no indication that the vendors were overcharging or exploiting the population. The people would not have allowed that to happen. Thus, Jesus is not engaging in protest of cheating the poor.”

The outer court, the Court of the Gentiles, is where the vendors sold their goods. The Temple at the time of Jesus was many things: it was a house of prayer for all nations; it was the site for the three pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot/Pentecost, and Sukkot/Booths; it was a symbol of Jewish tradition (we might think of it as comparable, for the Jewish people of the time, to how Americans might view the Statue of Liberty); it was the national bank, and it was the only place in the Jewish world where sacrifices could be offered. Therefore, there needed to be vendors on site.

Pilgrims who sought to offer doves (such as Mary and Joseph do, following the birth of Jesus, according to Luke 2:24) or a sheep for the Passover meal would not bring the animals with them from Galilee or Egypt or Damascus. They would not risk the animal becoming injured and so unfit for sacrifice. The animal might fly or wander away, be stolen, or die. And, as one of my students several years ago remarked, ‘The pilgrims might get hungry on the way.’ One bought one’s offering from the vendors. …

Despite Hollywood, and sermon after sermon, there is no indication that the vendors were overcharging or exploiting the population. The people would not have allowed that to happen. Thus, Jesus is not engaging in protest of cheating the poor.

Next, we need to think of the Temple as something other than what we think of churches. A church, usually, is a place of quiet and decorum. …The Temple was something much different: It was a tourist attraction, especially during the pilgrimage festivals. It was very crowded, and it was noisy. The noise was loud and boisterous, and because it was Passover, people were happy because they were celebrating the Feast of Freedom. …We might think of the setting as a type of vacation for the pilgrims: a chance to leave their homes, to catch up with friends and relatives, to see the “big city,” and to feel a special connection with their fellow Jews and with God. It is into this setting that Jesus comes. …”

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
more bullet points summarizing points from Levine’s chapter: - Jesus’s anger was not about animals being sold in the temple’s outer courts - There’s also no evidence of unjust prices, so he’s not angry about the poor being cheated here either. - Various Gospel stories show that Jesus did not reject the Temple or its laws & rituals (also – he has “zeal for his father’s house”)

Driving out the Vendors 

…It seems to me that Jesus, in the Temple, was angry. But what so angered him? I hear from a number of people, whether my students in class or congregations who have invited me to speak with them, that the Temple must have been a dreadful institution; that it exploited the poor; that it was in cahoots with Rome; that Caiaphas, the High Priest in charge of the Temple, was a terrible person; that it banned Gentiles from worship and so displayed hatred of foreigners; and so forth. …Some tell me that the Temple imposed oppressive purity laws that forbade people from entering, and so Jesus, who rejected those laws, rejected the temple as well. No wonder Jesus wants to destroy the institution.

But none of those views fits what we know about either Jesus or history.

First, Jesus did not hate the Temple, and he did not reject it. If he did, then it makes no sense that his followers continued to worship there. Jesus himself calls the Temple “my Father’s house” (Luke 7:49: John 2:16). …

Second, Jesus is not opposed to purity laws. To the contrary, he restores people to states of ritual purity. Even more, he tells a man whom he has cured of leprosy, “Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them” (Mark 1:44; see also Matthew 8:4; Luke 5:14). 

Third, Jesus says nothing about the Temple exploiting the population. As we’ll see in the next chapter, when we talk about the widow who makes an offering of her two coins, Jesus is concerned not with what the Temple charges, but with the generosity of the worshipers. 

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
a detail of an illustration of a courtyard in the Temple with large pillars and crowds of people, with a quote from Levine’s chapter reading, “…The Temple has an outer court, where Gentiles are welcome to worship. They were similarly welcome in the synagogues of antiquity, and today. They do not have the same rights and responsibilities as do Jews, and that makes sense as well. When I [a Jewish woman] visit a church, there are certain things I may not do. …”

Fourth, we’ve already seen that the Temple has an outer court, where Gentiles are welcome to worship. They were similarly welcome in the synagogues of antiquity, and today. They do not have the same rights and responsibilities as do Jews, and that makes sense as well. When I [a Jewish woman] visit a church, there are certain things I may not do. We might also think of how nations function: Canadians, for example, cannot do certain things in the USA, such as vote for president; nor can citizens of the USA vote in Canadian elections.

As for Caiaphas…Caiaphas is basically between a rock and a hard place. He is the nominal head of Judea, and he is supposed to keep the peace.Judea is occupied by Rome, and Roman soldiers are stationed there. Caiaphas needs to make sure that these soldiers do not go on the attack. He needs to placate Pilate, and he needs to placate Rome. 

At the same time, as the High Priest, he has a responsibility to the Jewish tradition. Rome wanted the Jews to offer sacrifices to the emperor…but Caiaphas and the other Jews refused to participate in this type of offering because they would not worship the emperor. The most they were willing to do was offer sacrifices on behalf of the emperor and the empire.

When Jesus comes into the city in the Triumphal Entry, when people are hailing him as son of David, Caiaphas recognizes the political danger. The Gospel of John tells us that the people wanted to make Jesus king (John 6:15). Caiaphas has to watch out for the mob. Caiaphas also has to watch out for all these Jewish pilgrims coming from all over the empire celebrating the Feast of Freedom, the end of slavery. When he sees Roman troops surrounding the Temple Mount, Caiaphas has to keep the peace. And Jesus is a threat to that peace. But none of this has to do directly with Jesus’ actions in the Temple. He is not at this point protesting Caiaphas’s role.

Sometimes I hear people say that Jesus drove the “money lenders” out of the Temple. That’s wrong, too. Money-lending was a business into which the medieval church forced Jews, because the church concluded that charging interest was unnatural (money should not beget money). Yet people needed, then and now, to take out loans. The issue for the Gospel is not money lending but money changing. These money changers exchanged the various currencies of the Roman Empire into Tyrian shekels, the type of silver coin that the Temple accepted. We experience the same process when we visit a foreign country and have to exchange our money for the local currency.

So, if Jesus is not condemning the Temple itself, or financial exploitation, or purity practices, what is he condemning? Let’s look at what the Gospels actually say. …

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
another bullet point summarizing points from Levine’s chapter: “What Jesus’s anger is about: in the versions in Matthew, Mark, & Luke, he quotes Jeremiah 7:11 in calling the Temple “a den of thieves” – it’s become a place where people who sin and oppress in their everyday life feel perfectly comfortable, instead of being called to repent and reform.”

According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, …the concern is not the Temple, but the attitude of the people who are coming to it.

In Mark’s account Jesus begins by saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations?” (11:17). Indeed, it is so written. Jesus is here condensing and then quoting Isaiah 56:6-7… Jesus’ rhetorical question should be answered with a resounding “Yes!” – for the Temple already was a house of prayer for all people. More, he is standing in the Court of the Gentiles when he makes his pronouncement. …Thus, the problem is not that the Temple excludes Gentiles. 

Already we find the challenge, and the risk. Are churches Today houses of prayer for all people, or are they just for people who look like us, walk like us, and talk like us?

How do we make other people feel welcome? Is the stranger greeted upon walking into the church? Is the first thing a stranger hears in the sanctuary, “You’re in my seat”? When we pray or sing hymns, do we think of what those words would sound like in a stranger’s ears? …

Matthew and Luke drop out “For all nations,” and appropriately so, for they knew it already was a house of prayer for all nations. Matthew and Luke thus change the focus to one of prayer. And prayer gets us closer to what is going on in the Synoptic tradition. …

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
another quote from Levine: “Some people in Jeremiah’s time, and at the time of Jesus, and today, take divine mercy for granted… The church member sins during the workweek, either by doing what is wrong or by failing to do what is right. Then on Sunday morning this same individual…heartily sings the hymns, happily shakes the hands of others, and generously puts a fifty-dollar bill in the collection plate. That makes the church a den of robbers… It becomes a safe place for those who are not truly repentant and who do not truly follow what Jesus asks.”

Den of Thieves

Jesus continues, ‘But you are making it a den of robbers’ (Matthew 21:13). Here he is quoting Jeremiah 7:11: “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?”

A “den of robbers” (sometimes translated a “den of thieves”) is not where robbers rob. “Den” really means “cave,” and a cave of robbers is where robbers go after they have taken what does not belong to them, and count up their loot. The context of Jeremiah’s quotation – and remember, it always helps to look up the context of citations to the Old Testament – tells us this.

Jeremiah 7:9-10 depicts the ancient prophet as condemning the people of his own time, the time right before Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s Temple over five hundred years earlier: “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!’ – only to go on doing all these abominations?“ 

Some people in Jeremiah’s time, and at the time of Jesus, and today, take divine mercy for granted and see worship as an opportunity to show off new clothes rather than recommit to clothing the naked. The present-day comparison to what Jeremiah, and Jesus, condemned is easy to make: The church member sins during the workweek, either by doing what is wrong or by failing to do what is right. Then on Sunday morning this same individual, perhaps convinced of personal righteousness, heartily sings the hymns, happily shakes the hands of others, and generously puts a fifty-collar bill in the collection plate. That makes the church a den of robbers – a cave of sinners. It becomes a safe place for those who are not truly repentant and who do not truly follow what Jesus asks. The church becomes a place of showboating, not of fishing for people. 

Jeremiah and Jesus indicted people then, and now. The ancient Temple, and the present-day church, should be places where people not only find community, welcome the stranger, and repent of their sins. They should be places where people promise to live a godly life, and then keep their promises…

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
one last bullet point: “Finally, in John’s version, Jesus foretells a time when the Temple is no longer needed, for all places will be sacred & God will speak directly to everyone of every nation – a future that prophets like Zechariah also foretold. (A key difference: Jesus identifies a “new temple,” his body.)”

Stop Making My Father’s House a Marketplace

John’s Gospel says nothing about the house of prayer or den of robbers. In John’s Gospel, Jesus starts not simply by overturning the tables, but also by using a “whip of cords” (since weapons were not permitted in the Temple, he may have fashioned the whip from straw at hand), and driving out the vendors. Jesus when says to the dove sellers, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2:16). He is alluding to Zechariah 14:21, the last verse from this prophet, “and every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be sacred to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and use them to boil the flesh of the sacrifice. And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.”

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
one last quote from Levine: “…Jesus anticipates the time when there willno longer be a need for vendors, for every house not only in Jerusalem but in all of Judea shall be like the Temple itself. The sacred nature of the Temple will spread through all the people. He sounds somewhat like the Pharisees here, since the Pharisees were interested in extending the holiness of the Temple to every household.The message is a profound one: Can our homes be as sanctified, as filled with Worship, as the local church?”

In John’s version of the Temple incident, Jesus anticipates the time when there will no longer be a need for vendors, for every house not only in Jerusalem but in all of Judea shall be like the Temple itself. The sacred nature of the Temple will spread through all the people. He sounds somewhat like the Pharisees here, since the Pharisees were interested in extending the holiness of the Temple to every household.

The message is a profound one: Can our homes be as sanctified, as filled with Worship, as the local church?

Do we “do our best” on Sunday From 11 a.m. to 12 noon, but just engage in business is usual during the workweek? Do we pray only in church, or is prayer part of our daily practice? Do we celebrate the gifts of God only when it is time to do so in the worship service, or do we celebrate these gifts morning to night? Is the church just a building, or is the church the community who gathers in Jesus’ name, who acts as Jesus taught, who lives the good news? 

Jesus’ words, citing Zechariah, do even more. They anticipate a time when all peoples, all nations, can worship in peace, and in love. There is no separation between home and house of worship, because the entire land lives in a sanctified state. Perhaps we can even hear a hint of Jeremiah’s teaching of the “new covenant,” when “no longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ For they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). Can we envision this? Can we work toward it? …

Excerpt from Levine’s Entering the Passion of Jesus
questions for reflection: 1. Do you struggle to let go of the way you’ve always read a Bible story? What helps you embrace new readings? 2. How do we find balance between welcoming people as they are, sins and all, and resisting being a comfortable, unchallenging space for oppressors? Moreover, how do we protect vulnerable persons from their oppressors?

Closing Thoughts: Re-interpreting Jesus not as superseding, but tapping into his faith’s beliefs

Recognizing how much antisemitism is embedded in our theologies, especially the stories or ideas we treasure most, can cause defensiveness, guilt, even a sense of being overwhelmed about what we can keep amid the mess. I’ve felt all those things and more in the past several years as I’ve explored how to weed out antisemitism in my own faith life and help fellow Christians do likewise.

One big thing I’ve been digesting all this time is AJ Levine’s constant reminder that we don’t have to make Judaism bad to make Jesus look good — and that includes the Judaism of Jesus’s own time, even though that Judaism looked very different from the Judaism of today. We don’t have to accuse the Temple or teachers of Jesus’s time with corruption and hypocrisy in order to find meaning within any of the Gospels stories.

A rule of thumb that I’ve brought into my Bible reading of late (especially after reading Levine’s book on Gospel parables, Short Stories by Jesus):

  • Anything that suggests that Jesus was The Very First Jew to suggest that God is loving and merciful — that Jews before him believed in a violent and vengeful God — is inaccurate & harmful.

We might implicitly suggest such a thing without even meaning to do so, so learning examples of supersessionist readings can help us catch new ones when they crop up. Short Stories by Jesus is one fabulous place to learn some of those examples. If you’re interested in Levine’s points on various parables but don’t have time for her whole book, I’ve been posting excerpts on my tumblr blog. For excerpts specifically about the antisemitic interpretations of parables, click here.

Another prime example of supersessionist readings involves the “antitheses” of Matthew 5 — “You have heard it said, but I say to you…” Levine has a sermon you can read or watch here that discusses how these antitheses are misunderstood by Christians as Jesus superseding the Torah with new ideas, when they don’t have to be read that way at all!

Moreover, the progressive desire to depict Jesus is countercultural and, well, progressive definitely fuels a lot of these readings. As Levine explains,

The message of Jesus and the meaning of the parables need to be heard in their original context, and that context cannot serve as an artificial and negative foil to make Jesus look original or countercultural in cases where he is not.

Yes, today we like what is “countercultural” or “radical” or “unique”—but those are our values and are not necessarily what the parables are conveying. Instead, the parables more often tease us into recognizing what we’ve already always known, and they do so by reframing our vision.

The point is less that they reveal something new than that they tap into our memories, our values, and our deepest longings, and so they resurrect what is very old, and very wise, and very precious. And often, very unsettling. …”

Short Stories by Jesus

Letting go of the “Jesus chock-full of completely new ideas” can be hard. But I’ve come to love the “Jesus who knew and cherished his people’s traditions” — who saw the goodness within them and worked to make that goodness reality.

Now, to help you adjust to a Jesus whose theology wasn’t all Completely Fresh, there is one teaching Levine says Jesus was original in: the love of the enemy. The Torah commands love of neighbor and stranger, but not of enemy:

In Jewish thought, one could not mistreat the enemy, but love was not mandated. Proverbs 25.21 insists, “If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink” (Paul cites Prov. 25.21–22 in Rom. 12.20).

Only Jesus insists on loving the enemy: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” He may be the only person in antiquity to have given this instruction.

Short Stories by Jesus

Further Reading

So that was a lot! I’ll leave you with some great places to go in the work of unpacking antisemitism.

Lent specific stuff:

More Stuff on Supersessionism, & Concrete Consequences of Christian Antisemitism:

Context around Pharisees, Temple, Torah:

If you have resources you want to share; or have questions, thoughts, etc. please let me know!