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Palm Sunday; Isaiah 5.1-7 and Mark 12.1-12
Date: 5th April 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Dr Jonathan Draper
Mark 12 vs 9, from our NT reading this evening: ‘He will come and destroy the tenants, and give the vineyard to others.’ This comes from a parable of Jesus directed against the religious leaders of his day saying that God was going to destroy the current tenants of his vineyard and give it over to others.
The history of the use this reading, and its antecedent from Isaiah which we had as our first reading, shows why the Christian church has often been accused of and has sometimes actually been anti-Semitic. These two readings, and others like them, are used by some to show that God, in Christ, has rejected the Jews as ‘corrupt tenants’ and has chosen Christians, those who follow the Christ, to be God’s people and to tend his vineyard instead. Never mind, of course, that Isaiah was writing to a group of people 2500 years ago in completely different circumstances, and was trying to get the people of God to abandon their less than godly ways and return to righteousness; never mind that Jesus was saying that the righteousness that comes from the heart and from following God is not like the superficial piety of the religious leaders he was attacking. Never mind all that. Because of the way the texts are written and because of the ways in which they have been used, anti-Semitism has dogged the Christian church from the beginning.
This was a serious problem almost immediately in the church. There was, on the one hand, as the early church expanded out from primarily Jewish areas and communities, an almost fatal clash between those who demanded that followers of Jesus should convert to Judaism first and learn to follow the law of Moses circumcision and all, and those who said that they needed to do no such thing. There was also, on the other hand, the absolute spiritual distinction St Paul drew between following the law, by which he meant the works of the Law of Moses, which leads only to death, and living by faith in Jesus as the risen Christ which leads to life. So stark was this contrast that St Paul had to devote a large chunk of his letter to the Romans to defending the place of the Jews in God’s plan for the world and the economy of salvation. By the early part of the 2nd century the Christian theologian Marcion could hold that the God of the OT was a different God from the one portrayed in the NT and called father by Jesus, and he rejected the OT as having nothing to do with Christianity; he only saw spiritual value, ironically, in a shortened collection of St Paul’s letters. And while Marcion’s views were ultimately rejected, it didn’t take long for Christianity to become an almost exclusively Gentile, that is, non-Jewish religion, where the Hebrew Bible, the scriptures referred to by Jesus – always known now as the Old Testament – was read with a distinctively Christian gloss.
Anti-Semitism is, as we know, not something confined to either long ago or far away. The history of York is such that Jews don’t always feel comfortable coming here even today; and very few weeks go by without a report of Jewish gravestones being smashed or swastikas daubed on the walls of a Synagogue or a Jewish business somewhere in our country. That a shop around the corner from this church feels able to sell swastika and iron cross pendants, and that few, it seems, have even bothered to object to them, is a sign of how close to the surface anti-Semitism actually is even today, and even in our city. It should be as unacceptable here as it is anywhere else.
It is ironic, of course, that some of the worst atrocities committed against the Jews have been done in the name of Jesus, the Jewish prophet from Palestine who was crucified by the Romans. But we forget our Jewish spiritual roots, though, at our peril; for forgetting our Jewish heritage has opened the floodgates of brutality and horror within the life time of us all.
Palm Sunday is an interesting day on which to reflect on this. Every element of the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is meaningless without an understanding of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish spiritual context in which Jesus and his followers were steeped and shaped: it could not be a more Jewish event. This is why the Jewish religious and political authorities were so alarmed: not because Jesus was doing something un-Jewish, but because everything he did was so deeply imbued with spiritual meaning that they couldn’t ignore it; like the great prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus used the knife of God’s word and will to cut through the self-righteousness of the religious practices of his day, especially those of the religious leaders, and to call people back to a more faithful following of God.
Christian anti-Semitism is a grave and unacceptable stain on the history of the Christian faith, and it takes on a kind of peculiar focus during the time in which we remember the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. But we mustn’t let an emotional response to the events of Christ’s passion blind us to the essential Jewishness of our faith, the essential Jewishness of Jesus and the fact that Jesus was executed by the Romans. It is no mistake, after all, that the events we remember and celebrate this coming week – what we understand as the events that bring and shape our salvation – took place during the time and within the meaning of the Passover, the great Jewish festival of liberation and forgiveness. Amen.