Loving Our Jewish Siblings

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Exodus 12:1-14

For our Jewish siblings, Exodus is the very center, the very heart of their faith, particularly the passage we heard today and the passage to come next week when Moses parts the Red Sea. Most Jews would tell you that Exodus is their most important book. And today’s story institutes a ritual for Jews that has been around for at least a thousand years before Jesus was born: Passover. “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”

More Jews today celebrate Passover than any of their other festivals. It is as central to their faith as Easter is to ours. On the first night, they have a seder, a shared meal in which they eat lamb, unleavened bread or matzah, and bitter herbs, as today’s passage commands them to, and at that meal they tell the story of God first passing over the Israelites when all the firstborn of Egypt are killed and then their escape through the Red Sea into liberation.

As we know, Jesus and all his disciples were Jewish, and they all would have celebrated Passover every year. And in Jesus’ time, any Jews who could, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover. This is the background of Jesus’ last days before he was crucified: a crowded city preparing for this major festival. Now while the synoptic gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—frame the last supper as the Passover meal, it probably wasn’t. And it certainly wasn’t a seder. The seder wasn’t instituted until after the destruction of the second temple 40 years after Jesus died.

Not only that, the gospel of John says that the dinner was on the night before Passover started, which is probably more likely according to most scholars. They argue that the Jewish priests would have been FAR too busy with their ritual duties to make time to capture, hold a trial for, and condemn Jesus on the first night of Passover. After all, it was their job on that day to sacrifice lambs for hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of Jewish pilgrims, to eat, and to follow a strict and lengthy liturgy around that sacrifice. [academic sources listed at the bottom of the page]

This point is important. Because many Christians like to see the last supper as Jesus turning away from his Jewish roots and instituting the Eucharist, one of Christianity’s central rituals. This is simply not true. Jesus did not die having created a new religion. Even Paul, even after he decided to follow and worship Jesus, even during his travels to share the good news of Christ, continued to celebrate Passover as a devout Jew.

For both Paul and Jesus, believing that Jesus was the Messiah was what it meant to be a faithful and devout Jew. In fact, it wasn’t until twenty years after Jesus’ death that the two disciples Peter and James together with Paul gathered in Jerusalem and decided that Gentiles who followed Jesus did not need to follow Jewish Law. It was just assumed before then that most Jesus-followers would be Jewish. That decision came down because Paul and other apostles had been out in the world spreading the message of Jesus, and it turned out that just as many, if not more, Gentiles than Jews were interested in that message.

Now here’s where we can go off track. We can either decide that those Jews who did not accept that Jesus was the Messiah were wrong and bad, or we can decide that most Jews went on practicing their faith as their ancestors had for thousands of years—loving their neighbor as Leviticus called them to do; keeping the festivals as Exodus called them to do; and being a light to the nations as Isaiah called them to do.

We can decide that they don’t need to be wrong in order for our belief in Jesus the Christ to be true and life-giving for us.

Now the gospels were written after Paul died and more than four decades after Jesus died, which was around year 30 of the first century. Mark’s gospel was the earliest, probably written somewhere in the early 70s, and John’s was the latest, probably written in the 90s. As I mentioned before, the second temple in Jerusalem, the heart of Jewish worship and faith, had been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70. When that happened, the Jewish people were forced to reimagine what their faith looked like in this new wilderness. At the same time, this event served to further separate Jesus-followers from their Jewishness and from Jews themselves.

So the gospel writers, writing after the destruction of the temple, were interested in making Jesus more Christian than Jewish. They have Jesus constantly sparring with stiff-necked, small-minded Pharisees, even though there’s a good chance that Jesus may have come out of the Pharisaic tradition himself. The gospel of John constantly references “the Jews” as the antagonists, as if Jesus and his disciples weren’t part of that group. And Matthew, Mark, and Luke have him replacing the Passover meal with the Eucharist.

But, as I said before, the last supper was almost certainly not a Passover meal. It was a gathering of Jesus with his friends ahead of the Passover festival. And I believe that Jesus knew it was his last meal with them. I believe that he blessed the bread and wine, from which Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul later instituted the formal ritual of the Eucharist.

We can take what Passover meant to Jesus and his disciples—death passing over the Jews because of their sacrifice of a lamb to God and then God setting God’s people free—and make a metaphor, applying it to to our own understanding of Jesus—death passing over us because of Jesus’ sacrifice and the liberation that brings to us. We do this every Sunday when I chant, Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. In that line, we remember how our faith is still rooted in Judaism, but that our branch took a different direction. And our Jewish siblings continued in their own direction.

My point in all of this is: We don’t need our Christian ways of being to replace Jewish ways of being. And as I talked about a few weeks ago, so much of what we’ve been taught about our faith does exactly that.

Yes, I know this is the second time I’ve preached about this recently. That’s because this replacement thinking has vast and horrifying consequences. During the Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries, Christians in France and Germany massacred entire Jewish communities. In the following centuries, England, France, and Austria expelled huge numbers of their Jewish population. Jews were blamed for the Black Death and later for financial struggles in different countries. This Christian mistrust and hatred of our Jewish siblings throughout the centuries is what set the stage for the Holocaust. It’s why antisemitism is still so rampant today.

This replacement theology has directly contributed to the current situation in Israel and Palestine and even indirectly to the war in Iran. There is an idea amongst some Christians that the second coming of Jesus depends on the Jewish people returning to and taking back their homeland. In order for the end times to begin, the temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt—according to their interpretation of Hebrews 10. So these Christians support the government and military of Israel at any cost for the sole purpose of hastening Jesus’ return so that faithful Christians can live in the New Jerusalem that Jesus will bring.

That’s not showing respect or love to our Jewish siblings, the majority of whom don’t even live in Israel. That’s using them as a prop for one’s own theological ends.

What we believe about our Jewish siblings and their faith has real consequences in our world.

So when we read Jesus as fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah, as we will at Advent, let’s recognize that’s not how our Jewish siblings read the prophet, and that’s okay. When we see the gospels going out of their way to pit Jesus against his fellow Jews—and listen, some of that was absolutely accurate—but let’s remember that each of the gospel writers had their own agenda. Let’s remember that when we talk about the New Covenant, it doesn’t mean that the first covenant with the Israelites, the Jews, has been cancelled.

Let’s always remember that we can take the liberating and joyful truth of Jesus that we read in our scriptures without separating him from his Jewishness or setting ourselves over and against our Jewish siblings.

Amen.

Academic Sources:
Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle by Paula Frederikson
When Christians Were Jews by Paula Frederikson
A Jewish Paul by Matthew Thiessen