Three Ways to Avoid Anti-Judaism during Holy Week

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Key points:

  • For Jewish people, the Christian Holy Week has often been a time of persecution and violence.
  • Christian liturgies and interpretations of Scripture have wrongly portrayed the Jewish people as villains responsible for Jesus’ death.
  • United Methodists can take three actions immediately, this Holy Week, to reduce harm to our Jewish neighbors. 

From at least the fourth century, Holy Week has marked a time of intense anti-Jewish ritual, economic, and political practices by Christians.

Christian liturgies contained prayers insulting the Jews or calling them wicked, including earlier versions of the Reproaches and other prayers used for Good Friday in the Western Churches (Catholic and Protestant). The readings for Holy Week, and especially for Good Friday, were (and to some degree still are) interpreted to make all Jewish people the villains ultimately responsible for the execution of Jesus.

Pogroms were often instituted by Christian kings and rulers against Jewish people, especially on Good Friday. These took the form of  harming Jewish communities economically by prohibiting them to leave their homes or carry out any business, forcing their relocation, perpetrating ritual or physical violence, or all the above.

For many Jews, Holy Week for Christians became a week of horrors.

While large-scale persecution of Jewish people by Christians has mostly ended since the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War, Christian ritual practice often continues to perpetuate harms against our siblings in Abraham.

Here are three ways United Methodists can observe Holy Week while reducing harm to our Jewish neighbors.

Stop Christian Seders

The United Methodist Book of Worship (350) states:

United Methodists are encouraged to celebrate the Seder as invited guests in a Jewish home or in consultation with representatives of the Jewish community, thus respecting the integrity of what is a Jewish tradition and continuing the worthy practice of Jews and Christians sharing at table together. Celebrating the modern meal without a Jewish family as host is an affront to Jewish tradition and sometimes creates misunderstanding about the meaning of the Lord's Supper" (emphasis added).

Why is the General Conference-approved official guidance on this matter so strong?

The answer is because it is simply true. Christians hosting a Seder is in fact offensive to many Jewish people, and does nothing to promote deeper understanding of Judaism nor of the Jewish roots of Christianity, including the Judaism or Jewish ritual practices of Jesus himself. Added to that, there is no documentary evidence of any Seder (which means “order”) for the Passover meal that dates to the time of Jesus, and the version of the Passover Seder in use by Jewish communities today has its roots not in the first century, but in the late Middle Ages. There is simply no historical line we can draw between the various Christian texts the recount the last supper and what Passover meal practices may have been at the time, or since.

The Book of Worship gives an appropriate alternative for congregations who wish to experience a Passover Seder. Ask a rabbi or a Jewish family that keeps Passover whether they may be willing to host your congregation or several families from your congregation at an actual Passover Seder. Just keep in mind that it is rare that the Passover Seder would fall on the same day as Maundy Thursday. 

Avoid supersessionist interpretations of Scripture

Why do we read the instructions for preparing and eating the Passover meal from Exodus on Maundy Thursday?

Being clear about our answer to that question is important, not only on Maundy Thursday, but for how we approach the Hebrew scriptures in ways that avoid the long-held Christian practice of supersessionism.

Supersessionism is an approach to interpreting the texts of the Hebrew Bible primarily as a prelude to the Christian New Testament, whose message is understood to supersede (declare obsolete) the original meanings found in the “Old Testament.” This is sometimes also referred to as “replacement theory.” Christians have often fallen into supersessionism when talking about the “fulfillment” of certain Hebrew scriptures in Jesus. The result is to erase the original meaning and replace it with one supplied by a Christian narrative.

Supersessionist readings misunderstand the very notion of “fulfillment” of scripture within the Hebrew Bible itself. Fulfillment does not mean that a given scripture predicted, or was ever written to predict, long ago, something that would happen later. Fulfillment is better understood as a kind of rhyme between the situation described in an older scripture and a more recent event. It is not a claim that the older text was about the more recent event all along, but rather that the older text describes the more recent situation in ways that give it more meaning as it is happening.

A supersessionist reading thus gets the intended relationship of the older text and the more recent event exactly backwards. It is not that the older text predicts the more recent event. It is that the more recent event becomes more meaningful in light of the older text.

So, a supersessionist reading of the story of the Passover from Exodus 12 would say that the last supper and later the death of Jesus in some way gives the fullest or only true meaning to the ancient account, erasing and replacing any meanings that Jewish people may have ascribed to it.

A non-supersessionist reading respects the value of the Hebrew scriptures. It does not seek to erase and replace their original meanings with Christian ones. Instead, it uses the ancient text to give more background, depth, and meaning to the more current event, in this case, the story of the last supper from John’s gospel near the beginning of the Passover season.

The Maundy Thursday reading from John’s gospel, importantly, nowhere mentions the story of the beginning of the Lord’s supper, though the reading from I Corinthians does. Instead, John focuses on Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The question for us in this story is not how it fulfills and thus replaces the Exodus text, but rather how the Exodus text might further illumine what is happening in John’s gospel.

Don't blame “the Jews” for the death of Jesus

We must, as Jewish New Testament scholar  Dr. Amy-Jill Levine reminds, take soberly and squarely the fact the story of Jesus’s suffering and death in John’s gospel refers to “the Jews” far more than any other gospel (seventeen times within two chapters) and always in a negative way. There is not a single positive or even neutral use of the term “the Jews” within it. Every time “the Jews” appears, the intent is to insult the Jewish people in some way. John’s gospel, especially the passion story, simply is anti-Jewish.

And it is John’s gospel that Christians read to tell the story of the passion and death of Jesus on Good Friday.

So what are we to do? Read a different Gospel? Each has its own anti-Jewish moments, the most blatant of which is Matthew’s, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25).

What United Methodists have done is to supply an alternative translation of John’s passion narrative in The United Methodist Book of Worship as part of the service of Tenebrae (354-362). The General Board of Discipleship commissioned Dr. John Charlesworth, a United Methodist New Testament scholar at Princeton, to develop a new translation of John’s passion that would take seriously the contexts in which the term “the Jews” appears in John’s gospel to provide a more nuanced approach that does not lay blame at the feet of all Jewish people, as many English translations do, including the venerable and newly updated New Revised Standard Version.

Even with the downplayed anti-Judaism in this version of the biblical text, an undercurrent of anti-Judaism remains, driven both by the text itself and by the centuries of Christian anti-Judaism that lie behind its interpretation over time. Simply being less explicitly anti-Jewish in this reading does not remove the anti-Judaism entirely.

If you have a rabbi nearby, talk with her or him about ways they would appreciate you handling the anti-Jewish history of Good Friday over time, and implement their recommendations as you are able. If not, at the very least acknowledge the anti-Jewish history of John’s passion and its interpretation and use by Christians, and prime the congregation to think instead about ways in which the biblical texts may be addressing them personally, whether as part of a dominant culture or as leaders in their own contexts.

Ending the practice of Christian Seders, providing non-supersessionist approaches to the use of the Hebrew scriptures, and working to mitigate the effects of anti-Jewish texts and practices on Good Friday are three actions you can take starting this Holy Week not only to combat anti-Judaism in your church’s practices, but also to build more positive, mutually respectful relationships with your Jewish neighbors.  

The Rev. Taylor W. Burton Edwards is director of Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications.