Oh my church, my hands and feet on earth,
why do you not heed me on the cross?
Answer me!
From the moment I shaped humanity from the mud
and gifted you with my own Breath
I delighted in you, and called you good,
invited you to serve my diverse Creation,
promising that as long as you cared for it,
it would care for you –
yet you trample my good works under your feet!
You consume and consume and consume beyond your need
even while many of your siblings starve.
In sentencing your siblings and the land
to a torturous death,
you sentence me.
Holy God,
we have no defense.
Holy God,
do what you deem just.
Holy God,
redeem and renew us!
Oh my church, my hands and feet on earth,
why do you not heed me on the cross?
Answer me!
I chose the children of Israel as my own
not despite but because Jacob dared to wrestle me;
I chose the enslaved Hebrews as my own
not despite but because of their littleness,
the way their neighbors sought to dominate or destroy them.
My covenant with them is eternal;
My Torah instructs them well on how to love me
by loving the stranger, the Other, the defenseless –
Yet you claim your relationship with me negates theirs!
You call their testament “old,”
and claim the God you find there
is bloodthirsty, barbaric, not the same God;
Across the centuries you have listened to the story
of how I was charged by Roman powers with sedition,
died on a Roman cross –
and then went out and blamed “the Jews” for my death!
You have coerced conversion,
enacted or enabled hate crimes against them;
you have shunned and slandered them
when you ought to have
embraced them as your kin!
When you reject and persecute my Jewish people,
truly, truly you reject and persecute me.
Holy God,
we have no defense.
Holy God,
do what you deem just.
Holy God,
redeem and renew us!
Oh my church, my hands and feet on earth,
why do you not heed me on the cross?
Answer me!
I so loved you, I wrapped my divinity in frail flesh
so I could share with you
both joy and pain, feast and famine, friendship and loss;
I so loved you, I accepted Rome’s cross
to show my solidarity with all
whom worldly powers crush —
But still you idolize the very forces
that brutalized my body unto death!
When you regard a flag above a life
and let your siblings perish
on the other side of a border you invented;
when you wage war against Black and Indigenous peoples
or look away as they are killed
you also kill me.
Holy God,
we have no defense.
Holy God,
do what you deem just.
Holy God,
redeem and renew us!
Oh my church, my hands and feet on earth,
why do you not heed me on the cross?
Answer me!
Why do you not help me when I cry out
in thirst and hunger, or nakedness?
Why do you not welcome me when I come to you as a stranger?
Where are you when I am sick, but can’t afford care?
Where are you when I am abused or contracting COVID in prison?
Oh, my church! when will you truly become
my hands and feet on earth?
Answer, answer me!
Holy God,
we have no defense.
Holy God,
do what you deem just.
Holy God,
redeem and renew us
and we will be your hands and feet.
We will care for your Creation
and show gratitude for its care of us.
We will respect your Jewish people,
repenting of and uprooting our antisemitism;
we will learn to recognize your face
among persons of all faiths.
We will care for the most oppressed among us,
joining in solidarity with Black, Indigenous people of color,
with the LGBTQA+ community,
with the disability community, and all the disenfranchised,
uplifting their voices
and making good trouble
until the needs of all are met.
Truly, then, you will be my church
and I will give you strength,
and you shall journey in the name of
God Who Draws All Peoples To Themself.
You can hear me read this piece and explain it in other words in episode 39 of my podcast – find links here.
I wrote this piece to be used as an alternative in churches that on Good Friday traditionally read the Improperia, the “Solemn Reproaches of the Cross, the original version of which you can read here. My intention is to encourage Christians to examine our antisemitism during this week, rather than fueling it with language that blames the Jewish people past and present for Jesus’s death.
Holy Week has long been a dangerous time of the year for Jewish persons (See this article for the history of antisemitic hate crimes on Good Friday in medieval Europe; and this article arguing that “Centuries of Christian Antisemitism Led to the Holocaust“). The scriptures and liturgy that we choose to read in our churches during this time fuels that antisemitism not only this week, but the whole year round.
As Jewish woman and New Testament professor Amy-Jill Levine writes in this article,
“Jesus of Nazareth, charged by the Roman authorities with sedition, dies on a Roman cross. But Jews ― the collective, all Jews ― become known as “Christ-killers.” Still haunting, the legacy of that charge becomes acute during Holy Week, when pastors and priests who speak about the death of Jesus have to talk about “the Jews.” Every year, the same difficulty surfaces: how can a gospel of love be proclaimed, if that same gospel is heard to promote hatred of Jesus’s own people?”
Among the most poisonous of liturgy read by many churches across the centuries is the “Reproaches.” As Elizabeth Palmer explains in her 2020 article “Thinking about Good Friday during a Pandemic,”
In the Solemn Reproaches, Jesus addresses people who have harmed him — and the text has a long history of stirring up violence against Jewish people. Many times over the centuries, in many places, Christians bowed before the cross on Good Friday and heard or sang some version of these words: “I led thee through the wilderness 40 years, fed thee with manna, and brought thee into a land exceeding good, and thou hast prepared a cross for thy Savior.” Then they’d leave the church, form a mob, and attack Jewish communities.
The “Reproaches” are coated in the blood of our Jewish neighbors. They should not be read or sung in our worship — but neither should they be hidden away outside of worship. We can’t pretend this text does not exist. We must grapple with it, guide congregations in understanding why it is so evil, and in doing so move towards acknowledging and dealing with our antisemitism, past and present.
My hope is that this alternative text, which includes a well-earned reproach for our antisemitism with examples of what that antisemitism looks like in our churches today, can be a jumping off point for conversations on this topic.
For more on antisemitism during Holy Week and what to do about it, I highly recommend Levine’s article ““Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter.” In this article, Levine describes how the anti-Jewish language got into the Gospels to begin with; how interfaith conversations today help stem the tide of antisemitism; and explores and ranks the 6 strategies Levine has seen people use when trying to resolve these problems with the New Testament.
From least useful to most useful, she names these strategies as excision (just removing the problematic stuff and pretending it was never there); retranslation (changing up the way we translate problematic texts, such as changing “the Jews” to “Judeans”); romanticizing (this includes Christians holding their own Passover seders – read this part of the article to see why we should Not Do That); allegorizing; historicizing; and, best of all, just admitting the problem:
“We come finally to our sixth option: admit to the problem and deal with it. There are many ways congregations can address the difficult texts. Put a note in service bulletins to explain the harm the texts have caused. Read the problematic texts silently, or in a whisper. Have Jews today give testimony about how they have been hurt by the texts.
Those who proclaim the problematic verses from the pulpit might imagine a Jewish child sitting in the front pew and take heed: don’t say anything that would hurt this child, and don’t say anything that would cause a member of the congregation to hurt this child.
Better still: educate the next generation, so that when they hear the problematic words proclaimed, they have multiple contexts – theological, historical, ethical – by which to understand them.Christians, hearing the Gospels during Holy Week, should no more hear a message of hatred of Jews than Jews, reading the Book of Esther on Purim, should hate Persians, or celebrating the seder and reliving the time when “we were slaves in Egypt,” should hate Egyptians.
We choose how to read. After two thousand years of enmity, Jews and Christians today can recover and even celebrate our common past, locate Jesus and his earliest followers within rather than over and against Judaism, and live into the time when, as both synagogue and church proclaim, we can love G-d and our neighbour.’
For more resources for dealing with antisemitism within our Christian communities, see below.
RESOURCES:
First, let’s get educated on the basic facts about antisemitism in Holy Week’s typical scriptures, and alternatives to concluding that “the Jews killed Jesus”:
- Article: “The Thing I Never Want to Hear Again on Good Friday“
- Article: “Who are ‘The Jews’ in John?”
- Article from My Jewish Learning – “Who Killed Jesus?”
- You might like my sermon from last Palm Sunday that discusses antisemitism in the “triumphal entry” narrative and connects it to the perennial search for someone to blame when we feel afraid or helpless, including parallels to anti-Asian sentiments in this pandemic
- See also Jon M. Sweeney’s book: Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews: Reflections for Christians in Lent
Next, let’s reimagine the stories we read during Holy Week in ways that don’t do harm to our Jewish neighbors!
- I most highly recommend Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine’s book Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week.
- Get a summary of and link to a pdf of her chapter on Palm Sunday and the “cleansing of the temple” (Jesus flipping tables) here
- And if reading a whole book isn’t your thing, Levine also has a video series where she talks about the Passion story – here’s the first video, just 9 minutes long
- And here’s an article interviewing Levine that sums up the purpose of her work with the Christian Gospels – “A number of Christian commentators feel the need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good. Instead of portraying Jesus as a Jew talking to other Jews, he becomes in their views the first Christian, the one who invented divine grace, mercy, and love, and all that other good stuff. Such views neglect the presence of these same virtues within Jesus’ own Jewish context. There should be no reason this Jewish Jesus is used to promote anti-Judaism.”
Binary-Breaking Worship 