Jesu ben Joseph
Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington
December 18, 2005
Rev. Paul Ratzlaff
In a debate about whether to make English the official language of the United States, thereby eliminating bilingual education in public schools, one of the advocates for English only is reported to have proclaimed, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” That just tells you how domesticated Jesus has become in our time. We all think we know who Jesus was. He obviously spoke the language we speak; and looked like we look. We have our favorite image, whether positive or negative.
However, pay attention to the Jesus Seminar, which gathers scholars trying to determine what Jesus might have actually said. If you follow the scholars, you will know that most of what is attributed to Jesus reflects the early gospel writers attempting to make sense of this man by fitting him into a scheme, which becomes the basis for the new religion they were creating that we now call Christianity. But, in all likelihood, Jesus never said most of the stuff that the gospel writers said he did. Likewise, all the stuff about miracles and resurrections is “made up.” “Made up” not like an author who writes fiction, but “made up” by a community of passionate believers out of rumor and gossip and images that were part of the religious spirit of the time. For example, Caesars were worshipped as gods, and were called “son of god.” “Resurrection” may have been picked up from the story of Persephone and the Eluesian mysteries, with its rite of rebirth, a popular religion of the time. So, over time, stories about Jesus were elaborated until they were recorded as “gospel truth.”
A Catholic Scholar, Raymond Brown, who has examined the birth narratives, essentially says that they are all fabricated. There is no historical basis for any of it, except that Jesus came from Nazareth. All the other aspects, traveling to Bethlehem, angels singing to shepherds, and wise men from the east, etc., are made up out of bits and pieces of myths in the cultures of the time, along with the messianic strands from Jewish scripture. The date, December 25, was chosen by this new religion, Christianity, to co-opt the Roman mid winter festival of Saturnalia. (I’m reminded of the legends around the birth of Buddha – he emerged from his mother’s womb standing up, walked seven steps and proclaimed, “I am the highest in the world; I am the best in the world; I am the foremost in the world. This is my last birth; now there is no renewal of being for me.” At that point, the heavens erupted into a cascade of flowers.) Sorry, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.
However, I am not telling you this in order to announce that I am canceling Christmas Eve because it never happened that way. I would argue that there’s a kind of poetic truth in these fabricated stories of the birth of Jesus that captures elements of our human experience. But that’s a sermon for Christmas Eve itself, not my sermon today.
In the light of this awareness that we know very little of who Jesu ben Joseph actually was, I love this affirmation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, the German Protestant Resistance Theologian. “Jesus calls human beings, not to a new religion, but to life.” “Jesus calls human beings, not a new religion….” Jesus was not establishing a new religion with himself as the symbolic center, a cultus of worship, ritual and creed. Instead he urged the people around him to come alive, to live life fully, as God intends us all to live. Within the Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets, there is a way of living that is enlivening for all, which is God’s intention. Jesus “calls” us. He is not arguing with us. He is not cajoling us. He is not intimidating us. He “calls” us. He tries to reach that deep inner spirit in each of us that responds when called – that deep inner spirit that wants to live our lives fully and well – and wants that fullness for every human being. Jesus calls us to life. La chaim!
Is it not the irony of ironies that his so-called followers invented then a new religion, which in so many ways is not about life, but about violence and death! Because Christianity is so woven into our culture, we forget that at one time it, too, was a new religion, invented and developed over the first centuries of the Common Era. (Think of Mormonism as a contemporary new religion.) What do I mean “a new religion not about life, but violence and death”? In the new religion invented about Jesus Christ, those first passionate followers had to explain why he was killed. They developed the strategy of blaming the Jews! Who killed Jesus? The Jews, stuck in their old ways. The new religionists extracted Jesus from his Jewishness. Instead of Jesu ben Joseph, they named him Jesus Christ. They claimed that he was a new creature, God incarnate, sent to supersede the “Old Testament,” with a “New Testament.” The consequence of separating Jesus ben Joseph from his Jewishness has been catastrophic for the Jews, who have suffered centuries of prejudice, pogroms and the holocaust. Even today, to remind people that Jesus was a Jew sounds strange to many. I grew up with Sallman’s head of Christ as the primary image of Jesus. Jesus has northern European features, long wavy, auburn hair with blond highlights, brown eyes and, as a nod to where he was born, a tan. His long hair and beard, along with his tunic top let me know that he lived in another time, but he was one of my people. Is there an image embedded in your mind? I never saw an image that more accurately portrayed a peasant of the Jewish country-side, black curly hair, swarthy skin, rounder faced. That wouldn’t have looked like my people!
Twisting Jesu ben Joseph into Jesus Christ was not the end to the distortion of the new religion. It also devalued this life in favor of a promised life in the hereafter. That furthers what Bob Kimball calls “sanctified violence.”
“Sanctified violence”? Not only has violence against Jews been sanctified, but lots of other violence as well. Crusades, conquests, ethnic cleansing of the Americas, the list goes on of killing in the name of the Christian God.
“Sanctified violence” has worked in more subtle ways as well. A familiar, infamous example is Secretary of the Interior Watts, who had no concern for the loss of forests, because, after all, the apocalypse is at hand. Think of all the times people have been told to endure abuse, because they would be rewarded in heaven.
I don’t want to suggest that all of Christianity is tainted with “sanctified violence,” for Christianity is a much broader and more complex religious movement than that. A Christian leader who I find inspiring is the Episcopal Bishop Jack Spong. I respect him because he takes the religious scholarship seriously, along with the insights of modern science. He has written many books, among them, “Why Christianity Must Change, Or Die.” Even as he clears away all the accumulated fabrications about Jesus, he finds still in Jesus a spiritual charge, which for me is akin to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s response that “Jesus calls us, not to a new religion, but to life.”
So for the last minutes of this sermon, I will look more closely at an example of Jesu ben Joseph calling “us” to life. Look more carefully at his “calling” the lawyer, the account from Luke that I read earlier.
A “lawyer” (one who had studied the Torah) approaches Jesus. Clearly this is an individual who wants to live fully and well. He is already in touch with his heart’s deep yearning. He asks Jesus what he must do to come fully alive - alive through and through. (In the gospel writer’s words, his question is “how to inherit eternal life” but I suggest the emphasis on another life apart from this one reflects the distortion of the gospel writer, an early Christian. Might it not have been, “how can I live this very life with integrity and fullness?”?) Jesu ben Joseph replies, “What does our religion say about this? How do you understand it?” The lawyer answers, “Love God with all your being – your mind, heart, your body and soul - and love your neighbor as yourself.” “You’ve got it,” Jesu ben Joseph assures him. If you love the creator of life with your whole being, and if you love your neighbor likewise, you will come alive.
What does God want for us but to be fully alive, and to make aliveness possible for all of creation! (Jesus calls human beings, not to a new religion, but to life!) But the lawyer puzzles, “I got part of it, but I’m not sure who my neighbor is. Who is my neighbor?” Jesu ben Joseph doesn’t answer directly. He doesn’t launch into a discourse on the definition of “neighbor.” Instead he says, “Let me tell you a story.”
Interesting story! A man is robbed, stripped of his clothes, and left to die. Then Jesu ben Joseph points out the different reactions as people pass this victim.
His description of the different responses tells us that Jesu ben Joseph was paying attention. He saw what was going on. He didn’t just “look” around him, he saw. How often do we look but fail to see anything, because our looking takes in the images we expect. Because we only look at what we expect to see, we fail to notice what’s really happening. We meet someone we know. In looking we recognize them – in our mind we may say “Ah, that’s so and so”, but do we really see them? Do we really attend to what’s going on in their being in this very moment? Jesu ben Joseph saw right into people’s inner beings. His very presence brought healing. In addition, he noticed where the words and the actions didn’t jive. He saw when the society said it was doing one thing, but really doing another. Like putting Rosa Parks’s body in the rotunda while congress cut the budget for education and Medicaid, for the very people that Rosa Parks stood for. You could look at this as honoring Rosa Parks, and you could see it as a travesty.
Back to the story - first of all, Jesu ben Joseph notices the responses of the most esteemed people in the society of his day. These are the people who are scrupulous in following the rules of Jewish religion, the priest and the Levite. To update this story, I invite you to substitute in your imagination the kind of people you hold in high regard – the kind of people you think of as pillars of society. These are “good” people! This causes me to ask, “How do good people walk on by today? How do we good people go out of our way to the other side of the road, when painful images come to us across the TV screen, or radio airwaves? Do we avoid certain neighborhoods in order to avoid being disturbed?”
Jesu ben Joseph sees that people may be much esteemed as religious leaders, yet they walk on by when they could give another his life. In other words, all their supposed religious observance and expertise does not lead them to enhance life, but to contribute to death, for surely leaving the man uncared for will lead to his death. Jesu ben Joseph saw through the pretense, and invited his listeners to see through pretense to what really supported life.
Jesu ben Joseph was calling this man before him, who yearned to live fully, to notice that simply being an expert in Jewish law, such as he was, was not enough.
Then, Jesu ben Joseph told of the Samaritan who had compassion for the man left to die – such compassion that he treated him as one of his own. Some of you know this, but others may not. The Samaritans, at the time Jesu ben Joseph lived, were viewed as heathens, unclean – the “outcaste,” the “other.” Proper Jews, successful Jews looked down on the Samaritans. They were definitely not thought of as “good neighbors.”
Who are your “Samaritans”? Who do you look at with disdain, with disgust, because they live in ways that offend your sense of propriety?
I want you to get a feel for the radical story that this is. It’s the kind of story that made his listeners squirm, and it should make us squirm as well.
Yet in the story, it is the Samaritan who cares for a fellow human being, not only getting him help, but promising to pay for it all. The Samaritan, religious impure from an observant Jewish point of view, acts in a way that serves life.
“Who,” Jesu ben Joseph asks, “acted in the neighborly way?”
For this serious student of the spirit to utter the hated words, “the Samaritan,” would be most discomfiting. Still Jesu ben Joseph leaves him with the question.
Notice that the expert in Jewish law doesn’t say the despised word, “The Samaritan,” but refers to him as “The one who had mercy on the poor victim.”
To which Jesu ben Joseph says simply, “Live your life the same way.”
“Jesus calls human beings, not to a new religion, but to life.”
In this story that calls this man to life, Jesu ben Joseph was the dharma heir of the Jewish prophet, Amos. Amos, like Jesu ben Joseph, came from the provinces to confront the life-alienating ways of conventional society. Amos said to the powerful, successful people of his day something like the following: “Hear God’s words.
I [God] hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your assemblies.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps. (Amos 5: 21-23)
[You] sell … the needy for a pair of sandals.
[You] trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed (Amos 2: 6 & 7)
And then there’s that verse that we often sing.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream! (Amos 5: 24)
That is how you will live life fully and well. Justice will roll like a river and peace like an ever-flowing stream.
What does Jesu ben Joseph have to say to us this day, the 18th day of December in the year 2005? How are we called to life? What are we called to see? What are we called to do in response, so that we act on loving our God with our whole being, and our neighbor as ourselves?
I urge you to clear away much of the fabrication of the new religion, acknowledge and grieve its “sanctified violence,” yet heed the call to live this life in all its fullness, both for yourself, and in building the kind of world that nurtures fullness in all of God’s creatures. Amen. |
