2 Lent B March 1, 2015
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Psalm 22:22-30Romans 4:13-25 Mark 8:31-38
If Jesus was a practicing Jew and a rabbi,
why is it that we today are not a part of the synagogue communities? Why do we attend church instead of synagogue
today? The readings from the Scriptures
provide for us some answers to this question which we don't ask because we are quite
used to the near 2000 years of separation between the church and synagogue
communities.
Some people might say that Jesus is the
inspiration for the Christian church and he is the founder of the rabbinical
school which became the Jesus Movement.
He was different sort of rabbi in that he invited into his following a
wider cross section of society than did other more exclusive scholarly
rabbinical schools.
If Jesus is the inspiration for the church,
St. Paul might be called the theological founder of the Christian
churches. He is a figure who represents
a major paradigm shift which account for fact that the synagogues and the
churches eventually became separate communities of worshiping people.
And if we ask ourselves as to why we are
Christian instead of Jewish today, the clues are to be found in our Scripture
readings for today.
In short, two of the reasons that we are not
Jewish today is first because of Gentile Christianity. And second is because a disagreement about
the nature of the Messiah.
I believe the success phenomenon of the
effects of the message of Christ was something which perhaps caught St. Paul and
others off guard. St. Paul was the
former, rabbi Saul who persecuted members of the movement who followed rabbi Jesus. But when Saul converted I think he expected
that other conversions to Christ would be mostly within the communities of
Judaism which were a part of the diaspora in the cities of the Roman Empire. In
these cities, the Jews could live a relative separate existence and meet in
their gathering places and live in neighborhoods where they could segregate
enough so as to be able to support each other in maintaining the rather
rigorous and specialized ritual purity.
The dietary rules alone required community support; one could not just
eat with anyone's Gentile neighbor because of these rules. Rules of ritual purity required of the Jews
a high degree of segregation.
When many Gentiles become followers of Jesus,
they did not become proselyte Jews and embark upon keeping all of the practices
of ritual purity. The rules of purity
were too onerous and unnatural for the Gentiles to conform to. Paul saw that message of Jesus Christ changed
the lives of Gentiles; he saw evidence of the Holy Spirit in their lives. So St. Paul exempted the Gentile converts from the
Jewish purity rituals. He felt that this exemption from the Jewish ritual
should be tolerated too by the Jewish followers of Jesus. But can you see the difficulties which would
arise between a communities of people who were trying to live together and yet
had different lifestyle issues as it concerned ritual purity.
The sheer numbers of Gentiles who became followers
of Jesus forced St. Paul to justify this innovation of departing from the
practices of ritual Judaism. St. Paul
was such a "liberal," progressive and reforming Jew that eventually the
members of the synagogue felt as though he compromised too much of the
essentials of Judaism on behalf of accepting the Gentiles into the church and
allowing them to be exempt from being practicing Jews in their adherence to the
basic Jewish rituals and customs.
What is the first thing that a reformer often
does? A reformer claims to be the true
conservative and shows how an innovation is really in keeping with spirit of
the tradition. So how was Gentile
Christianity compatible with the Hebrew Scriptures? St. Paul wrote a defense of Gentile
Christianity by appealing to the ancient Patriarch Abraham. Abraham was an ancient Iraqi who was called
from his country to travel westward to the area we know as Palestine. Abraham was not a Jew; he was
pre-Jewish. He had his name changed when
God made a covenant with him to make him a "father of many"
nations. For St. Paul, Abraham was the
father of faith, both Jewish faith, pre-Mosaic law faith, but also the
post-Judaism faith of Gentile Christians.
If Christian faith derives from Abraham, the father of many nations,
this sort of faith had less to do with bloodline and ethnicity or geography, it
had everything to do with the grace of God's Spirit entering covenantal
relationships with people giving them the knowledge of their membership in God's
family but also power to live faithful lives.
So St. Paul appealed to Abraham to establish
the Scriptural validity of Gentile Christianity, even though this appeal did not
prevent the separation of Christianity and Judaism into two different faith
communities. The leaders of the
synagogue felt Paul and others had compromised too much of their traditions by
fully accepting Gentile Christians and exempting them from the traditional ritual
practices of Judaism. This is one of the
main reasons why we are not members of the Jewish faith today.
The other reason that we are not members of
the Jewish faith today, is due to fact of a major disagreement about the
identity of the Messiah. The Greek word
Christ, simply is the Greek version of Messiah which derives from the Hebrew
language. When we say Jesus Christ,
Christ is not the surname of Jesus, it is a confession by us of his designated
title and role. In all of the Gospel,
there are lots of dialogues and questions about who the Messiah is. Obviously the identity of the Messiah was a
hot topic of discussion in Palestine in the first century. The country of Israel was an occupied country
for many, many years by Empires: The
Assyrian Empire, Babylonian, Persian, Alexander the Great and his Generals and
finally, the Roman Empire. The long
occupied people of Israel had their own hopes and dreams. For a very short time they had a King David
who was one who presided over a free and undivided kingdom of Israel and
Judah. Everything after David was downhill. In exile to Babylon and Persia and after, the compilation and editing of the literature
of the Hebrew Scriptures created and maintained the identity of a people who
would not just totally accommodate themselves to their conquerors. The literature and the synagogue and the
ritual practices kept the Jews as a people with a distinct identity. Even when they did not live as the owners of
their own land, their religious leader wrote about the myths of land and the
great king David and in their hope they envision another one like David to come
to restore their country to independence and freedom. They had suffered so much that they also
envisioned an afterlife and a Son of Man who would return and usher the world
into a realized justice because scores would get settled in the afterlife of
the judgment.
So a very gifted and charismatic rabbi Jesus,
raised the hopes of his followers. But
if the Messiah is to be one like David, how could one present Jesus as the
Messiah after he suffers and dies? What
was the nature of the Messiahship of Jesus for his followers after his
death? Early followers of Jesus had post resurrection appearances of Christ. Others had other kinds of experiences of the
Holy Spirit associated with the life of Jesus.
They believed that the ability of Jesus to be known after his death was
a sign of God's power present in Jesus, a sign powerful enough to designate him
as the Messiah. With the narrative of
the Ascension of Jesus and his being seated at the right hand of God the Father
in heaven, his glorification, one finds that Jesus was this heavenly and unseen
kingly messianic Being. But Jesus was
not a visible earthly king; the actual evidence of the power of Jesus was seen
in effects on the moral and spiritual lives of people who came to have these
post-resurrection events or encounters with Christ.
So how does one convince about this hidden or
incognito Messiah to the Jews who needed the Messiah to be a visible conquering
political king such as David? The early
Christian expositors following St. Paul, adopted the theology of suffering and
the theology of the cross. How could
they then present Jesus as a Messiah using suffering and the cross? The New
Testament writers used the themes from Isaiah of the "suffering
servant" to show how Jesus of Nazareth was the valid Messiah in his
suffering and death. He became a "revealed"
Messiah to those who had post-resurrection experiences. And he became a delayed Messiah for those who
anticipated a Messiah like David; so the future returning Messiah will be one
like David.
I would want us to understand how the early
Christian leaders were explaining the meaning of the life of Jesus.
So today we are not meeting in synagogues,
because the message of Jesus became too popular for non-Jewish people who could
not conform to the ritual practices of Judaism.
We are not meeting in synagogues
on a Friday night Sabbath because we are within a tradition who believe Jesus
of Nazareth to be the Messiah because of his incomparable life ministry, his
suffering, his death, his post-resurrection appearances and because of his
exalted role in the interior kingdom.
And in believing this the church, following
St. Paul, took the life events of Jesus and made them into corresponding
spiritual metaphors. So taking up our
cross means that we "die to unworthy states of mind in our
"psuche," our soul life but in attaching ourselves to the
resurrection we receive new "psuche" new soul life which is expressed
in transformed behaviors.
Let us not worry about being
"different" from Judaism. Let
us be grateful that we stand upon the heritage of so much within Judaism and
that we have benefited from those who followed the lead of the Spirit of God to
make the Messiahship of Jesus Christ accessible to us.
And let us get with this ancient practice of
spiritual transformation whereby we take up our crosses and understand the
death of Jesus to be the power to die to what is unworthy in us, but then grasp
on to the resurrection as the power for new creative advance in excellence,
love and justice to come to expression in our lives. Amen.
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