Sermon: “One Covenant”
Text: Luke 4:14-21
Today’s text is from the Gospel of Luke: we hear that Jesus participates in a synagogue service in Nazareth, his hometown. (4:14-30) The scripture Jesus reads features the words of the prophet Isaiah (60:1-2), and he applies it to Gentiles, or non-Jews, as an example. One Gentile is a woman and a widow (4:25) and another is a Syrian soldier (4:27).
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
The Gospel of Luke’s program is not much different from the other Gospels. According to Luke, Christianity and its mission clearly originated within the Jewish community. God’s plan called for the message of Jesus Christ to be taken to the ends of the world before Christ would come again. This delay allowed time for mission to Jew and Gentile alike, seeking their conversion. Because the Jews did not accept and continued to not accept Jesus, and later rejected Paul’s message, Luke ultimately sees them as being rejected by God.
The problem is, this program, this narrative, is way too familiar to us. In history, taking the Gospel to the ends of the world has been dangerously complicit with colonizing evangelism. And Proselytism. The study I share with you this morning is based on the United Church’s study guide: Bearing Faithful Witness (United Church-Jewish Relations Today), and we, The United Church, “Reject” proselytism which targets Jews for conversion to Christianity.
If I say to you that the passage from Luke that Jesus teaches in the synagogue is one of the problematic passages, it might make you puzzled. There seems to be nothing wrong or untoward said here – it’s a simple message, of “God blesses Gentiles, too.”
However, listen. In the following passage (4:28-30), Luke uses the wrathful crowd to foretell the conclusion of his story: Jesus is rejected by the Jewish community, driven out of the city, and almost killed. That’s problematic, because it is extended to accuse the whole of the Jewish people (as if it is their inherent nature) for the rejection of Jesus, and so for the death of Jesus.
28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
When I was a child in Korea, I grew up as a Roman Catholic. I attended Sunday School every Sunday and worshiped at Children’s Mass every Saturday, in my hometown. It’s a big city, but when I grew up, you hardly saw anyone from other countries, or of another ethnicity. It was all Koreans, (except for 0.1 percent Chinese immigrant’s descendants) and except for our parish’s two Irish priests (who were reported to jokingly say that Korean is a “demonic” language, hard to learn. I heard that, for one of them, it was a habit to do a handstand against the wall in order to write his sermons, because the task was so torturous.)
I think my childhood world view was pretty simple, influenced by all kinds of outside sources of the simplified knowledge about how we are related to others. Here are a few things I believed when I was young:
Buddhists are superstitious because Buddha was a human. (I didn’t know Jesus was a human, too, until my teacher in Grade Six, who was a Buddhist, challenged me and said Jesus was a human, too) and this “new information” tested my faith.
Protestants are bad because they accuse Roman Catholics of being heretics. In response, my Catholic friends spoke ill of Protestants in defence. Kids go to the Protestant church because they want to date. They do not have communion, and if they do, theirs is fake - not Jesus’ body.
The Japanese (when we say, Japanese, that means “all Japanese of the past and of the present”) are invaders and colonizers, both savage and cruel.
Those were some of my beliefs, surrounded by people who thought like me. I also had some knowledge about who Jewish people, or “the Jews”, were, even before I met any real Jewish people in my life. Think about it. I had never met any Jewish person until I came to Canada. There is still no synagogue in my hometown. But I knew - we knew – everyone in my world knew that the Jews killed Jesus. (But we didn’t know Jesus was a Jew). No emotion, no hatred was attached to that belief. It was just a fact. It really didn’t matter to my young self, but it was the primary thing I thought I knew until I learned other, more truthful information about Jewish people's lives, history, holocaust, faith and traditions when I grew into adulthood.
There are many things we should try to “correctly” know and learn about Judaism and the relation of our Christian faith to Jesus as a Jew, Judaism, Jewish people, the Jewish Bible and literature the Mishnah and the Talmud, covenants (see the back page of the worship bulletin: One covenant or Two?), and so on. It would take our intention, sensitivity, attentiveness towards further study and dialogues. The study guide, Bearing Faithful Witness, recommends a visit to a synagogue and building friendships with Jewish people - try to get to know them in person. In this light, I am happy to share and affirm what I newly learned from Bearing Faithful Witness with you.
We believe that the God whom we know in Jesus Christ is the One who called Sarah and Abraham, gave the Torah to Moses, and put passion for justice into the hearts of the prophets. We believe in the faithfulness of God. We believe the Word become flesh in the person of Jesus, a Jew. The One who is “our judge and our hope” lives as a Jew, dies as a Jew, and is raised as a Jew. In making these affirmations we seek to bear faithful witness to the Jewishness of Jesus.
We believe that the Holy Spirit calls us to bear faithful witness concerning God’s reconciling mission in Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, God has opened the door “In a new way” to those previously outside the covenant. It seems important to me to note that “In a new way” means it is a brilliant and different way. It doesn’t mean that it is the only way, or that it has superseded the earlier covenant as deficient or incomplete. Rather, it more correctly means the story of Christ recapitulates the Hebrew stories, catching up the promises of God and “newly revealing” the content that God always saw was in them. In other words, what was always there is revealed again, and made available more widely to the Gentiles, those who were previously outside the covenant.
It can be never overemphasized or affirmed too often that the earliest followers of Jesus were all Jews, as was Jesus himself. For them, “Scripture” referred to the Torah and prophetic works that are in our Old Testament, along with other writings of Judaism. Jesus did not write any book or letter that has been discovered, and presumably for Jesus the Jewish scriptures (like Isaiah in today’s reading) were sufficient. Written works that did emerge with the early church were not intended to replace scripture or even to be added to scripture. They sought to interpret the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, his life and teachings, for the day-to-day struggles of the emerging church. Their authors searched the scriptures to find interpretive clues that made sense of Christ’s death and of the overwhelmingly strange event of Easter.
It was only in the fourth century CE that the church officially expanded the compass of scripture to include Christian writings. From the beginning of Christianity, then, Jewish scriptures were the natural interpretive vehicle for understanding God’s intentions and acts. Jesus himself led the way in using these writings. The emerging Christian writings, - the four Gospels, the Letters - focus on explaining the new things that God was doing in Christ. And it is also important to note: since then, Judaism has also evolved, with texts declaring the newness of God to be relevant and meaningful, to help chart the ongoing life of the Jewish people.
The love of God has been expressed in the giving of Torah and Gospel.
It would be the false witness to our Jewish neighbour and to our own heritage we share with Judaism, if we still believe, sometimes as it is said, “The God of Judaism is a god of wrath but the God of Christianity is a god of love.” Such generalization ignore both the love in Judaism and the wrath in Christianity.
Jesus commands us to love our neighbours, but all too often Christians have treated Jews as enemies. I am always aware that those wrong influences I had in my childhood about Jewish people have not all just washed away… I acknowledge and repent that the deeply-buried seed of suspicion influences my attitude towards the state of Israel.
We have many things to unlearn and learn, repent and affirm. We believe that our faith calls us to repent when the church has been unfaithful in its witness by not loving Jewish people as our neighbours. Let’s learn more. Let’s unlearn more.
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