Fear of the Jews

Lectionary reflections for Easter 2 (C)

by Jane Carol Redmont

Readings for Easter 2, Year C, Apr. 18, 2004

Acts 5:12a, 17-22,25-29 or Job 42:1-6

Psalm 111 or 118:19-24

Revelation 1:(1-8)9-19 or Acts 5:12a,17-22,25-29

John 20:19-31

This Sunday's Gospel and most of the other readings for the day – Psalms included – are about opening doors, not only literally but into new ways of seeing and being and doing. Easter is the season of openings and transformations: open tomb, walls traversed, truths revealed. Even the jaws of death and the gates of hell give way.

The Gospel also contains its own jagged gate: “for fear of the Jews.”

Mel Gibson's film The Passion of The Christ reminds many of us of the anti-Semitic uses of the Passion story and of the anti-Judaism within the Passion texts themselves. What we do not always attend to is the way in which this season of Resurrection is pervaded with some of the most deeply anti-Jewish material in the Christian testament.

We cannot ignore the anti-Jewish elements of the Christians scriptures, nor the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic uses to which they have been put. Most persecution against Jews throughout history has been perpetrated not by Muslims, not by secularists, but by Christians. 

To accuse the Scriptures of “anti-Semitism” rather than “anti-Judaism” is anachronistic, since “anti-Semitism” is a modern term with racial connotations. But we cannot ignore the anti-Jewish elements of the Christians scriptures, nor the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic uses to which they have been put. Most persecution against Jews throughout history has been perpetrated not by Muslims, not by secularists, but by Christians. Christians who heard the Word and Christians who preached it.

Conversing this week with colleagues and companions about this difficult Gospel, fresh from Passover, Holy Week and Easter, I correspond with an old friend, Jewish, well traveled and well studied, gifted with vision and heart. He knows from experience the wounds of both homophobia and anti-Semitism. “Mel,” he writes, “is just the tip of the iceberg. As a Jew, I always have my luggage packed because we are always between pogroms.” He means it. And notes that the massacres have been, “with few exceptions, incited by the intelligentsia and the ruling class,” though those people are not necessarily the ones who carry them out. He writes of Chrysostom, the Crusades, Luther, various Czarists, Heidegger.

I squirm as I read his letter. I squirm as a Christian, I squirm as a Jew. In the packed bag – or the passport kept current and at the ready – I recognize my own reflex; I too have Jewish ancestry and sixty years ago, the Nazis would have come for me, baptism or no baptism. In the listing of Christian thinkers and leaders, I want to excise paragraphs, pages, whole books, several authors, entire episodes, I want to turn my back. Not my people, I think. Oh yes, my people.

I think of perpetrators. I think also of bystanders: those who witness evil more or less attentively, and who do nothing; those who look away; those who think there is no problem.

Damn this stumbling block at the start of the text! I thought this; perhaps you did too. We want to jump over the offending phrase to the beloved story of Doubting Thomas. A fellow preacher in my self-described progressive Episcopal congregation once spoke of Thomas as our patron saint, the one in whom we recognize ourselves, questioners anxious to know more, unsatisfied, who want to meet Jesus up close. We want to jump over the barrier to one of the crucial messages in John's Gospel: that faith without benefit of signs and wonders, faith in and with the living Word, is where there is wholeness and life. We want the power to breathe forgiveness and peace as Jesus breathed it on our ancestors in faith.

The freedom of Christ crosses walls, but the walls are real. Forgiveness and peace are never generic, just as “liberty to the captives” is not. Our barriers are not abstract. They have shapes and names. Wounds all bleed, but they bleed in particular hands and sides and drain particular hearts. 

Or do we? The freedom of Christ crosses walls, but the walls are real. Forgiveness and peace are never generic, just as “liberty to the captives” is not. Our barriers are not abstract. They have shapes and names. Wounds all bleed, but they bleed in particular hands and sides and drain particular hearts. Suffering is particular. So is healing. And healing, even healing of the imagination, takes work.

If a Jew – not a Jew of the first century, but a Jew of the twenty-first, a live member of a living tradition, with a particular history of relationship with Christians: a neighbor, a colleague, perhaps, in this inter-married and -partnered society, a relative – came to our congregation and heard the text, and heard us open up the Word, what would she, or he, experience?

The term used in New Testament Greek for what is translated as “the Jews” is hoi Ioudaioi , literally “the Judeans.” (Yes, there is always a politics of translation.) Scholarly opinions vary whether Ioudaioi referred, in Jesus' day and a generation after, to residents of the whole land of Israel or to residents of Judea in the South. Scholars also disagree in their interpretation of why John's Gospel, rich in imagery from the Jewish scriptures, shows such animus against “the Jews.” What they do agree on is that we are dealing here with a family dispute.

Like most long-standing family disputes, the origins of the rift are murky. The community around which John's Gospel arose was, like other early Christian groups, wrestling with questions of identity and faith, of how to live together, of who was in and who was out, of where and how the living presence of God might be found. (Does any of this sound familiar?) The offending line in today's text may well reflect the period of divorce from the synagogue – not all synagogues, as later accounts have speculated with no evidence, but the synagogue the Johannine community knew. A very particular dispute, later and now translated and writ large.

In its painful and at times conflicted early years, the community of John's Gospel discovered that the very life of God was communal. Divine life is, in this Gospel, “social, interconnected, and intimate,” writes another conversation partner, a Catholic Christian biblical scholar with both Jesuit and Jesus Seminar connections. John's Gospel opens up concentric circles, from Jesus to the One he called “Father,” from that One back to Jesus and out to the community of believers and doers.

Reading together – in conversation – the text and its edges, its fissures, its uses and misuses, its past and present contexts, how will we define our Episcopal, Anglican, Christian, and Earth communities? Like the early disciples, we often huddle with walls about us and doors locked. But the Risen One walks through them. Will we follow?

Jane Redmont prays and preaches at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Berkeley, California.  A Ph.D. candidate in theology at the Graduate Theological Union , she is completing a year as Bogard Teaching Fellow at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific .  She is teaching a course on “Women as Global Church” related to the topic of her dissertation and is the author of two books, Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today and When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life .  Jane is active in the Episcopal Peace Fellowship .  She may be reached by email at janered@earthlink.net .