This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Now in the last days of Passover, Easter Sunday appears. Our wonderful progressive Christian brothers and sisters are in full confessional mode.
They should be. Historic anti-Semitism dogs Christians. After all, it’s right there in the New Testament. Easter brings it all up again. The Gospel of John remains: Did the Jews crucify Jesus? From the religion editor at Huffington Post:
I went to a Good Friday service at my progressive church last year… They sang — in beautiful tones, in a lovely sanctuary — the same crucifixion narrative told in the Gospel of John that claims that Jesus was crucified by the Jews, and the blame is upon them.
So Christians are correct in bringing this to the fore on Easter Sunday. However, they are irresponsible – and self-serving – when they make this confession without confronting the parallel confession of what Jews – with Easter’s confessional support – have done and are doing to the Palestinian people.
Of course there’s push back, especially among well-trained, well-placed pastors who interact with our well-trained, well-placed rabbis. You know the ones who plan regular lunches and visit each other’s place of worship so Christians and Jews can get to know each other, feel each other’s pain and share a joint faith-filled hope.
Whose pain? Hope for what?
Pastor Facebook double-speak goes something like this: “Easter Sunday is about ‘our’ faith, not about politics. I deal with the Palestinian ‘issue’ – among other issues – at another time. And why call out Jews in relation to Israel? That’s wrong. Israel is a state with many political opinions and Jews come in many political persuasions. We need to be careful here. When I talk to my rabbinic colleagues they assure me that this is the right position to take.”
It’s difficult to argue with a supposedly progressive Christian pastor who can’t find a place to stand anywhere that has consequences. I think the subconscious fear is that probing too deeply might force our well-trained, well-placed pastor to run and hide.
What does a Christian pastor – or rabbi – become if by telling the truth they’re suddenly no longer well-placed? Do they become wandering, itinerant preachers who have nowhere to lay their heads? God forbid! Especially on Easter and Passover, holy days that model the suffering of displacement for speaking and acting on truth.
So who is this confession for? Does it really have much to do with flesh and blood Jews? Or is it a well-intentioned rescue package for Christianity? And pastors?
Like Jews on Passover who reach out to Palestinians. Is it really about flesh and blood Palestinians? Or a well-intentioned rescue package for Jews? And rabbis?
There’s another realm other than self-interest. It involves sacrifice. It involves confession which isn’t – only – about rescue.
Broadly considered, the place of personal and communal sacrifice is the prophetic, which risks everything, including exile. It seems that Passover and Easter model the prophetic but where, oh where, is this found in contemporary Jewish and Christian life?
You won’t find it in the endless parsing of the Gospel of John.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought grace came in two varieties, cheap and costly. On Easter, cheap grace is confessing the sin of anti-Semitism without addressing Jewish abuse of power in the present. Costly grace is a new solidarity with Jews which involves confession and a spoken and active movement toward justice for Palestinians.
This Easter, Palestinians rain on the Christian confessional parade. But that means prophetic Jews do, too.
Jesus crucified by “the Jews”? By “The Jews”? Come on!
But, of course, shorthand rules when you’re in a hurry,
Jesus’ followers were Jews. He swam in a sea of Jews. The LEADERS (the AIPAC of the day) were also Jews, RICH POWERFUL Jews.
Maybe, likely, it is correct to say Jesus was crucified (in part, don’t forget the Romans) by RICH POWERFUL JEWS. Just as Palestinians today are crucified (in part) by AIPAC, BICOM, etc. (Don’t forget Israeli government, settler crazies, and and other citizens).
But, I know, shorthand rules when you’re in a hurry, and its so much fun to blame “The Jews”. Or “The Jewish Bankers who rule the world”. Hmmm, and it appears that Goldman Sachs always appoints the American SecTreas, and G/S appears to be controlled by RICH POWERFUL JEWS, or as some would say (by way of abbreviation) by “The Jews”.
Marc is quoting Mr. Raushenbusch of Huffington Post and satirising the ‘Pastor Facebooks’ that think like him.
Following pabelmont above, I would think it clear that the Gospels all say that the Romans crucified Jesus and all say, indeed make a point of saying, that the Jewish priests did not have authority to crucify people. However, all attribute a heavy degree of responsibility to at least some Jewish people, Matthew most questionably and disturbingly because he makes a Jewish crowd accept responsibility, Luke being different in that he distinguishes sharply between the Jewish leaders – the rich and powerful, as pabelmont says – and the Jewish masses, who are very unhappy with the event.
I can sympathise with one of Marc’s aims, which is, as I was suggesting in response to his Passover meditations, to tell us Christians not to be smug. But argument gets very difficult beyond that point. He seems to want us to avoid the facile renunciation, a version of Bonhoeffer’s ‘cheap grace’, of anti-Jewish feeling that comes so easily to Pastor Facebook and wants the current violation of Palestine to be explicitly mentioned. I have some sympathy with Pastor F: it is not easy to mention that violation and to mention specifically, with Marc, the abuse of power by Jewish people, without sounding smug or hostile or worse.
Today, 2 fresh elements added to Marc’s Easter paralleling, the Sacrament of Penance and the reintroduction of the Jewish deicide even though it has now become redundant. As part of the Second Vatican Council that ended in 1966, Pope Paul VI had repudiated the traditional belief in the collective Jewish guilt for the Crucifixion. Paul VI stated that, even though some Jewish authorities and those who followed them called for Jesus’ death, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of all those Jews present at that time, nor can the Jews in our time be held as guilty. At the time, the Jews were angered for having been “forgiven” by Paul VI and felt that he was actually rubbing it in.
In 1998, Church Council of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America adopted its resolution urging any Lutheran church presenting a Passion play to adhere to their Guidelines for Lutheran-Jewish Relations, stating that “the New Testament … must not be used as justification for hostility towards present-day Jews,” and that “blame for the death of Jesus should not be attributed to Judaism or the Jewish people.” (Wiki)
In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI published his book in which he totally repudiated the blaming of the Jews and went as far as questioning the historicity of the passage found only in the Gospel of Matthew about blaming the Jews.
Anyway, from Jews for Jesus that have him being crucified a second time at Auschwitz since he was a Jew, which sort of blend in with what Marc and pablemont are saying here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXmr_weg2ao
That’s nice.
So how does one explain the idea that the New Testament is anti-Semitic if it was written by Jewish believers?
Dear Marc,
You wrote:
Are you talking about people risking rejection by their community and sacrifice? Isn’t this the essence of John the Evangelist’s passage that you find offensive? Would you be willing to reconsider then whether John’s writing is really “anti-Semitic” as it may seem to you, as the theme is a Jewish Christian writer talking about the difficulty of communal rejection?