Scripture
Photo by Tim Wildsmith on UnsplashPhoto by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash
It has been one of the great tragedies of Christendom that the carpenter of Galilee, a Jew by birth, tradition, and burial, has had his name leveraged for over two millennia to persecute his own people. Christian preaching (especially as the Lenten Season comes to a close) often includes a particular strain of pathology: a casual, largely unconscious flirtation with anti-Semitism. One of the enduring challenges for preachers is to exorcise this ever-present demon from their pulpits.
Consider the scriptural scaffolding upon which many sermons are built. The Passion narratives are a minefield of interpretation. The Gospels, written decades after the events they describe, were crafted as religious texts and political documents. The early Christians, eager to curry favor with Rome and differentiate themselves from the Jewish community, found it expedient to downplay Roman culpability in the execution of Jesus and instead to implicate “the Jews.” Not a few Jews. Not Caiaphas. Not the Sanhedrin. The Jews. A chilling generalization which, over centuries, morphed into justification for pogroms, ghettos, expulsions, and eventually something unspeakably worse.
One would have thought that after the Shoah, after the liberation of Auschwitz, the church would have undergone a radical course correction. Yes, there have been apologies, declarations, and even the occasional act of penitence. But old habits and prejudices die hard, particularly when embedded in liturgy, hymns, and the very soul of Holy Week.
Even now, in supposedly enlightened times, one hears the subtle echoes. A preacher speaks of the “blindness” of the Pharisees. Another draws too sharp a line between the “spirit” of Christianity and the “law” of Judaism, as though Jesus’ moral insight were born ex nihilo rather than steeped in Torah and the Prophets. The Good Friday homily, intended to evoke humility and compassion, becomes a macbre spectacle of insinuation: “They rejected their own Messiah,” we’re told, as if collective guilt were a transmissible affliction, passed from generation to generation like some spiritual taint.
It is astonishing how easily the language of othering slips into the sermon. How quickly “they” become a shadow. How natural it feels to draw the Jew as foil: stiff-necked, legalistic, scheming. The preacher does not even know they are doing it, and therein lies the danger. It is not overt hatred that we must fear most in the modern pew. Our greatest enemies are unexamined clichés and unchallenged metaphors.
This is not a matter of political correctness. It is a question of moral clarity and historical responsibility. If the church is to be a place of ethical instruction, it cannot afford to be morally blind. If preachers are to be shepherds, they must be able to distinguish between feeding their flock and poisoning the well.
To preach Christ is not to denounce the synagogue. To lift the cross is not to cast stones. If there is any lesson worth remembering from the tangle of miracle and myth that is Christian doctrine, it is that no people should be condemned by ancestry, nor any virtue assigned by belief alone. If that lesson cannot be taught without slipping into the ancient rhythms of contempt, then perhaps it should not be taught at all.
Preachers should examine their texts and tone. Let them parse their metaphors as carefully as they parse the Greek of the Gospels. For every careless word spoken in sanctuaries has its echo in history.
Here’s the thing, though: History, unlike Scripture, cannot be so easily spiritualized away.
Richard Bryant
The Rev. Richard Bryant is a clergy member of the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his blog, Elevate the Discourse.