This week I will focus on the Hebrew Scripture reading of the lectionary, Jeremiah 31:31-34.
Jeremiah was born in Anathoth, a city just north of Jerusalem, and probably descended from the Shiloh priesthood. His career is dated from approximately 625 to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. It spanned about forty years between the reigns of Josiah to Zedekiah, the last kings of Judah, who Jeremiah tried to influencing urging appeasement with Babylon rather than rebellion.
The events described in the book of Jeremiah, much of which was dictated to his assistant Baruch, are corroborated by nonbiblical sources. During this time period, the Babylonian Empire was rising in power and threatening Judah. Jeremiah was active during the siege of Jerusalem in 597 BCE. He would have seen refugees from the countryside pouring into Jerusalem as their towns were swallowed up by the Babylonians, and desperate famine from lack of food from the siege. Zedekiah, who has been described as not the strongest of kings, mounted a revolt against Babylon, expecting help from Egypt which never came.
Zedekiah’s revolt led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, described in 2 Kings 25. This was one of the most pivotal traumas for the people of Israel and for the Jewish faith. The Babylonians used ramps to scale Jerusalem’s walls, destroyed the First Temple, and captured the royal family. Zedekiah was forced to witness the death of his sons, thus the extinguishing of the Davidic line, then blinded and taken prisoner. According to the book of Kings, a small number of residents were left to be plowmen and work in vineyards, but the majority of citizens were taken to Babylon in captivity. A major reason why the destruction of the Temple represented not just a political but a religious crisis was that so much of religious life revolved around worship at the Temple. An analogy would be if worship in America was centered around a single church building, and that building was destroyed. The Babylonian exile is still commemorated today in songs that take their chorus from Psalm 137, by artists including Sinead O’Connor and Sweet Honey in the Rock. An example can be found on the Web here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGKgCAKnzYo.
"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars we hung out harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors asked us for songs of joy;
they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How can we sing the songs of the LORD
in a foreign land?”
One of my Jewish friends, hearing these lyrics set to a perky, reggae melody, asked me, “How can the song be so upbeat? Don’t they know the song is about something terrible?”
The historical events during Jeremiah’s career are significant for understanding the context in which the lectionary passage was written. Jeremiah understands himself as someone called to articulate God’s messages to Israel. Like Moses, Jeremiah at first hesitates and feels himself inadequate to the task. Yet God will put words in his mouth: “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you.” (1:7) Abraham Heschel identifies two main themes in tension the book of Jeremiah: God’s wrath at human cruelty, and God’s grief that humans must suffer from their own failures.
Unlike the book of Job, where suffering is not caused by human failure but occurs arbitrarily, the book of Jeremiah presents an interpretation of suffering as a consequence of sin. In the earlier chapters, God rails at social injustice committed by the people he has chosen: “They bend their tongues like bows . . . they have taught their tongues to speak lies; they commit iniquity and are too weary to repent. Oppression upon oppression, deceit upon deceit! They refuse to know me, says the LORD.” (9:3-6) Jeremiah describes physical privation as resulting from lack of righteousness: “. . . the cry of Jerusalem goes up. Her nobles send their servants for water, they return with their vessels empty. They are ashamed and dismayed and cover their heads, because the ground is cracked” (14:2-3). God describes the faithlessness of Israel using the metaphor of a broken marriage:
I remember the devotion of your youth,
your love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness,
in a land not sown. . .
What wrong did your ancestors find in me,
that they went far from me,
and went after worthless things,
and became worthless themselves? (2:2-4)
Thus the passage from this week’s lectionary is a pivotal point in the entire book. The passage expresses confidence in a future time of renewal and restoration. In the midst of suffering, God affirms that the relationship with Israel will endure. The broken marriage metaphor from Jeremiah 2 is transformed into assurance of a new marriage covenant. There is a parallel in this passage with the book of the prophet Hosea. Hosea describes his marriage with a prostitute as a metaphor for God’s redeeming love for Israel. Although the prostitute Gomer leaves Hosea, he finds her and takes her back. Similarly, Jeremiah 31 describes God looking ahead toward a future time when the relationship with Israel will be restored. Another metaphor for this time involves God writing the law on the peoples’ hearts. This image is similar to an image from Song of Solomon, 8:6:
“Place me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
passion as fierce as the grave.”
It is not clear from this passage whether Israel’s forgiveness results from people’s repentance, or God’s unearned love:
31 "The time is coming," declares the LORD,
"when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,"
declares the LORD.
33 "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time," declares the LORD.
"I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor,
or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,'
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,"
declares the LORD.
"For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more."
--Elizabeth Fels
Sources:
Blenkinsopp, Joseph. A History of Prophecy in Israel. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1983.
Coogan, Michael, Ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (3rd ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Heschel, Abraham. The Prophets. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
March 22: The Paradox of Grace
Grace is one of the most difficult theological terms for me to explain in everyday conversation. As opposed to, say, “soteriology,” “grace” is ubiquitous in popular culture—yet how many of us at the drop of a hat can define what it means? Coming from the Greek word Χάρις, or “charis,” it is the theme of the song “Amazing Grace,” and, on the opposite end of the pop culture spectrum, the TV crime-fighting show “Saving Grace.” It’s a popular name for girls, and part of the name of the hospital Seattle Grace where “Grey’s Anatomy” is set. In the lectionary reading Ephesians 2:1-10, “grace” is nothing less than the mechanism of salvation: “For by grace you have been saved.” In this week’s entry I will explore the concept of grace in this passage.
Ephesians 2:1-10
1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
2 in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.
3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them (New American Standard Bible).
The city of Ephesus is located on the Aegean coast of Asia minor. It is one of the Pauline letters which some scholars doubt was actually written by Paul. Reasons for this doubt include theological concepts developed here but not elsewhere in the letters, such as salvation experienced during life on earth (2:4-10), and terms that are significant in Ephesians both not in other letters, like “heavenly places,” “dividing wall,” and “fellow citizen.” In addition, the rhetorical style in which the letters to the Ephesians are written features long, complex sentences, which the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible note are divided in the NRSV translation. However, there are several similarities in language between Ephesians and Colossians. If Ephesians was written by Paul, a probable date for them would be the late 50s. If it was written by a follower of Paul, it would have come after the 50s and likely modeled on Colossians.
A major theme of the letters, which is reflected in this passage, is the vision of a universal church. The language of Ephesians can also be traced to Jewish scripture, such as the so-called “Third Isaiah” in which the God of Israel is depicted as the God of all humanity. Regardless of who the author is, the book of Ephesians is part of the biblical canon and has played a major role in shaping Christian thought. We see the concept of a diverse church reflected in this particular passage: 2:1, “You who were dead in your trespasses and sins,” is addressed to Gentiles, while Jewish Christians are meant by the phrase “we too” (or “all of us”) in 2:3. The term grace then enters as the means by which the Christian community opens outward: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (2:8-9). This line is similar to Romans 3:22-24: “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by grace as a gift . . .”
Not long ago I had to respond to the question, “Isn’t all you have to do to get saved is believe in Jesus, regardless of how nice, or how much of a jerk, you are in your life? If this is true, how is it meaningful for a Christian to take a stand on social ethics?” I can imagine the asker of the question might have attended a church service like one I visited recently in which the preacher congratulated the congregation on “being saved.” Reading lines like Ephesians 2:8 out of context, it is not hard to see how one might get the impression that converting to Christianity takes away the gravity of moral decisions. According to the stereotype, a person can do harm all week, go to confession on Sunday, start with a clean slate, and repeat the cycle.
However, grace in this passage is not a license to do whatever we want, whenever we want. Rather it concerns our motivation for doing good, and the circumstances that make doing good possible at all. In Judaism and Christianity: Perspectives and Traditions, the authors Luther Harshbarger and John Mourant write,
Grace is probably the most crucial concept in western religious thought because it refers to the free and unmerited act by and through which God restores man. In essence grace is a paradox which affirms that every good in man and every good act is somehow from God rather than from the self (314).
Thus, when the author of Ephesians writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (2:8-9), the point is not to denigrate the importance of serving others—it’s to give credit for being able to serve at all to God. Human access to divine mercy is not a reward for hitting a certain mark on a scale of good works—rather, we are inspired to do good works in joyful response to God’s love and mercy, embodied in the incarnation.
In Judaism and Christianity: Perspectives and Traditions, the authors argue that the stereotypical division of Judaism as a “religion of law” and Christianity as a “religious of grace” is quite false. For example, a fundamental characteristic of grace as described in this Ephesians passage is that it’s not something earned, but a free gift that God offers: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive . . .” (4-5). The language used to describe God directly recalls the Hebrew word hesed, or steadfast loving kindness. Hesed is used to describe God throughout the Hebrew Scripture, for example when God saves Jonah from the fish, despite Jonah’s refusal to preach to Nineveh. Harshbarger and Mourant highlight the parallel between the Christian concept of grace and the Jewish concept of being chosen: both versions are the result of God’s abundant love and mercy, not from any special virtue on the part of the people that, so to speak, forces God’s hand:
The election of Israel is a constant theme in the Tanakh and rabbinic literature. There is, however, never a suggestion that the election came through any merit of Israel. . . Grace, then, is closely associated with the Covenant and finds its expression in the Law. To be a Jew means to stand in Abraham’s place and at the foot of Sinai receive the Torah . . . Through the Law man enters a partnership with God as a man under commandment, yet free. Grace as it is manifested in and through the commandment does not diminish man’s freedom” (315).
For Christians, the authors differentiate between Catholic and Protestants conceptions of grace. The primary difference between Catholic and Protestant conception of grace concerns the role of the sacraments: “For the Roman Catholic, grace as a gift of God is an energy-giving virtue which is infused into the soul sacramentally. The sacraments are the effective signs of grace—grace made visible” (316). On the other hand, Luther claims that man is justified by grace through faith alone:
In grace God in His deepest being is performing a completely gratuitous act. There are no degrees of grace; either one is forgiven or one is not. . . The sacraments rightly administered and rightly received do embody the promises of God, but grace is not thereby restricted” (317).
Both strands of Christian theology hold that grace is that which makes it possible for humans to achieve anything. According to Ephesians 2:10 we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works,” yet God is the catalyst awakening us to this potential. God does not only demand goodness, but supplies us with the power to do good.
I would like to close by linking to two youtube versions of “Amazing Grace”, by the
country singer Leann Rimes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT88jBAoVIM&feature=related
and for bagpipe fans, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkLXOWimMY8&feature=related
--Elizabeth Fels
Source for background on Ephesians:
Coogan, Michael, Ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (3rd ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Harshbarger, Luther H. and Mourant, John A. Judaism and Christianity: Perspectives and Traditions. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 1968.
Ephesians 2:1-10
1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
2 in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.
3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them (New American Standard Bible).
The city of Ephesus is located on the Aegean coast of Asia minor. It is one of the Pauline letters which some scholars doubt was actually written by Paul. Reasons for this doubt include theological concepts developed here but not elsewhere in the letters, such as salvation experienced during life on earth (2:4-10), and terms that are significant in Ephesians both not in other letters, like “heavenly places,” “dividing wall,” and “fellow citizen.” In addition, the rhetorical style in which the letters to the Ephesians are written features long, complex sentences, which the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible note are divided in the NRSV translation. However, there are several similarities in language between Ephesians and Colossians. If Ephesians was written by Paul, a probable date for them would be the late 50s. If it was written by a follower of Paul, it would have come after the 50s and likely modeled on Colossians.
A major theme of the letters, which is reflected in this passage, is the vision of a universal church. The language of Ephesians can also be traced to Jewish scripture, such as the so-called “Third Isaiah” in which the God of Israel is depicted as the God of all humanity. Regardless of who the author is, the book of Ephesians is part of the biblical canon and has played a major role in shaping Christian thought. We see the concept of a diverse church reflected in this particular passage: 2:1, “You who were dead in your trespasses and sins,” is addressed to Gentiles, while Jewish Christians are meant by the phrase “we too” (or “all of us”) in 2:3. The term grace then enters as the means by which the Christian community opens outward: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (2:8-9). This line is similar to Romans 3:22-24: “For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by grace as a gift . . .”
Not long ago I had to respond to the question, “Isn’t all you have to do to get saved is believe in Jesus, regardless of how nice, or how much of a jerk, you are in your life? If this is true, how is it meaningful for a Christian to take a stand on social ethics?” I can imagine the asker of the question might have attended a church service like one I visited recently in which the preacher congratulated the congregation on “being saved.” Reading lines like Ephesians 2:8 out of context, it is not hard to see how one might get the impression that converting to Christianity takes away the gravity of moral decisions. According to the stereotype, a person can do harm all week, go to confession on Sunday, start with a clean slate, and repeat the cycle.
However, grace in this passage is not a license to do whatever we want, whenever we want. Rather it concerns our motivation for doing good, and the circumstances that make doing good possible at all. In Judaism and Christianity: Perspectives and Traditions, the authors Luther Harshbarger and John Mourant write,
Grace is probably the most crucial concept in western religious thought because it refers to the free and unmerited act by and through which God restores man. In essence grace is a paradox which affirms that every good in man and every good act is somehow from God rather than from the self (314).
Thus, when the author of Ephesians writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (2:8-9), the point is not to denigrate the importance of serving others—it’s to give credit for being able to serve at all to God. Human access to divine mercy is not a reward for hitting a certain mark on a scale of good works—rather, we are inspired to do good works in joyful response to God’s love and mercy, embodied in the incarnation.
In Judaism and Christianity: Perspectives and Traditions, the authors argue that the stereotypical division of Judaism as a “religion of law” and Christianity as a “religious of grace” is quite false. For example, a fundamental characteristic of grace as described in this Ephesians passage is that it’s not something earned, but a free gift that God offers: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive . . .” (4-5). The language used to describe God directly recalls the Hebrew word hesed, or steadfast loving kindness. Hesed is used to describe God throughout the Hebrew Scripture, for example when God saves Jonah from the fish, despite Jonah’s refusal to preach to Nineveh. Harshbarger and Mourant highlight the parallel between the Christian concept of grace and the Jewish concept of being chosen: both versions are the result of God’s abundant love and mercy, not from any special virtue on the part of the people that, so to speak, forces God’s hand:
The election of Israel is a constant theme in the Tanakh and rabbinic literature. There is, however, never a suggestion that the election came through any merit of Israel. . . Grace, then, is closely associated with the Covenant and finds its expression in the Law. To be a Jew means to stand in Abraham’s place and at the foot of Sinai receive the Torah . . . Through the Law man enters a partnership with God as a man under commandment, yet free. Grace as it is manifested in and through the commandment does not diminish man’s freedom” (315).
For Christians, the authors differentiate between Catholic and Protestants conceptions of grace. The primary difference between Catholic and Protestant conception of grace concerns the role of the sacraments: “For the Roman Catholic, grace as a gift of God is an energy-giving virtue which is infused into the soul sacramentally. The sacraments are the effective signs of grace—grace made visible” (316). On the other hand, Luther claims that man is justified by grace through faith alone:
In grace God in His deepest being is performing a completely gratuitous act. There are no degrees of grace; either one is forgiven or one is not. . . The sacraments rightly administered and rightly received do embody the promises of God, but grace is not thereby restricted” (317).
Both strands of Christian theology hold that grace is that which makes it possible for humans to achieve anything. According to Ephesians 2:10 we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works,” yet God is the catalyst awakening us to this potential. God does not only demand goodness, but supplies us with the power to do good.
I would like to close by linking to two youtube versions of “Amazing Grace”, by the
country singer Leann Rimes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT88jBAoVIM&feature=related
and for bagpipe fans, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkLXOWimMY8&feature=related
--Elizabeth Fels
Source for background on Ephesians:
Coogan, Michael, Ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (3rd ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Harshbarger, Luther H. and Mourant, John A. Judaism and Christianity: Perspectives and Traditions. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc. 1968.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
March 15: Ten Words
The Hebrew Scripture reading from the lectionary today has had recent appearances on late-night comedy shows. Representative Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia’s Third District appeared on the Colbert Report “Better Know a District” segment after co-sponsoring a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and Senate. “I think if we were totally without them, we may lose our sense of direction,” Westmoreland said. When Colbert asked him to name the commandments, Westmoreland could only name three: “Don’t murder, don’t lie, don’t steal.”:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/70730/june-14-2006/better-know-a-district---georgia-s-8th---lynn-westmoreland
If he did not know the answer, like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python in the Holy Grail asking whether the old man guarding the bridge meant an African or a European swallow, Westmoreland could have asked Colbert whether he meant the Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic version: these three religious communities have different versions of the ten commandments, or as they are literally called in biblical Hebrew, “the ten words.” In the Jewish tradition, Exodus 20.2 is considered the first of the ten words: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” In the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions, the commandments begin with Exodus 20:3-5, with the last two commandments concerning coveting a neighbor’s wife and his property separated. In the Eastern Orthodox and other Protestant traditions, the first commandment is 20.3, the second is 20.4-6, and coveting a neighbor’s wife and property are considered a single commandment.
Since I am focusing on Exodus 20:1-17 in this entry, for ease of reference I will post the reading into the text, from the New International Version:
And God spoke all these words:
2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 "You shall have no other gods before [a] me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8 "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
13 "You shall not murder.
14 "You shall not commit adultery.
15 "You shall not steal.
16 "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17 "You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to neighbor."
While not everyone might be able to list off the ten commandments at the drop of a hat, they play a controversial role in modern culture: several court cases recently have addressed whether they can be displayed in public buildings. In 2005, the Supreme Court issued two 5-4 decisions on this topic, ruling that the Ten Commandments could be displayed outside the Texas Capital but not inside Kentucky court houses—or, as Jon Stewart put it, “Outside a building, okay, inside a building, not so much.”
An Alabama Supreme Court chief justice was fired recently for refusing to remove a two-ton display of the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the court house. “Three times I was asked by a prosecutor of this state, an attorney general, if I would deny God. Three times I said I would not,” he said at a press conference. Defenders of the right to display the Ten Commandments argue that they reflect the role religion has played in the development of the US. The opposing argument is that such displays are tantamount to an official endorsement of religion, violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, and, in court houses in particular, imply that cases are judged according to religious laws.
In this entry, I would like to examine what can be inferred about the social setting of the people who received Exodus 20:1-17, using The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction and The New Oxford Annotated Bible as resources. Although the text describes God as giving Moses the Ten Commandments shortly after the Israelites' escape from slavery, “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone out of the land of Egypt” (Ex.19:1), they are addressed to an agrarian community, where there are houses, oxen, donkeys, and slaves, or, as many translations tend to call them, “servants.” However, unlike in the Deuteronomic Code, there is no mention of a monarch, and the text is dated to the late second millennium BCE.
Interestingly, the text does not express a vision of what we would call today monotheism. The language of the passage, “you shall have no other gods before me” does not imply that there is only one God, but presumes the existence of other gods who are not to be ranked with Yahweh. This “messy monotheism,” as Paula Fredriksen calls it, is consistent with the presumed reference to the Ten Commandments in the book of Jeremiah, from the late seventh century BCE: “You steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known” (Jer. 7:9). Often in the prophet writings, language of marital fidelity is used to describe the people’s commitment to God, or lack thereof.
Like the Noaheide laws, in the Hebrew Scripture reading from the first week of Lent, the Ten Commandments are written in language that implies a treaty structure. The passage begins with God, the stronger power, describing what He has done for Israel, and then describing how He should be honored. The first four commandments concern the people’s relationship to the divine: the second commandment prohibits the making of “idols,” which can be understood as images of God. The prohibition against making idols would have differentiated the Israelites from neighboring groups, who made animal and human images to depict deities. I remember my Hebrew Scripture professor talking about traditions in the Jewish and Muslim faiths of not visually portraying the divine, describing the complex, intensely colorful flowers that characterize Islamic art. He remarked dryly, “Christianity is a stunning exception.” From Michelangelo to South Park, prohibitions against rendering the divine in a visual image have apparently not been enforced for some time in Christian communities. The prohibition against “making wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God” may have implied invoking the name of God in an efforts to use magic or sorcery, attempts to gain control over the divine.
The other six commandments involve human relations with each other. Michael Coogan writes, “A man’s life, his marriage, his person . . . his reputation, and his property were to be inviolable by another Israelite (his “neighbor.”) Two other major areas in which the culture of contemporary religious communities do not reflect the moral norms expressed in the Ten Commandments concern the status of women and slaves. Exodus 20.17 often gets translated with the word “servants,” as in, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or manservant or maidservant, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” I once heard a sermon in which the pastor said, “they were more like modern-day employees.” However as seen in the next chapter of Exodus, the laws governing this relationship bear closer relation to what we would call slavery than, say, a Jane Austen-era cordial servant-employer relationship. Exodus 21:7 reads, “When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. In Exodus 21 we read,
When you buy a male Hebrew slave” (note the adjective “male”), he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person . . . If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone.
The much-quoted line “you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” falls before the prohibition of coveting donkeys or oxen, but after that of coveting a neighbor’s house. No mention is made of a neighbor’s husband, because the language of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew uses the second person masculine singular. Like other groups from this time period, the Israelite society structure was patriarchal, and the commandments are specifically addressed to men.
Fun Fact: in Exodus 34, after the golden calf debacle, Moses breaks the tablets containing the text of the commandments, and God tells him to go back to Mount Sinai for another copy. But the text in Exodus 34 is slightly different from Exodus 20—the new commandments focus less on human treatment of each other and more on worship, and for that reason are called the “Ritual Decalogue.” It can be inferred from the presence of differences in the texts that there was more than one tradition of the Ten Words, and that the writer(s) of Exodus placed more weight on including them than in making them match.
One last observation on this week’s lectionary reading: the last verse of Psalm 19 is incorporated into Sweet Honey in the Rock’s hauntingly beautiful a capella version of “By the Waters of Babylon”: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”
--Elizabeth Fels
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/70730/june-14-2006/better-know-a-district---georgia-s-8th---lynn-westmoreland
If he did not know the answer, like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python in the Holy Grail asking whether the old man guarding the bridge meant an African or a European swallow, Westmoreland could have asked Colbert whether he meant the Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, or Catholic version: these three religious communities have different versions of the ten commandments, or as they are literally called in biblical Hebrew, “the ten words.” In the Jewish tradition, Exodus 20.2 is considered the first of the ten words: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” In the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions, the commandments begin with Exodus 20:3-5, with the last two commandments concerning coveting a neighbor’s wife and his property separated. In the Eastern Orthodox and other Protestant traditions, the first commandment is 20.3, the second is 20.4-6, and coveting a neighbor’s wife and property are considered a single commandment.
Since I am focusing on Exodus 20:1-17 in this entry, for ease of reference I will post the reading into the text, from the New International Version:
And God spoke all these words:
2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
3 "You shall have no other gods before [a] me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
8 "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. 11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
13 "You shall not murder.
14 "You shall not commit adultery.
15 "You shall not steal.
16 "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
17 "You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to neighbor."
While not everyone might be able to list off the ten commandments at the drop of a hat, they play a controversial role in modern culture: several court cases recently have addressed whether they can be displayed in public buildings. In 2005, the Supreme Court issued two 5-4 decisions on this topic, ruling that the Ten Commandments could be displayed outside the Texas Capital but not inside Kentucky court houses—or, as Jon Stewart put it, “Outside a building, okay, inside a building, not so much.”
An Alabama Supreme Court chief justice was fired recently for refusing to remove a two-ton display of the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the court house. “Three times I was asked by a prosecutor of this state, an attorney general, if I would deny God. Three times I said I would not,” he said at a press conference. Defenders of the right to display the Ten Commandments argue that they reflect the role religion has played in the development of the US. The opposing argument is that such displays are tantamount to an official endorsement of religion, violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, and, in court houses in particular, imply that cases are judged according to religious laws.
In this entry, I would like to examine what can be inferred about the social setting of the people who received Exodus 20:1-17, using The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction and The New Oxford Annotated Bible as resources. Although the text describes God as giving Moses the Ten Commandments shortly after the Israelites' escape from slavery, “On the third new moon after the Israelites had gone out of the land of Egypt” (Ex.19:1), they are addressed to an agrarian community, where there are houses, oxen, donkeys, and slaves, or, as many translations tend to call them, “servants.” However, unlike in the Deuteronomic Code, there is no mention of a monarch, and the text is dated to the late second millennium BCE.
Interestingly, the text does not express a vision of what we would call today monotheism. The language of the passage, “you shall have no other gods before me” does not imply that there is only one God, but presumes the existence of other gods who are not to be ranked with Yahweh. This “messy monotheism,” as Paula Fredriksen calls it, is consistent with the presumed reference to the Ten Commandments in the book of Jeremiah, from the late seventh century BCE: “You steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known” (Jer. 7:9). Often in the prophet writings, language of marital fidelity is used to describe the people’s commitment to God, or lack thereof.
Like the Noaheide laws, in the Hebrew Scripture reading from the first week of Lent, the Ten Commandments are written in language that implies a treaty structure. The passage begins with God, the stronger power, describing what He has done for Israel, and then describing how He should be honored. The first four commandments concern the people’s relationship to the divine: the second commandment prohibits the making of “idols,” which can be understood as images of God. The prohibition against making idols would have differentiated the Israelites from neighboring groups, who made animal and human images to depict deities. I remember my Hebrew Scripture professor talking about traditions in the Jewish and Muslim faiths of not visually portraying the divine, describing the complex, intensely colorful flowers that characterize Islamic art. He remarked dryly, “Christianity is a stunning exception.” From Michelangelo to South Park, prohibitions against rendering the divine in a visual image have apparently not been enforced for some time in Christian communities. The prohibition against “making wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God” may have implied invoking the name of God in an efforts to use magic or sorcery, attempts to gain control over the divine.
The other six commandments involve human relations with each other. Michael Coogan writes, “A man’s life, his marriage, his person . . . his reputation, and his property were to be inviolable by another Israelite (his “neighbor.”) Two other major areas in which the culture of contemporary religious communities do not reflect the moral norms expressed in the Ten Commandments concern the status of women and slaves. Exodus 20.17 often gets translated with the word “servants,” as in, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or manservant or maidservant, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” I once heard a sermon in which the pastor said, “they were more like modern-day employees.” However as seen in the next chapter of Exodus, the laws governing this relationship bear closer relation to what we would call slavery than, say, a Jane Austen-era cordial servant-employer relationship. Exodus 21:7 reads, “When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. In Exodus 21 we read,
When you buy a male Hebrew slave” (note the adjective “male”), he shall serve six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person . . . If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone.
The much-quoted line “you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” falls before the prohibition of coveting donkeys or oxen, but after that of coveting a neighbor’s house. No mention is made of a neighbor’s husband, because the language of the Ten Commandments in Hebrew uses the second person masculine singular. Like other groups from this time period, the Israelite society structure was patriarchal, and the commandments are specifically addressed to men.
Fun Fact: in Exodus 34, after the golden calf debacle, Moses breaks the tablets containing the text of the commandments, and God tells him to go back to Mount Sinai for another copy. But the text in Exodus 34 is slightly different from Exodus 20—the new commandments focus less on human treatment of each other and more on worship, and for that reason are called the “Ritual Decalogue.” It can be inferred from the presence of differences in the texts that there was more than one tradition of the Ten Words, and that the writer(s) of Exodus placed more weight on including them than in making them match.
One last observation on this week’s lectionary reading: the last verse of Psalm 19 is incorporated into Sweet Honey in the Rock’s hauntingly beautiful a capella version of “By the Waters of Babylon”: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.”
--Elizabeth Fels
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
March 8: Jesus's Jewish Context
This week I will focus on the Gospel reading of the lectionary, Mark 8: 31-38. While in the last reading, we saw the Gospel open with Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his mission, the passage this week portrays Jesus’ role as a suffering servant, his death, and resurrection. Jesus uses the phrase “Son of Man” to describe himself: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering . . . and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside to rebuke him (31-32). The phrase “Son of Man,” or literally “human being,” has been called a reference to the angelic figure who appears in Daniel 7:13-14, representing the renewal of Israel:
I saw one like a human being
Coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
And was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
And glory and kingship,
That all people, nations, and languages
Should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
That shall not pass away,
And his kingship is one
That shall never be destroyed.
In Mark’s passage, Jesus goes on to say, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” This would have been an extremely graphic metaphor to Jesus’ audience of Jews living in Roman-occupied Caesarea Philippi. As demonstrated by the Passion story, but supported by historical evidence apart from the Bible, agitators in the Roman Empire who state officials deemed threatening were forced to carry the crossbeams on which they would then be hung for several days until suffocating to death.
One aspect of this Gospel reading that stands out is the way that the Jewish religious elite are portrayed. At this juncture of the scene, Jesus has just told the disciples that he is the Messiah (“anointed one”), the figure bringing about Israel’s renewal. Yet he will be a martyr-Messiah: not a ruler wielding political power, freeing Israel from Rome, and reinstating the Davidic line of kings. In addition he will not be recognized as the Messiah by the religious elite of his time: “rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed . . .” (31).
While preparing for this blog, I came across an editorial in Monday’s Boston Globe edition on the Vatican rejecting the “apology” from Richard Williamson. As the international press has widely reported, Williamson is a bishop of the breakaway Society of Pope Pius X whose excommunication was recently lifted by the Pope Benedict: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/03/02/a_bishops_bad_faith_apology/. Interviewed on Swedish television earlier this year, Williamson stated that “not one Jew was killed by gas chambers, it was all lies, lies, lies.” Although at the prompting of the Vatican, Williamson regretted causing harm, he did not go so far as to recant his denial of the Holocaust.
While this is an extreme example of a self-identified Christian leader making anti-Semitic statements, this narrative calls to mind the conflictual history between Judaism and Christianity. On one hand, parishes across the US have robust interfaith dialogue programs promoting mutual understanding. Paula Fredriksen, Professor of Ancient Christian at Boston University, writes of efforts of Catholic leaders to combat anti-Semitism: “. . . popes and bishops, in plenum councils, have issued official (‘magisterial’) teachings against it. Anti-Semitism violates magisterial instruction touching on biblical interpretation, on the theological significance of Christ’s sacrifice, and on Catholic-Jewish relations.” (1)
Yet as the Williamson story reminds us, tension between Jewish and Christian communities has not disappeared. Another national news story that recently thematized it involved the portrayal of Jewish people in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion. Amy-Jill Levine, professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of prize-winning studies on Christian origins and the Gospel of Matthew, has described, for example, the unbiblical scene where construction of the cross on which Jesus died occurs in the Jewish Temple.
This brings us back to today’s reading. There is arguably not a passage in Mark suggesting that Jewish people as a whole bear responsibility for Jesus’ death. However, the syntax of this line does not imply that Jesus will be crucified for sedition in imperial Rome, but in connection with his rejection by Jewish leaders. His rejection and death are juxtaposed consequently in this sentence: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (31). Parishioners invested in promoting Jewish-Christian dialogue may likely wonder how this passage would sound to Jewish friends and colleagues.
In his book The Origins of Anti-Semitism, John Gager, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, describes a method of reading this passage not necessarily as a polemic against Jewish people, but as one scene among many in which all of Jesus’ contemporaries including his closest disciples fail to grasp his message. Describing the context of this passage, Gager writes how in Chapter 5, opposition to Jesus did not come from Jewish people but from an unclean demon; next Jesus grants the request of Jairus, “one of the rulers in the synagogue,” to heal his daughter (5:21-24, 35-43). Placing this passage in the context of Mark’s overall narrative structure, Gager writes,
. . . the theme of incomprehension is a leitmotif throughout Mark.
The most uncomprehending figures in the Gospel, and thus the
targets of Jesus’ most severe rebukes, are not outsiders at all but
rather the disciples themselves (Gager, 145).
8:33 supports this reading. In the kind of extreme rhetorical gesture we see Jesus often make in the Gospels, here Jesus is calling Peter, the eventual rock of the church, “Satan,” presumably when Peter does not accept that Jesus’ kingship is not of this world: “‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Those who know the final outcome from the beginning are Christian readers of Mark’s Gospel, not the disciples in the Gospel itself. However Gager also directly admits that there are passages in the Gospels that portray Judaism negatively and have historically been interpreted to justify discrimination or worse, like Matthew 27:25. He explores how Gospel writers were likely motivated to define the early Christian movement as connected to and yet different from the vibrant and attractive Jewish community, and how this might have been a motivation for anti-Judaism polemic in the Gospels.
For readers interested in this topic I strongly recommend Amy-Jill Levine’s book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. A proponent of what Krister Stendhal calls “Holy Envy,” or appreciation of the beliefs and practices of another, Levine calls for in-depth examination of Jesus’s cultural context on the part of ministers and church leaders: as a Jew, speaking to Jews. The following quote encapsulates Levine’s project:
By seeing Jesus as a Jew with regard to both belief and practice,
Christians can develop a deeper appreciation for the teachings of
the church. . . / . . Today Jesus’ words are too familiar, too domesticated,
too stripped of their initial edginess and urgency. Only when heard
through first-century Jewish ears can their original edginess and urgency
be recovered. Consequently, to understand the man from Nazareth,
it is necessary to understand Judaism. . . . if we get Judaism wrong,
we’ll wind up perpetuating anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic teachings,
and thus the mission of the church—to spread a gospel of love rather
than a gospel of hate—will be undermined. For Christians, this concern
for historical setting should have theological import as well. If one
takes the incarnation—that is, the claim that the “Word became flesh
and lived among us” (John 1:14)—seriously, then one should take
seriously the time when, place where, and people among whom
this event occurred (Levine, 6-7).
Levine goes on to describe Jewish life in Jesus’s historical setting, including the roles of women, perceptions of the messiah, and diversity of practices and beliefs, with particular focus on the narratives of the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan Woman.
In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul presents a complex and at times contradictory picture of Jewish-Christian relations. Yet Romans 3, the chapter before this week’s lectionary reading passage, contains a vision of God extending salvation to Jewish people and Gentiles both: “. . . He will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:30-31.)
--Elizabeth Fels
(1) See http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2003/07/gospel-according-to-mel-gibson-paula.html
Other works cited:
John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
Bible quotes taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, third edition.
I saw one like a human being
Coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
And was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
And glory and kingship,
That all people, nations, and languages
Should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
That shall not pass away,
And his kingship is one
That shall never be destroyed.
In Mark’s passage, Jesus goes on to say, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” This would have been an extremely graphic metaphor to Jesus’ audience of Jews living in Roman-occupied Caesarea Philippi. As demonstrated by the Passion story, but supported by historical evidence apart from the Bible, agitators in the Roman Empire who state officials deemed threatening were forced to carry the crossbeams on which they would then be hung for several days until suffocating to death.
One aspect of this Gospel reading that stands out is the way that the Jewish religious elite are portrayed. At this juncture of the scene, Jesus has just told the disciples that he is the Messiah (“anointed one”), the figure bringing about Israel’s renewal. Yet he will be a martyr-Messiah: not a ruler wielding political power, freeing Israel from Rome, and reinstating the Davidic line of kings. In addition he will not be recognized as the Messiah by the religious elite of his time: “rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed . . .” (31).
While preparing for this blog, I came across an editorial in Monday’s Boston Globe edition on the Vatican rejecting the “apology” from Richard Williamson. As the international press has widely reported, Williamson is a bishop of the breakaway Society of Pope Pius X whose excommunication was recently lifted by the Pope Benedict: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/03/02/a_bishops_bad_faith_apology/. Interviewed on Swedish television earlier this year, Williamson stated that “not one Jew was killed by gas chambers, it was all lies, lies, lies.” Although at the prompting of the Vatican, Williamson regretted causing harm, he did not go so far as to recant his denial of the Holocaust.
While this is an extreme example of a self-identified Christian leader making anti-Semitic statements, this narrative calls to mind the conflictual history between Judaism and Christianity. On one hand, parishes across the US have robust interfaith dialogue programs promoting mutual understanding. Paula Fredriksen, Professor of Ancient Christian at Boston University, writes of efforts of Catholic leaders to combat anti-Semitism: “. . . popes and bishops, in plenum councils, have issued official (‘magisterial’) teachings against it. Anti-Semitism violates magisterial instruction touching on biblical interpretation, on the theological significance of Christ’s sacrifice, and on Catholic-Jewish relations.” (1)
Yet as the Williamson story reminds us, tension between Jewish and Christian communities has not disappeared. Another national news story that recently thematized it involved the portrayal of Jewish people in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion. Amy-Jill Levine, professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of prize-winning studies on Christian origins and the Gospel of Matthew, has described, for example, the unbiblical scene where construction of the cross on which Jesus died occurs in the Jewish Temple.
This brings us back to today’s reading. There is arguably not a passage in Mark suggesting that Jewish people as a whole bear responsibility for Jesus’ death. However, the syntax of this line does not imply that Jesus will be crucified for sedition in imperial Rome, but in connection with his rejection by Jewish leaders. His rejection and death are juxtaposed consequently in this sentence: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (31). Parishioners invested in promoting Jewish-Christian dialogue may likely wonder how this passage would sound to Jewish friends and colleagues.
In his book The Origins of Anti-Semitism, John Gager, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, describes a method of reading this passage not necessarily as a polemic against Jewish people, but as one scene among many in which all of Jesus’ contemporaries including his closest disciples fail to grasp his message. Describing the context of this passage, Gager writes how in Chapter 5, opposition to Jesus did not come from Jewish people but from an unclean demon; next Jesus grants the request of Jairus, “one of the rulers in the synagogue,” to heal his daughter (5:21-24, 35-43). Placing this passage in the context of Mark’s overall narrative structure, Gager writes,
. . . the theme of incomprehension is a leitmotif throughout Mark.
The most uncomprehending figures in the Gospel, and thus the
targets of Jesus’ most severe rebukes, are not outsiders at all but
rather the disciples themselves (Gager, 145).
8:33 supports this reading. In the kind of extreme rhetorical gesture we see Jesus often make in the Gospels, here Jesus is calling Peter, the eventual rock of the church, “Satan,” presumably when Peter does not accept that Jesus’ kingship is not of this world: “‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Those who know the final outcome from the beginning are Christian readers of Mark’s Gospel, not the disciples in the Gospel itself. However Gager also directly admits that there are passages in the Gospels that portray Judaism negatively and have historically been interpreted to justify discrimination or worse, like Matthew 27:25. He explores how Gospel writers were likely motivated to define the early Christian movement as connected to and yet different from the vibrant and attractive Jewish community, and how this might have been a motivation for anti-Judaism polemic in the Gospels.
For readers interested in this topic I strongly recommend Amy-Jill Levine’s book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. A proponent of what Krister Stendhal calls “Holy Envy,” or appreciation of the beliefs and practices of another, Levine calls for in-depth examination of Jesus’s cultural context on the part of ministers and church leaders: as a Jew, speaking to Jews. The following quote encapsulates Levine’s project:
By seeing Jesus as a Jew with regard to both belief and practice,
Christians can develop a deeper appreciation for the teachings of
the church. . . / . . Today Jesus’ words are too familiar, too domesticated,
too stripped of their initial edginess and urgency. Only when heard
through first-century Jewish ears can their original edginess and urgency
be recovered. Consequently, to understand the man from Nazareth,
it is necessary to understand Judaism. . . . if we get Judaism wrong,
we’ll wind up perpetuating anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic teachings,
and thus the mission of the church—to spread a gospel of love rather
than a gospel of hate—will be undermined. For Christians, this concern
for historical setting should have theological import as well. If one
takes the incarnation—that is, the claim that the “Word became flesh
and lived among us” (John 1:14)—seriously, then one should take
seriously the time when, place where, and people among whom
this event occurred (Levine, 6-7).
Levine goes on to describe Jewish life in Jesus’s historical setting, including the roles of women, perceptions of the messiah, and diversity of practices and beliefs, with particular focus on the narratives of the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan Woman.
In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul presents a complex and at times contradictory picture of Jewish-Christian relations. Yet Romans 3, the chapter before this week’s lectionary reading passage, contains a vision of God extending salvation to Jewish people and Gentiles both: “. . . He will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:30-31.)
--Elizabeth Fels
(1) See http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2003/07/gospel-according-to-mel-gibson-paula.html
Other works cited:
John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
Bible quotes taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, third edition.
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