Sunday, March 1, 2015

Explaining the First Great Paradigm Shift in Christianity


2 Lent B      March 1, 2015
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 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.

  

No comments:

Post a Comment

Prayers for Advent, 2024

Friday in 3 Advent, December 20, 2024 Creator God, you birthed us as humans in your image, and you have given special births to those throug...