Justifying Hate: Part Two (
Rev. Gary Cox
University Congregational Church
I think the perfect sermon would be informative,
intriguing, and inspiring. Informative,
because people of the caliber that come to this church are eager to learn new
things; intriguing, because people would like to learn interesting
things; and inspiring, because that’s what church is all about. Which is probably bad news for this sermon. Let me say that I do hope you will
find it very informative, and hopefully a bit intriguing. But I fully realize that if anybody walks out
of here inspired and transformed after today’s service, it will not be due to
my words, but rather to the skill of our great choir, and the mysterious work
of the Holy Spirit.
Last
week we began with a sort of psychological study of humanity. Admitting that my ideas on this subject are
not universally accepted, I maintained that human beings seem to have a built
in need for an enemy. Oh, it’s not that
we’re cruel beings, or that we go through life hating everybody we see. It’s just that we seem to have this ugly
little place deep inside where we store up our anger and frustration, and we
have a need to find somebody or some thing on which to vent that ugliness.
We talked about racism, and how many of us know people
who hate people of other races for no reason whatsoever. I cited a particular uncle of mine who falls
into this category. And we remembered
how communism was
We then turned to the most dangerous
and persistent form of hatred known to humankind: religious hatred. Once you are certain God is on your side to
the exclusion of your enemy, the sin of murder becomes a virtue. After all, what’s the difference if your
enemy goes to hell now or twenty years from now? Unredeemable evil must be confronted by those
willing to stand up for God’s holy purposes.
Finally, the primary subject of last
week’s sermon was the wretched track record Christians have in relation to the
Jews. From the Spanish inquisition to
the Holocaust, Christians have found reason after reason, time after time, for
killing off people who adhere to the religion from which Christianity came
forth. And we have used the biblical
words of Paul and Jesus to justify our hatred.
Last week we took a close look at
Paul, and discovered something that should trouble those who have relied on his
words to make the Jews their enemies. To
make a long story short, Paul’s words were written to non-Jewish converts to
Christianity. When Jewish
converts to Christianity told those non-Jewish people they should follow the
ancient Jewish customs, Paul told them they did not need to do that. All they needed was the love of God as found
in Jesus Christ.
Taken out of context, Paul’s words
can appear to be an attack on the entire Jewish faith. But as we saw last week, when placed in the
proper context, and when taken along with Paul’s positive words about Judaism,
his message does not attack the Jewish faith.
In fact, Paul considered the Jews to be the chosen people of God. He simply believed that a new group had been added
to the chosen people—the Christians.
This week, we turn our attention to
Jesus. As is the case with every other
subject in the world, Bible quotes can be pulled out of context to prove
anything you want to prove. Want to
prove men are superior to women? You can
do so with the Bible. Want to prove men
and women are entirely equal? Ditto—the
Bible can be used as “proof.” Want to be
a racist, a homophobe, a military conqueror, a hater of women, killer of
pagans, despiser of Jews? No problem. A phrase here and a phrase there and we can
turn the basic message of the Bible upside down and make it look like a
terrorist manual.
When it comes to the words of Jesus,
the problem is exacerbated. After all,
this is the incarnation. Our faith makes
the claim that Jesus Christ is the word made flesh, the very image of God in
time and space. So if we can make it
look like Jesus tells us to hate the Jews, we are on solid ground when we
despise the Jews. If we can make it look
like Jesus tried to establish this small, exclusive club of the “in” people—the
heaven-bound Christians in a world full of hell-bound sinners—then we can start
feeling pretty good about ourselves. And
best of all, we can vent our hatred in the name of love.
And make no mistake, Christians do just that all the
time. The message of a large part of the
modern church seems to be, “God loves you…but you’re going straight to hell
unless you think about religion just like I do.” The basic message of Jesus, which is to love
everybody and judge nobody, is a double-edged sword. You can’t really love somebody you are
judging. To love somebody means you love
them as they are. To believe another
person is worthy of hell, and to say you love them, is
nonsense. If you love them, you find value
in them as they are—not in some idealized version of them that you would
like to create. And if you find
value in them, how much more will God love them and value them—God, who
created them in the first place, and who forgives their shortcomings
just as much as your own?
Jesus really makes it pretty easy for us. Jesus allows us an amazing amount of
freedom. We can do anything we want, as
long as we love other people. Oh, and
there’s one rule—one thing that we cannot do: judge. We should be real careful about taking the
words attributed to Jesus and using them to cast judgment.
But over the years, we have gotten quite good at doing
just that. We have that inborn need for
an enemy, and if we can meet that need with religion as a foundation, we’ve can
have our cake and eat it too. We can
vent our ugliness and please God at the same time!
The first thing we have to realize when we look at the
way the words of Jesus have been used to denigrate the Jews is this: we find
more than one picture of Jesus in the Bible.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John do not give us an accurate photograph of
Jesus. Instead, they each give us a
rough sketch, and from those four sketches each of us develops our personalized
composite drawing that we hang on the wall of our religious mind.
Can the words attributed to Jesus be used to justify
anti-Jewish sentiments? Absolutely. And that brings us to the most critical and
controversial issue we face when trying to identify the actual thoughts and
words of Jesus. Each of the gospel
writers puts his own spin on Jesus. They
interpret their community’s memories of Jesus at least forty years after Jesus’
crucifixion. And scholars are in near
universal agreement that there are places in each of the gospel accounts where
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John sort of put words in Jesus’ mouth.
By the time these communities of faith were forming, a
great schism had arisen between the Jewish authorities and the followers of
Jesus. This is understandable. Jesus’ followers were claiming that the long-awaited
Jewish Messiah had arrived in the world…and that most Jews failed to recognize
him. In fact, they claimed, some of the
Jewish authorities were even complicit in his death.
After Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in the
year 70—about forty years after the death of Jesus—there was a chance that the
Jewish faith would disappear from the earth.
This was a small and persecuted community. Their main city, Jerusalem, and their primary
place of worship, the Temple, had been destroyed. The Romans finally decided they had had
enough of the Jews, and the Jewish authorities were convinced that unity was of
vital importance. The only way to hold
the religion together was for everybody to agree on certain religious
truths.
The fact that a small band of troublemakers were
standing the very core of the faith on its head, by claiming the Messiah had
already arrived, was not helpful. Even
worse, these so-called “Christians” were inviting non-Jewish people into
the faith. This was simply
unacceptable. And the Jewish authorities
wrote religious laws against the Christians.
They ordered them out of the synagogues, and said that any follower of
Jesus would have his name removed from God’s book of life. They would be lost forever.
This is the climate in which the gospels were
written. And we can be relatively
certain that while Jesus never envisioned Judaism as his enemy—he was
thoroughly Jewish throughout his life—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were in a
difficult struggle with the Jewish authorities.
And when they re-told the story of Jesus, their struggle with the Jewish
authorities colored the way they told Jesus’ story.
Let’s look briefly at the four gospels, starting with
the first gospel to be written—Mark. Of
the four gospel writers, Mark seems to have the least problems with the
Jews. In fact, Mark uses the Greek word
for Jew, or Jews, only five times in his entire gospel, and then it is to refer
to Jesus as the King of the Jews.
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t treat the Jews as a
holistic group. He deals more with
various groups within the Jewish community, and with individual Jewish
people. The individuals, for the most
part, fare pretty well. In fact, only
Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas, is portrayed as being purely evil. She is the one who asks for the head of John
the Baptist. Even her husband is deeply
grieved at this, although he follows her wishes.
The disciples, all of whom are Jewish, are simply
normal, flawed human beings in Mark’s gospel.
They misunderstand Jesus. At one
point or another they deny him, betray him, and forsake him. But that is a sign of their humanity, not of
their evil nature. Along with the
disciples, the other Jewish individuals that appear in Mark’s gospel appreciate
Jesus, and are amazed at his healing powers and his miracles.
The Jewish groups, such as the Pharisees and
Sadducees, do not fare so well. The
various Jewish sects of that day did not get along with one another, and argued
vehemently over religious practice and theology. But Mark portrays them all as opposed to the
ministry of Jesus. And this is a
critical point. Each and every person
who followed Jesus when he was alive was Jewish. It was the religious hierarchy that
became the enemy of Jesus.
Matthew’s gospel really brings this point home. The Jesus we find in the Gospel of Matthew is
quite Jewish. In Matthew, Jesus not only
accepts the commandments, he makes them stronger. The commandments say one is not to kill;
Jesus says one cannot even be angry. The
commandments say one cannot commit adultery; Jesus says one cannot even look at
another person with lust. Jesus upholds
the basic laws of Judaism, and follows the Jewish rituals. He even says, at one point in Matthew’s
gospel, “the scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; therefore do
whatever they teach you and follow it.”
Ultimately, Matthew’s message is similar to the
message of Paul we examined last week.
It is not that the Jews have been replaced by a new chosen people—the
Christians. Instead, his message is that
a new group has been added to God’s chosen people. Having said that, we must admit that one
phrase from the gospel of Matthew has been used to justify the Christian hatred
of Jews through the ages. As Jesus is
being tried, and the Roman authorities say they have no reason to put him to
death, Matthew has the Jewish crowd cry out, “His blood be on us and on our
children.” Amy Jill-Levine, who is an
unusual combination—a Jewish New Testament scholar—says that both she and her
children have been called “Christ killers,” with that single phrase from
Matthew used as justification. We can
only imagine what the devoutly Jewish Jesus would have to say about that.
Luke does not give a favorable portrayal of the Jews,
which is not surprising since he is the one gospel author who likely was not
himself Jewish. It is generally agreed
that Luke’s faith community had a very poor relationship with the local
synagogues, which he indicates are a place of irrational hatred.
Luke’s story of the prodigal son, however, when interpreted
allegorically, indicates that Luke may not have been against Judaism so
much as he was for Christianity.
If you’ll remember the parable of the prodigal son, when the young son
returns to his father, the older son is jealous at the big fuss made over his
little brother, who ran off and blew his inheritance on wine, women and
song. Some interpret this parable by
saying the Father is God, the young son represents newly forgiven Christians,
and the older son is Judaism. But
remember what the father says to the oldest son—“You are always with me, and
all that is mine is yours.” Interpreted
in this way, it would appear that even Luke considered Christianity an addition
to God’s kingdom, as opposed to a new kingdom that made others irrelevant.
And that leads us to the Gospel of John. This is the most spiritual of the gospels,
and the least accurate historically. It
is the most powerful of the gospels, for those of us who seek to develop a
strong relationship with the spirit of the risen Christ. But there is no way to pretend that the
writer of the Gospel of John had warm and fuzzy feelings toward Jews. In the 8th chapter of John, Jesus
says to a group of Jews, “You are from your father the devil.”
It is hard to imagine Jesus saying such a thing. It is generally agreed that John’s community
was the most persecuted of the four gospel communities. It is generally agreed that they had been
forcibly expelled from the synagogue, and labeled as hell-bound heretics.
There is no doubt that scholars can separate Jesus
himself from the anti-Jewish arguments in the Gospel of John. And in all the gospels, Jesus’ harsh words
are almost always aimed at the Jewish authorities, and not at the people
who followed the Jewish faith. But I
have to agree with Adele Reinhartz, who after trying her best to prove John was
not anti-Jewish, writes, “There is in fact no solution that gets the Fourth
Gospel off the hook.”
For John everything is black and white. You are saved or you are damned. You are in light or you are in darkness. You are a follower of the one and only way to
receive salvation—Jesus Christ—or you are lost.
The theology that can be derived from John’s story is spiritually powerful. And if we were to throw out his gospel
because of its weaknesses, we would be losing something important. But the fact is, we have to accept that John,
like each of the gospel writers, was a human being. And as with every book of the Bible, however
inspired, there are moments of fallen humanity that work their way into those
words. We should always remember that we
are the tools through which God works, and less-than-perfect tools often skew
the vision of the artist.
Well, that may not be
what some of us were hoping for. It
seems that even the best of us, from the gospel writers to modern clergy, from
the Mother Theresa’s to people in the pews, have that dark place within us that
needs an enemy—an enemy that often becomes the object of our hate. That’s why it is so important that we be
aware it is there. Because there have
been countless times throughout history when people have been able to tap into
that hatred and use it for their own purposes.
And whether they base their arguments on religion, race or politics,
these are the “powers and principalities” our faith warns us to stand against.
We’ve found reasons to fight with one another—to kill
one another—for as long as we’ve been on the planet. And history indicates, and our honored
veterans can attest, that war is sometimes unavoidable. But none of us would say that of the 200
million-plus human beings killed in wars in just the 20th Century,
each of those deaths was necessary, unavoidable, and just.
There are a few dreamers, and I am one, who believe
the day will come when we decide to stop killing each other; when good people
refuse to take the lives of other good people; when the religions of the world
stop justifying war. On that day, the
powers and principalities will throw a war, and nobody will come. We will each have our dark place in check,
and refuse to seek an enemy.
I know my logic sounds almost childlike, but that’s
okay, because I’ve just seen too much hatred, too much killing. And my faith lies in another dreamer. My hope comes in remembering the one who
refused to be manipulated; the one who loved even in the face of pure hatred;
the one who took a child and said, “To such as this child belongs the kingdom
of heaven,” the one who took up his cross, and was willing to follow it
wherever it lead.