2 Lent A March 16, 2014
Gen 12:1-8
Ps.121
According
to recent population totals, there are 3.1 billion Christians in our world and
14 million Jews. What does this mean for
Christian and Jewish Holy Books? It
means that more people read the Jewish Holy Book than do read the Christian
Holy Book, by at least 14 million people.
For Christians, the Hebrew Scriptures are required reading but for Jews,
the New Testament is not required reading.
We know that Christianity and Judaism are two
different religions today. It was not
always so. Jesus was a Jew who practiced
the pieties and liturgical forms of Judaism of his time. But in Judaism, the tradition is regarded to
be a living tradition. Rabbis would
write, preach and teach on the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures and new
understandings would arise to add to the body of the tradition. Jesus of Nazareth was a rabbi with disciples
and he was adding to the growth and the development of the Hebrew/Judaic
tradition.
Before Christianity and Judaism became
different religions there were phases of transitions in time of several decades
between the life of Jesus and the more complete separation of the communities
of faith signaled by the practice of “excommunication” of the followers of
Rabbi Jesus from the synagogues and a similar shunning of so called “Judaizers”
within the Christian communities.
The New Testament writings, including the
Gospel are written in some phase of this transition of the birth of the
Christian religion out of and separate from Judaism. When people believe things strongly, they
cannot avoid being a bit excessive in their persuasive attempts. If one has good news, one wants to validate
the good news by seeing its positive effect upon others. And one can be disappointed or even critical
of those who persist in finding the “old good news” as their continuing good
news. So many Jews after Jesus still
found that their good news did not include following Jesus as their Messiah.
What made the Jesus Movement a significant
threat to the very structure of Judaism was the success of the message of Jesus
within the Gentile community. And when
St. Paul and others decided that the Spirit of God could be present and work
without the practice of all of the legal requirements of Judaism, the
separation between Jews and Christians became sealed. This upstart movement, the Jesus movement was
claiming to be a valid successor and re-interpretation of Judaism and the
Hebrew Scriptures. The New Testament
writings are essentially writings of re-interpretation of the Hebrew
Scriptures.
So how can faith be valid for the Gentiles
who did not have the benefit of growing up being taught the Torah, the prophets
and other teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures?
Well, you know that pre-Jewish patriarch named Abram, who became
Abraham? He left his homeland in Ur of
the Chaldees, and his obedience ushered in a new religious paradigm. His obedience to God was an act of faith and
he was a righteous man and he did not have the benefit of the Law of Moses
because he lived before Moses. So he was
like the Gentiles, he was a person of faith, without the benefit of the Mosaic
Law. Abraham was appropriated by Paul
and others as the paradigm of having faith without the Judaic law. But what Paul also did was to spiritualize
the promise of God to Abraham to make of him a great nation. The great nation for Paul was no longer the
land and people of Israel; the great nation for Paul was the nation of faith
which derived from believing in Jesus as the Messiah. By removing, the “land based” notion for the
people of faith, the universal potential of the Christian faith was unleashed
and one could say that this partly accounts for the evangelizing success of
Christianity in our world in comparison with Judaism.
We need also to remember that the Gospels
were written during this transition phase of the separation of the Jewish and
Christian religions. So one of the
motives behind the Gospel writings is to make a persuasive appeal to Jews who
had not yet come to embrace Jesus as their Messiah. Another motive of the Gospel writings is to
instruct the Gentile Christians about the deep Jewish roots of the Christian
faith.
Of the four Gospels, the Gospel of John is
perhaps the most Gentile Gospel. It was
written later than the three synoptic Gospels and it has a more developed
Christian teaching presented in long discourses of Jesus, one of which we read
in part today. Nicodemus, is a person
who does not appear in the earlier written Gospels, which is interesting since
he is presented as having such a prominent role in the requesting from Pilate
of the body of Jesus after his death.
We have read today the favorite discourse
which defines evangelical Christianity.
We find in this text the origin of the phrase, “born again” and the
location of the most famous Christian graffiti of sporting events, John 3:16, “For
God so loved the world…..”
The Gospels are literature and as such they are
art. The first goal of art is to trick
us into a moment of an “as if” belief.
So we read this Gospel “as if” we are eyewitness to an actual encounter
between Jesus and Nicodemus. We are
caught in the wonder of the “primary naivete” like the wonder of a child. But in adult study, our suspicions correct us
with a literary analysis to remind us that this is literary art written in a
specific time for specific persuasive purposes.
Being adult literary critics might seem to ruin the literal story for
us, kind of like telling children that Disney characters are not real. We do
have adult commonsense minds to understand the function of a writing in a
context for certain purposes. In two
moments of the experience of art, we have the wonder of primary naivete; in
another moment we have a balancing commonsense mind. Fundamentalist literalists are people who
make both of these events the same, in that they are afraid of their adult
mind. And they would deny us who do have
adult minds, the genuine wonder of devotional experience which we know in the
event of primary naivete.
One of the purposes of the dialogue between
Jesus and Nicodemus is for the persuasion of Jews to follow Jesus. Nicodemus is a Greek name meaning “victory of
the people.” Interesting for a Jewish
member of the Sanhedrin to have a Greek name.
But in some other Hebrew tradition, Nicodemus means, “innocent of blood.”
So you see there is an invitation to Jews to
be like Nicodemus and be innocent of the blood of Jesus. There is also an invitation to convert to
this new paradigm of how God is to be understood. Be born again; be born from above. Be converted to this new paradigm for the
universalizing of the message of God to all people. Be born by water and the Spirit. This is a sure indication of the practice of
water baptism that was prevalent within the Christian community. This Gospel about God is a teaching about
becoming initiated into the community of Christ. This Gospel ties the work of Moses in raising
the healing serpent upon a pole to the raising of Christ on the cross, not as a
symbol of death but as a symbol of health and salvation.
And then we find the favorite Bible verse of
many, because it expresses the universal love of God that we believe to characterize
the life of Jesus: For God so loved the
world that he gave God’s unique child so anyone who believes in Him would not
see their lives as ending with death but would activate within themselves the
life of God’s presence, the Spirit of God, who is immortal and eternal life.
We, today need to understand the antagonism
that is evident in the New Testament writings as they are zealous attempts to
try to convince all Jews at the time of their writing that Jesus was the Messiah referred to in the Judaic tradition. Today
we can believe in Jesus as the Messiah without denying the validity of the
faith of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Let us accept our Jewish brothers and sisters
as equals with their own wonderful tradition of devotion to God.
We can embrace our devotion of Christ without
diminishing the sincere faith of other people, even as we are committed to
proclaim: God loves the world so much that the fullness of the divine life is
shared with us completely by the omnipresence of God’s Holy Spirit, but most
particularly in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
What we can learn the most from Christ is
this proclamation: For God so loved the world. This is the very best of the
Gospel. Amen.
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