Rev. Ann C. Fox
(508) 992-7081
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Unitarian
Universalist
Society of Fairhaven
A Jewish Jesus
a Palm Sunday sermon by Rev. Ann C. Fox
April 5, 2009
Note: A reading is attached, which you might like to read first
On Palm Sunday, let us remind ourselves of the story from the Gospel of Matthew about the entry of Jesus of Nazareth into Jerusalem:
And when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives….the disciples….brought the ass and the colt and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon. Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and the others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road also. And the crowds that went before him and followed him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest.” And when he entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.” (Matt. 21:1-11)
It must have been an exciting parade! So, I have to tell my Palm Sunday joke that I think you’ve heard before: Because of a sore throat, 5-year-old Johnny stayed home from church with a sitter. When the family returned home, they were carrying several palm fronds. Johnny asked them what they were for. "People held them over Jesus' head as he walked by," his father told him. "Wouldn't you know it," Johnny said, "the one Sunday I don't go to church and He shows up."
Notice that branches were laid down before the prophet. The “palm” frond was a Roman symbol of victory, not a Jewish one. I see that today’s mainline churches are using fair-trade palm fronds and that the University of Minnesota’s Eco-Palms program ensures the leaves were harvested in Mexico and Guatemala in an environmentally sensitive manner by workers who get paid a fair price! (Boston Globe, 5/4/09) Eco Justice is spreading its wings even on Palm Sunday.
We, in this congregation, can hardly ignore the story of Jesus with our two big memorial windows of the nativity behind me and the Sermon on the Mount window behind you.1 When people visit our church, they usually ask, “Was this originally a Unitarian church?” I usually respond, “Oh yes, this big Sermon on the Mount window shows Jesus the Teacher. Jesus was always a special teacher for Unitarians, especially at the turn of the 20th century. And for many of us today, he is still a great teacher.”
The question that presents itself to each one of us at Easter is: what does each of us think about the “Christ” part of Jesus, as in Jesus Christ? Was Jesus “Jesus the Prophet” as the Gospel of Matthew referred to the one who entered Jerusalem on the donkey or was that man Jesus Christ, which means ‘anointed one’ but came to mean, God himself? For years I wondered what Jews thought about how one of their own was interpreted to be God him. A British scholar of the history of Jewish and Christian religions, Geza Vermes [pronounced Gey-zah Ver-mesh], has spent a good part of his life studying how Judaism and Christianity developed. He also is the foremost scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Geza Vermes [Ver-mesh] examines the historical person as revealed by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He finds in these Gospels a man who is like so many in ancient Hebrew history. The most famous and ancient are the prophets Elijah and Elisha. We might remember that Jesus asked Peter, “Who do they say that I am?” Peter replies, “They say you are Elijah come again.” Now, the reason people said this was that Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, banished the demons, and challenged injustice. He was unlike Elijah in that Jesus grew great crowds to hear him speak and he did outrageous things like speaking to women and the unclean tax collectors and many others.
The Hebrew rabbinic literature and also Josephus, the admired Jewish historian of Jesus’ time, describe holy men who were contemporary with Jesus. Some characteristics of these men are (Vermes, p.257): humility, unworldliness, detachment from possessions, poverty, sharing with others, holding personal piety higher than ritual, meditating before prayer, and having great faith.
One younger contemporary of Jesus’ was Hanina ben Dosa, a first century Galilean from the town of Araba, about a dozen miles north of Nazareth. “The rabbinic tradition shows him to be a ‘person of outstanding devotion who was a famous healer and a master over the demonic powers.’ He was…rabbinic Judaism’s most prominent wonder worker whose death marked the end of the era of the ‘men of deeds.’ But he was also known for some of his moral teachings.” The term, “men of deeds” means one who performs miracles. In the Gospels, Jesus’ miracles are described as “deeds.” (See Luke 24:19) One of Hanina’s sayings is, “No man can please God unless his neighbors are pleased with his behavior toward them.” Hanina also healed many people, even at a distance.
These holy men were commonly called ish ha-elohim (p.270), or ‘men of God’ and they were thorns in the sides of rabbis and Pharisees because they ignored the accepted purity rules of behavior and temple rituals. They were eccentrics who challenged the customs of the day if the customs got in the way of justice and common sense.
Jewish scholars find it curious that there is so little mention of Jesus in their literature or in the writings of the historian Josephus. The historian “Josephus [37-100 AD] is the only first century writer outside the Gospels who provides some geographical information about Jesus. He writes in the year 62 of ‘a man named James the brother of Jesus called the Christ.’ The brevity of the description presumes that this Jesus was a known character of his day.” (Vermes, p. 276) But little more is said that is authentically Josephus’s writing. (There is a full paragraph about Jesus Christ but most scholars believe it was a later insertion for it is not in Josephus’s style at all.)
Christian scholars are sometimes offended by Vermes’ [Ver-mesh] comparison of Jesus with the holy men of ancient Israel. The Christian scholars challenge him and say that if Jesus was such a pious man of deeds, why was he crucified? Vermes [Ver-mesh] responds that Jesus was like John the Baptist. John was a charismatic speaker who drew many crowds wherever he went. Although the fantastic story is that Salome asked for John’s head on a platter, actually the Baptist had become politically threatening; since King Herod was responsible for peace in the neighborhood, John had to be killed. Jesus was politically threatening as well—he, too, drew great crowds and when he turned over the tables of the money lenders in the temple during the festival of Passover Vermes believe that Jesus sealed his own fate. Temple authorities would be afraid that the Romans would shut them down. Jesus was a rabble-rouser in their eyes and likely in the eyes of the Romans.
Josephus has much to say about John but he does not connect him with Jesus as did the Gospel writers. Vermes [Ver-mesh] believes that the Baptist was much more famous than Jesus and this is why Josephus does not mention Jesus much. Jesus is not mentioned in any documents of the day except in the Gospel stories. Vermes [Ver-mesh] focuses on what made Jesus so “special” that he attracted a great following even after his death. He quotes one of his own books saying that Jesus was “second to none in profundity of insight and grandeur of character” and as “an unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth and of bringing every issue back to the essence of religion, the existential relationship of man and man, and man and God” (Jesus the Jew, 224) He says that, “Jesus stood head and shoulders above” the others. (p. 271) and was unequaled in “the remarkable art of his parables [and] the shrewdness and sharpness of his proverbs…to make ethical ideas [popular]. (p. 274) Though other prophets embraced the weak, the poor, the widow and orphan, Jesus went further and bravely extended a hand of friendship to the social outcasts, the unclean and despised…and there is one aspect in which Jesus was entirely different: he was unmarried.” This was completely against Jewish law. (p.272) All other ish ha-elohim had been married to fulfill the first command from Eden to: be fruitful and multiply. It seems that John the Baptist was also not married, nor were the monastic Essenes. Perhaps this was to set Jesus apart or perhaps to devote all his energy to his task.
Why were writers inspired to create the Gospels? Vermes [Ver-mesh] believes there was a vacuum to be filled. People in the thrall of the Romans were hungry for an ethical religion to give them guidance and comfort. Jesus had impressed enough hearers that what was remembered was eventually written down. Vermes [Ver-mesh] wishes Jesus himself had written something—don’t we ALL.
Vermes has given us a Jewish portrait of Jesus treading in the footsteps of the ancient Israel ish ha-elohim, men of God. He was like them and yet something also like a Zen master, a skilled teacher. It can be said that his followers helped to spread a Jewish-like religion across the world.
Perhaps early Unitarians saw this when they left Yah Wey as the mysterious God of the Jews and regarded Jesus as a special teacher. Perhaps his stained glass window deserves to be larger than life in our church. Perhaps we are fortunate to have such an architecture that invites us each year to individually reconsider Jesus’ meaning to us.
Easter is coming but not before Good Friday and hot cross buns remind us of the cruel murder of a fearless man of God. May we savor the story of one who was an ish ha-elohim. But let us remember also that he assured us that all that is in heaven is within us. May we listen for what is within and thus hear the still small voice of wisdom.
Reference
Vermes,
Geza. The Changing Faces of Jesus, New York, N.Y.: Penguin Putnam,
Inc., 2000.
1 Dear Reader, Our church is an English Gothic mini-cathedral. These two windows are massive and glorious. The nine stained glass windows on the sides are equally beautiful, each one bearing the text of a Beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. (Matt. 5:3-11) Henry Huttleston Rogers (affectionately called HHR) built the church in memory of his mother. He built three other major buildings in town (the town hall, the library, and the high school, equally beautiful each in its own way).
© The Rev. Ann C. Fox