Paul as a Jew

October 19, 2008

Michele Rizoli

Text:

Romans 11:1-4, 13-24

 

 

 

 

There’s a curious ad campaign going on lately on TV for diamond Shreddies cereal. Shreddies are square little pieces of shredded whole wheat.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqRtynIV96E) The ad shows a worker watching a conveyer belt with little squares running by. Suddenly he looks down and the squares have turned and now they look like diamonds.  The frightened worker hits a big red emergency button and stops production. Management types rush in (sans without hairnets) to wonder what could have happened to make the shape change from square to diamond. How many of these diamond shapes have actually gone out?  It is a very funny campaign (people either love it or hate it), a spoof on the usual “new and improved” campaigns that usually try to grab our attention. It’s the exact same cereal, turned on its side. They call it an angular upgrade.

         No, my dear friends, this is not product placement in the middle of sermon. The Shreddies reference is to tell you what we are proposing with our preaching series on Paul: an angular upgrade. We are looking at the same scriptures with fresh eyes and coming back to taste them anew. This is especially true of my topic today, which is to look at Paul and Judaism.

Some of you will know I spent the month of July in Jerusalem, at the Bat Kol Institute (www.batkol.info) learning about “Judaism as a source of Christian self-understanding.”[1] I can’t possibly convey everything I learned and am still learning, but before we turn to Paul I would like to highlight a few key points that come out of that context. Some might seem obvious but bear reinforcement.

First and foremost is understanding that Judaism today is not what we see in the Old Testament, nor is it the same as the judaisms (plural) at the time of Jesus or Paul, which were still very much under construction. Amy-Jill Levine, author of The Misunderstood Jew (about Jesus) explains that reading the Old Testament and thinking we know the Jewish faith and practice, is like reading Acts and thinking we know all about the Presbyterian Church down the road. Rabbinic Judaism was still evolving in New Testament times. Modern-day Jews are as different and as similar to bible-times Jews as Christians are different and similar to the Early church. A lot has happened in the meantime, sometimes with serious consequences.

Another important distinction was made by one of the rabbis who was our teacher at Bat Kol. That is that Judaism today is not the same thing as the State of Israel or the secular Israeli government. There is a lot more to unpack with this statement, but now is not the time nor place to enter into that discussion.

A second point concerns the New Testament. At TUMC we have been known to spend time at our congregational meetings refining back and forth how a statement is going to be set down in writing. (I plead guilty.) We care how things are said because we know it matters; we know that how things are written shapes one’s understanding and expectations about a text. Apply that understanding to the way the Bible came together in human terms. The Gospels were compiled with an agenda and part of that was to sort out Jesus in relation to the Jewish faith and identity. Paul, for his part didn’t sit down and write up a theological treatise and send it off to the copyeditors and printers for the benefit of posterity. What we have is a collage of some of his writings (other letters written in Paul’s name) that someone chose to preserve. Thinking we know Paul from just these writings would be like collecting a few of your better emails, adding them to a few stories about you and trying to reconstruct your perspective on things.

After his encounter with the resurrected Jesus, Paul was in uncharted territory. He was writing letters, responding to situations as they came up, figuring out as he went along how to reconcile what he experienced on the road to Damascus, what he was experiencing in an ongoing way through the work of the Spirit and how all that tied together with his own Jewish faith and identity. Paul was not discarding his Jewish faith in favour of Christianity, there was no such thing at the time.

Neither Paul nor Jesus rejected their Jewishness. In his letters, Paul constantly reminds his readers about this. “I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin (Rm 11.2) … circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; … as to righteousness under the law, blameless (Phil 3.5).”

He also agonizes lovingly over his Jewish people. In Romans 9.3-5 Paul says: “For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.”

A third realization from my course this Summer is that centuries of Christian interpretation have led Christians to perceive Judaism in New Testament times as a monolithic system of rules that Jesus was up against and that Paul was doing away with. More importantly, when we hear Jesus or Paul talking about “the Law” we assume they are talking about legalism or about earning one’s salvation by works. In their context that is simply not the case.

For Jesus and Paul the Law refers to the Torah, the cherished, holy Word of God given by God through Moses and other interpreters. As we can read in other places in the Bible (Ps 119 for instance) it was beloved – more to be desired than gold, sweeter than honey; a way to live how God wants, it is studied to learn God’s wisdom. Living and learning the Torah was what a life of faith was all about. Faithful Jews to this day seek to live out Torah in their lives.

Keeping the Torah (including circumcision, pu
rity laws, and guidelines about eating and Sabbath) was also one of the factors that set Jews apart, gave them an identity within their context. Shared history, shared customs, shared faith are all important markers of identity. For the Jews in New Testament times it was no different. That is one of the reasons why Paul struggles with these issues so much in his writings. He doesn’t want to give up who he is, but he also wants to welcome those outside the Jewish faith. Throughout the letters we see that Paul is re-working his own self-understanding as a Jew. He doesn’t want to give up the Torah any more than a Mennonite would want to give up a peace stance. But he sees God working among gentiles beyond the requirements of the Torah, so as Paul came to think the Torah was no longer the central unifying point anymore, Christ was.

• Jesus and Paul were not up against legalism.

• Torah/Law is not a burden but the primary way of relating to God.

• Paul and Jesus did not throw away their Jewish identity.

The reason I emphasize these points is because Christians have read and heard the Bible through a lens of supersessionism and that is a problem, especially in our current context. Now, the way my mind works, I’m thinking “Super-sessionism!”; some kind of hero with a cape who loves committee work. No, supersessionism is a line of thought in Christian theology. Supersessionism comes in many variations, but very simply it is the idea that Christianity is superior to and replaces Judaism. In its extreme form, this belief sees that on the one hand there are the Jews with all their “silly” laws and unfaithfulness to God and on the other are the “enlightened” Christians who have recognized the true Messiah and received God’s blessing in place of the Jews. As I said there are many shades of variation, but even the way we name the books in the Bible reflects some of this perspective. We speak of the Old Testament (Old covenant) and the New Testament (New covenant).

But isn’t this actually what we believe? Didn’t Paul himself teach it? Why is it a problem? Well, let’s look at that.

Context changes things, and our context includes two important elements that make us question whether we’ve read Paul fairly: the Shoah and the encounter with other religious perspectives.

The Shoah is that grim reality that screams at us from recent history: the elimination of millions of Jews for no other reason than who they were, outcasts in society. Many people refer to this as the Holocaust. Another thing I learned was not to call this horrible genocide the holocaust – holocaust means a burnt offering totally consumed for God, and there should be no suggestions that such a tragedy was anything that God would have required. Shoah means calamity, tragedy.

Although Christians were not responsible for the Shoah, many have come to realize that Christian doctrine over the centuries prepared the ground for anti-judaism and the attending racism that allowed the elimination of the Jews to take place. The Shoah calls us to deeply reexamine how we understand our claims as Christians.

Some of the texts for my course have very informative and detailed histories of how Paul’s theological struggles developed into supersessionism and anti-judaism. (If you are interested I can suggest some books to you.) The (very) oversimplified version is that it began with the controversies amongst early Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians that we see in the New Testament. Early church fathers went on to underscore and emphasize difference, using strong derogatory rhetoric against Jews that became incorporated into society. They began calling them Christ-killers (and worse) and elaborating an understanding of Christianity over and against Judaism. It wasn’t hard to do, because so many of the NT texts seemed to corroborate this line of thinking. Jerome was in on it, Augustine was in on it, Luther was in on it. Theologically and historically we have inherited their version of things.

Once when we were moving we found a notebook that Sandro had kept when he was a boy. In it were his notes from when he had created a club. The title was written neatly across the top, complete with founding date and place. All the executive positions were listed. President – Sandro, Treasurer – Sandro, Secretary – Sandro (you get the idea).  Lower down on the page was a listing of all the members with the dates when they were admitted to the club. There were two, Sandro (of course) and his brother Saulo (whose name incidentally means Saul). Now that’s all charming, but my favourite part is that lower down on the page, with the same date is an entry that reads “Saulo Rizoli, expelled.” He had only just joined, but sibling rivalry was more powerful than the desire to have a club with more than one member.

Jodie already mentioned similar rivalries when she preached last Sunday. Paul wanted to bring everyone together to a place where it didn’t matter whether one was Gentile or Jew. But the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion were at work, and historically the brothers in the faith parted ways.

Christianity over Judaism is the storyline that eventually won out and became incorporated into Western civilization. You might say to yourself, “I’m not anti-Jewish” and that may well be the case. But each time we hear about the “sneaky Pharisees” testing Jesus, or the “oppressive Law” that early Christians were trying to get rid of, we are bearing evidence that we inherited an anti-Jewish way of reading the New Testament.[2] For centuries we Christians have been primed to hear these texts in a certain way. But that is not the whole story; there is another way to look at them. There is a lot at stake. We need to change how we read these texts or we run the risk of perpetuating the same destructive dichotomy.

The second element of our current context brings us face to face with Paul’s own struggle in Romans 11. We live side by side Jews and find them to be as devout in their faith journey as we are in ours. Culturally we live in a world where Christianity’s claims of superiority over others, especially over the Abrahamic traditions, are hard to maintain. Christians are compelled to take a fresh look at how we understand ourselves. This is even more so if we realize that our reading of Scripture may have been distorted. We need to find a way of interpreting these texts that does not close off dialogue with people of the Jewish faith.

Furthermore, if Ch
ristians are the only ones who got it right, what does that say about God’s faithfulness when God made all those promises to Abraham and his sons? As Paul says it, “I ask, then, has God rejected God’s people?” The answer is: “By no means!”

To be clear, Paul does see the Risen Jesus as the Messiah that the Jewish people were awaiting; a continuation of Israel’s long history with a faithful God. In that long history, there are many times when God’s people found themselves forgetting about following in God’s ways, and were threatened with being cut off, and repented and God received them back. That’s how the story always went and for Paul the fact that some of his fellow Jews were rejecting Jesus as Messiah was just another one of those cases. Paul argues that his people would eventually come around and realize that the time had come where God’s blessing extended to the gentiles and they would be blessed again themselves. In fact, in his view their rejection may be what made it possible for gentiles to get in on God’s blessing. For Paul “the covenant fidelity of God’s ancient people (Israel) is now a possibility apart from assuming the identity of that people.”[3]

That’s lovely if you’re one of the gentiles, as we are, but still, let’s be honest, it would be tricky for a Jew to hear this as good news. “What, I don’t get to be Jewish anymore?” It cuts both ways. This is only good news if God responds to God’s people with grace, as was always the case. The good news is that God was not rejecting the Jews, but including the gentiles.

Romans 11 is a great example of Paul using Scripture to set up an argument in a very Jewish way. He speaks of the imagery of the olive tree (a well worn Biblical image, Jer 11.16, Hos. 14.6). Olive trees are quite amenable to grafting, where a branch from another tree can be added to the original root in order to inject some new energy into the old tree. In this particular argument, Paul is very clear that the Jewish root remains, ready to receive grafted branches from wild olives but also any of the original branches too. God is not clear-cutting the olive grove and planting date trees. For Paul “a gentile church without the Jewish roots is not the church of God.”[4] God is being faithful to the original tree and working to extend its productivity and longevity. Gentiles are not a new people of God, they are being incorporated, they are dependent on the Jewish root. Boasting that you are God’s favourite is equally problematic for Gentiles and for Jews. This is all a work of God’s grace.

Reading Paul in regard to Judaism is complicated. (I could have offered you a couple of other versions about this tree metaphor, for instance.) Even after having spent a month in Jerusalem, and reading all kinds of articles on this topic, I strain not to read anti-Judaism in what Paul says. Why does it even matter? Can’t we just let Paul be? Well, no.

Here’s my take-home message: “The consequences of seeing early Judaism as an inferior legalistic religion have been devastating…Because of that, the ethical implications of [how we interpret Paul] cannot be ignored.”[5] Furthermore, re-reading Paul differently nurtures the ground for dialogue between Christians and Jews. It becomes an act of peacemaking. Re-reading Paul refreshes and strengthens our faith. I can personally verify that Christians have a lot to gain from better understanding the root they have been grafted into.

Finally, and most importantly, re-reading Scripture in this way keeps us humble in face of who and how God chooses to bless. That is our “angular upgrade” for today.

Respectfully, I would like to finish with the Shema Israel, a prayer that is dear to the Jewish people, a reminder that our God is one.

Deut. 6.4 Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. (Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem ehad).