Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (22 page)

You would not know that if all you had to go on was the Church—not only in its preaching but in customary readings of its foundational documents, the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. As Sanders writes:

Discussions of New Testament theology have often contrasted Christian theology, in which "indicative" precedes "imperative," with Jewish theology, which (it is believed) works the other way around. That is, whereas Christianity says "God loves you; therefore love one another," Judaism is believed to say: "love one another and thereby earn God's love." Christianity is a religion of grace, Judaism a religion of merit and works-righteousness, in which people must strive to purchase God's favor, and in which they are always anxious that they have not done enough to earn it. In favor of this distinction, Christians can quote John 1:17: "The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." This proves that Christianity was the first religion of grace. Historically, that is not so.
⁶⁹

And historically, Christians have used these definitions to show—as Susannah Heschel says we have always been desperate to
⁷⁰
—that, yes indeed, with Jesus something new and unprecedented has broken through to the human realm. Never mind that in order to do this Christians have had to redefine Judaism in the narrowest terms and, with grave consequences, in the most negative terms. Judaism was the shadow against which Christianity could be the light. Nowhere has this dynamic been more forceful or more damaging than on the matter of love. Yet the fact remains that nowhere more pointedly than on this matter of love was Jesus a faithful Jew. He was proclaiming the love of the Jewish God.

Moved by such a love, Jesus would simply have refused to embark on any course that would have reintroduced the element of exclusion, especially one that played into the hands of the imperial system of divide-and-keep-conquered. While I presume to differ with Horsley and Silberman on what I take to be their denigration of the Temple cult, on this other point they are eloquent: "During the months preceding his final journey, Jesus initiated his movement of community renewal, dedicated to restoring reciprocity and cooperation in the spirit of the dawning Kingdom of God. Yet his movement of revival of village life could not become just another separatist movement, withdrawing from confrontation and seeking the shelter of obscurity in the backcountry valleys and remote mountainous areas of Galilee."
⁷¹

Jesus had to take his message to Jerusalem—not
against
Jerusalem, as the story is so often put in the Christian telling—because as a loyal Jew he was summoned to preach it in his nation's religious and political capital. The motive was not a shallow patriotism; it would be anachronistic to associate the national feeling of a first-century Jew for Israel with a twentieth-century attachment to the modern nation-state. Jesus' progress from Galilee to Jerusalem was not the same as Michael Collins's majestic journey from Cork to Dublin. The Temple was not a Jewish version of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. Jesus went to Jerusalem for reasons akin to those that drew me and countless others over the centuries to the same city—first Jews, then Christians, and, just as powerfully, Muslims. While this city embodies the divisions of the human condition, it also transcends them. That transcendence was the point.

What Jesus foresaw as a consequence of his arrival in Jerusalem we do not know, but there would have been no surprise that it meant suffering. Presumably, he had already experienced the conflict between the attitude of radical openness that he advocated and the mail-fisted defensiveness of the imperium. He would have known what had happened to his mentor John the Baptist and to countless others of his generation who, in large and small ways, had defied Rome. The buzzard-ridden remains of some of those may well have lined the road into Jerusalem. The cross, which to us is a ubiquitous symbol of a certain religion, was to Jesus, as a Jew, an equally ubiquitous symbol of a certain politics—the deadly politics of Rome.

Scholars credit the religious and imaginative genius of Paul for turning the crucifix against the Roman enemy.
⁷²
As Helmut Koester points out, he did so by viewing it in the light of Jewish cultic notions of the expiating sacrifice.
⁷³
Yet in the Christian memory of the Jewish response to Christian preaching, the fact that Jesus was "hung on a tree" made him "a stumbling block to Jews." This assertion depends on one verse from Deuteronomy,
⁷⁴
that to be hung on a tree is to be accursed by God, a verse invoked by the relatively small number of Jews who embraced faith in Jesus as Messiah to explain the rejection by so many Jews of the crucified one. The cross was thus turned into a polemical tool, with Christians denigrating Jews for their legalistic obsession with the Deuteronomic proscription. But this literal reading of an obscure line in the Bible ignores the fact that for the people under the boot of Rome in that time, death by crucifixion would have already been the fate of some of the noblest and bravest Jews, if not the most prudent.
⁷⁵
And anyway, the Deuteronomy reference becomes unintelligible in the situation of war with Rome. Political and social context—to repeat the mantra—is of overriding importance. The horrid, ignoble death by crucifixion at the hands of Rome would have become, even before Pilate, a point of Jewish pride. Remember Josephus: "[We face] death on behalf of our laws with a courage which no other nation can equal."
⁷⁶

And how was it that Jews mustered such courage? In the case of Jesus we have an answer. His message of love, based in tradition, opened into life—"abundant life," in the phrase John attributes to him.
⁷⁷
Life that can be expected to overcome death, because life to the full is what "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" offers as a measure of God's love. The ongoing life of the people Israel is the proof of this love. Thus love is the farthest thing from an abstraction, is not reduced to feelings or limited to the narrow realm of relationships. Instead, love is the attitude that shows itself in what it brings about—God's attitude, and therefore ours. Such love, bringing life, is doubly relevant in the midst of a martial occupation that uses brutal death-dealing as a form of control. Here is why Rome was the dead opposite of Israel. That a weary, heartsick group could recognize such love in a Galilean of no importance, who had nevertheless grasped this core of the faith and showed it, did not set him against Israel but stood him in its center. The biblical record attests, from the first verse on, to the most basic Jewish belief, which is belief in the power of God to create life. Nothing Rome does, nothing any human does, can take away that power. Life is the fundamental principle of morality undergirding all the commandments, which always ask, What is for life? And so life is the sign of faith, never affirmed more than when death seems imminent. Each human instance of death is a return to the first chaos of Genesis: What God did then, out of love, God does now. So life is the distilled word for hope, as one hears in every Jewish toast,
L'chaim—
To life.

For all this, Jesus of Galilee came to the end, fully aware of what a man like him, with a message like his, in a place like that, was up against. The point is that his courage was Jewish courage, his faith in God was Jewish faith. And, perhaps surprisingly to all observers by now, the last turn in his story, from brutal death to new life, a sign of God's vindicating love, was Jewish before it was anyone's.

12. The Healing Circle

A
ND THEN
there were those who loved him.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

In his notes to
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot associates these lines with the story of the journey to Emmaus, which in Luke comes immediately after the discovery that Jesus' tomb is empty. "That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him."
¹

Eliot explains that his lines about the mysterious third companion were "stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions...: it was related that the part)' of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was
one more member
than could actually be counted."
²
We are talking here about the extremity of human experience, yet to Christian piety, the story of the death and Resurrection of Jesus has long since been stripped of anything like extremity. For most worshipers on Easter morn, it is a pageant, a domesticated soap opera, and only by a stretch of the imagination can we put ourselves in the places of those men and women who knew Jesus personally, who loved him, and who, after the horrible events of that Passover in Jerusalem, must have been in a state of what we can only call extremity.

They did with their grief what we do with ours. While I was preparing to write this book, a dear friend was dying of cancer. At her request, a few chosen friends gathered to sit with her for an hour or two each week during the last two months or so of her life. Then she died. For a few weeks more, we continued to come together. This is a not uncommon phenomenon among those of us reared in the era of the T-group, now that we are aging and dying. This coming together for shared grief is sometimes called a healing circle, but it is an experience of raw extremity. There are the pains of loss, loneliness, and fear, but also, oddly, there are the consolations of companionship and hope. In our gatherings before and after our friend's death, we wept. We sat in silence. We paid attention to our breathing. We ate and drank. We tried to express our feelings and found it hard to do so. The sense of time itself changed in that situation, as we drew closer and closer, first to the death of our friend, and then to the abyss that opened under it.

Time seemed to slow down, and the past became freshly present as we spontaneously related the stories of our bonds with the one who had gathered us. But the stories, favorite memories, and anecdotes that elaborated all that we loved about our friend soon opened into the stories and memories of our whole generation. A pre-boomer group of East Coast lefties more or less the same age, we had been through a powerful set of common experiences, beginning long before we'd actually met—from the assassinations of the 1960s and the Vietnam protests to the transformation from rebel children to worried parents, from free love to retirement accounts. We each began bringing to our circle texts to read aloud—bits of poetry, fiction, political rhetoric—that evoked the rare days that had prepared us to be friends. We read from and listened to Mary Oliver, Albert Camus, Bobby Kennedy in South Africa, Allard Lowenstein, Betty Friedan. Above all, such readings reminded us of what we had loved about the one we had lost. And, aging flower children that we were, we sang Peter, Paul, and Mary songs and the Judy Collins version of "Amazing Grace."

Lament. Texts. Silence. Stories. Food. Drink. Songs. More texts. Poems. We wove a web of meanings that joined us. It was "grief-work," as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had taught us to call it, years before we had a clue what it really was.
³
Our circle was an extended American version of the Irish wake, of Italian keening, of African drumming in honor of ancestors. It was a version of the Jewish custom of "sitting
shiva
" from the Hebrew word for seven, referring to the seven days of mourning after the death of a loved one. It was what we did with the extreme disappointment that death must be to every human being—the extreme loss of hope, the extreme loneliness, the foretaste of what awaits us all. The circle was our common act of love for our dead friend, and, because of her—a last and quite typical gift—an act of love for each other and for ourselves.

Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, "Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?" And he said to them, "What things?" And they said to him, "Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."
⁴

Immediately after Jesus' death, the circle of his friends began to gather. Their love for him, instead of fading in his absence, quickened, opening into a potent love they felt for one another. Their gatherings were like those of a bereft circle,
⁵
and they were built around lament, the reading of texts, silence, stories, food, drink, songs, more texts, poems—a changed sense of time and a repeated intuition that there was "one more member" than could be counted. That intuition is what we call the Resurrection. That the followers of Jesus thought of him in its terms does not separate them from Jewishness but locates them within it, for resurrection of the dead, as Fredriksen notes, "was one of the redemptive acts anticipated in Jewish traditions about the End of Days,"
⁶
which Jesus had called his Kingdom. To imagine Jesus as risen was to expect that soon all would be. This theological affirmation that Jesus had been raised from the dead by his faithful Father followed upon the human experience that when they gathered in his memory, he was still with them. In a similar way, the later theological affirmation that Jesus was divine would follow from the community's instinctive impulse to pray not
for
him but
to
him.