THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
NOBODY OWNS THIS STORY
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached June 6, 2004, at the First Unitarian Church of HonoluluNo one owns the story of Jesus. Mel Gibson doesn't own the story of Jesus. The Catholic Church does not own the story of Jesus. Evangelical Christianity--what some like to call the "religious right"--does not own the story of Jesus. I own it as much as anyone else. It is a part of my heritage. It has shaped the thought forms of all of Western civilization. The questions we ask and the kinds of answers we seek --whether embraced or rejected --have been shaped deeply by that heritage. No one can begin to fully understand the history of Western thought--not just in religion, but in politics, philosophy, even science--without knowledge of that story and how it has been used.
But that also means that Mel Gibson has every right to use it for his ends, too. This, despite the fact that my colleague Rev. Mark Belletini in Cleveland is of the opinion that Gibson has crucified Jesus for the second time.
However, one person's opinion about that story is NOT just as good as another's. There is a body of solid information, the core of which is accepted by the scholars of all of the traditions, religious and secular. Any use of that story that pretends to be historical has the burden of proof when it deviates from that core of knowledge. Otherwise, it deserves to be taken as fiction. Mel Gibson's film,"The Passion of the Christ" is just such a fiction. Pious fiction, perhaps; but fiction none the less.
One of the problems I have with this particular film is that major films of this kind, with the visual impact that is possible with today's cinematography, have the power to shape what is taken for history in the minds of viewers. The vivid imagery that comes to mind if you saw the movie "Titanic" has likely trumped anything else you remember or thought you knew about that historical event. For my generation "The Sands of Iwo Jima" is the war in the Pacific. Sadly, for my children's generation, it may be the musical, "South Pacific," or even "McHale's Navy." Anyone raised on the images of Viet-Nam on nightly news knows the Viet Nam war differently from those who were not. I have therefore chosen not to see Gibson's film and do not recommend it. That is not the story of Jesus that I want cluttering up my imagination and memory.
"The Passion of the Christ" is true neither to the history known from extra-Biblical sources nor from the Biblical texts themselves. For all his protestations of following Scripture, it isn't there. The general assumption is that the gospels contain a consistent, coherent story. Those of you who took the Reading the New Testament Together course with me know that's not so. Anybody, in fact, who reads them with any care, without the prior assumption that there is a consistent, coherent story, can clearly see the differences. The only places where the Gospels agree is where they copied from each other. One of the textbooks that we used in the course is the gospels parallel, where the gospels are printed in columns, side by side. This reveals the depth of that copying; and their differences.
Biblical scholars --Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical--all agree that none of the gospels are eyewitness accounts. Mark, the earliest of the gospels, could not have been written before 70 A.D., almost 40 years after Jesus' death. Matthew and Luke contain 11/12ths of Mark verbatim, including Mark's grammatical mistakes. And Matthew makes geographical mistakes which make it clear that he had never been to Galilee or Jerusalem. The gospel of John has a totally different time line from the other three, and specifically contradicts a number of events and sayings in the other three gospels. Incidentally, it also has two lines in it that specifically contradict a major piece of Mr. Gibson's story. He didn't read that part. All four of the gospels show clear internal evidence of having gone through editions, modifications and editing. And again, these are not things that only liberal Biblical scholars say, this is the general consensus of Biblical scholarship from right to left across the spectrum. That you probably have never heard that unless you took a Bible course in college, indicates just how seriously we clergy have concealed this information from you.
Every Christmas you see one version of it, putting two stories together that only have a couple of names in common; and then at Easter time giving you another movie or TV program, the only consistent part, again, being the places where they copied each other. The texts themselves have a history.
Further, to be understood with any intelligence, they must be read in historical context; that is, with an awareness of what was going on at the time the writers were editing the documents into their final form. This was not in 30 A.D., but in 100 A.D., a different context entirely. All four of the gospels differ in curious ways from other versions of the story that did not make it into the official collection. We have many of those other versions only because they were hidden and escaped the official Christian book-burners of the third and fourth centuries.
Gibson's story distorts all four of his textual sources and adds elements from Medieval iconography and legends that are nowhere even hinted at in the texts.
And what of the anti-Semitism objections that first created the stir in the media over the film? This is the part that fascinates me even more than the other mistakes in the film.
My son, Daniel, came home from Maryknoll Middle School and said "We were talking about it in class and who killed Jesus?" (Well, it is a Catholic school.)
I told Daniel, "Well, he was a volunteer." From the text it's clear. He predicted it. He went to Jerusalem knowing it was going to happen. If you take the text literally, he was a volunteer. Daniel went back to class and told his teacher that and she had a cow.
Was it the Jews who killed Jesus? If it were true that the Jews killed Jesus, why is it they have been subjected to prejudice for all these centuries since? If, indeed, they killed Jesus they should have been celebrated as heroes!
Heroes, you say? How so? Well, if it's true that Jesus' death saves all who believe in him from their sins, then the Jews played a crucial role in the salvation of the world. It could not have happened without them! Indeed, Judas' role is even more heroic than Jesus' because he gave his life for real, thinking he was doing a good thing and didn't even get resurrected! I actually have a book in my library that presents that thesis in great detail, written at the end of the 19th century.
One of the things that is conveniently forgotten by almost everybody who reads those texts is that the temple authorities, the Sanhedrin, were trying desperately to maintain a tenuous and fragile relationship with the Roman occupiers. They knew from experience that if they did not keep a lid on things, lots of people were going to be killed. Just a few years before Jesus' death a rebellious bunch of folk in Jerusalem were complaining to Pilate. Seems he had taken the temple treasury to build an aqueduct for his troops. Pilate had his soldiers dress up in local garb with their swords under their robes and disperse themselves amongst the crowd. At a signal, they took out their swords and committed major mayhem. The Roman historians say that thousands of people were killed that day. That was the atmosphere of the time. That's what the temple authorities were desperately trying to prevent. We know from extra-Biblical sources that Galilee and Judea were torn by several groups of would-be rebels against Rome. Again, remember Judas Iscariot, more properly Judas the Sicarri. The Sicarri were a group of underground-folk whose favorite thing was to sneak into Roman garrisons and kill as many soldiers in their sleep as they could before they themselves got killed. This is what was going on at the time. The priests were desperately trying to preserve Temple Judaism and save lives.
And they were right! Thirty-seven years later, 70 A.D., in response to Jewish rebel groups--including incidentally Jesus' brother James--the Romans finally were fed up and destroyed the temple. They dispersed the citizens of Jerusalem into the countryside. Judaism, as it had existed for a millennium, was no more.
The Judaism of today, synagogue Judaism, is not the descendant of Temple Judaism. It is the descendant of the Jews of the Diaspora, the Jews who had been scattered abroad across the then-known world after the first temple--Solomon's Temple--was destroyed in 586 B.C. Jews today, and all of those that Christendom has been familiar with since 70 A.D., were not the Jews that were even there when Jesus was killed.
Finally, on the subject of who killed Jesus, only the Romans could crucify and they only crucified rebels. They didn't crucify robbers. They didn't even crucify murderers. They only crucified rebels. This was plain old ordinary terrorism. "Look here, populace. If you attempt to rise up against us we're going hang you on a gibbet and leave you there until the birds pick your bones clean." Far from the weak and acquiescent governor in Gibson's film, or even the "I find no fault in him" of the Gospels, Pontius Pilate was so vicious that he was recalled to Rome only three years after Jesus' death. He fled to Spain instead because he knew that he was to be killed by the emperor. He was that blood thirsty and lousy a governor. All of this is from Roman history.
However, by the time the Gospels reached their current form, the Jews who played any role in the story were dead, the temple had been destroyed, and "Jews" were convenient patsies. Because, you see, the Christians in the last years of the first century A.D. had to get along with the Romans. They didn't have to get along with the Jews, much less the Jews in Jerusalem. So the story was "spun." Whatever the Roman role in the story was, it was played down. Whatever the role of the temple authorities was, it was played up.
Still, blanket blaming of the Jews did not appear in western Christian thought until 500 years later; a blame that the Vatican has explicitly repudiated, but Gibson's film revives again with a vengeance. He even has the priests dressed in black. (They actually wore white.)
The New Testament story that we have is a story that is written in layers. The texts themselves have a long history. The texts have within them, from their own internal evidence, indications of that history, that layering. The New Testament starts, at the earliest layer, with basic Jewish ideas. For the Judaism of Jesus and his followers was not the Temple Judaism of the Old Testament. Go back and read Exodus and Leviticus. That is not the Judaism of Jesus and his followers. That Temple Judaism actually comes out of a 5th century B.C. rebuilding of the temple, the assembling of the Scriptures and the major editing thereof.
Jesus' foundation, and the foundation of his followers was, rather, the Judaism of the prophetic tradition. As in Amos': "I hate, I despise your feasts. The smell of your offerings nauseates me." It was anti-priest. It was anti-temple. It was pro-justice and it was pro-people. It was also fiercely anti-Roman and anti-Greek, the two tyrannies which had, in Jesus' day, ruled Palestine for 400 years (except for a brief period in between under the Maccabeean kings and priests).
St. Paul took these very Jewish ideas and transliterated them into the Hellenistic language of the Greco-Roman world. He engaged in such interesting translation devices, for example, as the reversal of the terms "Son of God" and "Son of Man." In the tradition in which both Temple Judaism and Prophetic Judaism stands, "Son of God" always refers to an ordinary human being doing God's will, whether he (sic) knows it or not. The "Son of Man," on the contrary, is always, in those old traditions, a semi-divine figure, at least to the extent of being grabbed and literally possessed by God in order to accomplish a specific task in human history. It was the Son of Man, for example, that was to come and launch the entry of the Kingdom of God into human history; or as some interpreted it--the end of human history.
St. Paul takes the two terms and turns them around. He says that Jesus was "Son of God" according to his divinity and "Son of Man" according to his humanity. Unless you get too pushed out of shape about that, what St. Paul was trying to do was to interpret arcane Jewish ideas to a Roman and Greek audience. And, in an ironic way, in taking these Jewish ideas to the "enemy" he was also doing something consistent with several of the Old Testament heritages, as well. He was consistent, at least, with the teachings of Jeremiah who prompted Israel to, indeed, take their heritage to all of the nations. Consistent with Second Isaiah who spoke of Israel becoming "a light unto the nations." And consistent, incidentally, with the most misunderstood book in the Old Testament, the book of Jonah. The book of Jonah is a piece of transparently pious fiction that is a major indictment of Israel for thinking of itself as God's chosen people; chosen for privilege instead of chosen for taking the word of God into the larger world. Being swallowed by a fish has nothing to do with it.
The last layer, the layer of the texts of the gospels and of St. Paul's letters as we currently have them, is all Hellenistic Platonic Realism. It's where the absurd notion of the separation of the soul from the body enters western culture. Along with it comes the incorporation of major portions of Roman Mithraism, the religion of the Roman soldiers and a great many Greco-Roman thinkers and intelligentsia as well. And Mithraism is full of that Persian notion of the end of the world in the cosmic battle between the god of light and the god of darkness. This is very different from Jeremiah's image of God writing His law upon our hearts so that no one need teach it, different from Second Isaiah's image of healing and justice, different from Jesus' notion of the Kingdom of God emerging in our midst.
I want to end this with an incident reported in the New Testament as an event in the life of Jesus.
The temple spies are constantly trying to trap him in something that they can then get him in trouble for. One of the issues that was, perhaps, the livest issue in Israel of that day was whether or not one should pay taxes to the Romans. They asked him, "How about paying taxes to Rome?"
Jesus asked, "Anybody got a coin?" They hand him a Roman coin and he holds it up. "Whose likeness is on this coin?" he asks.
They said, "That's Caesar."
And Jesus, in one of the most wonderful responses, worthy of a Zen master, says, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." Now, if you aren't hip, that sounds like saying, "Yeah, pay the taxes; but, you know, be true to Yahweh in your way separately." But what is hidden in the straight forward aphorism is the interesting question: Just what is Caesar's? And the answer, from Jesus' point of view at least, would have been, "Nothing."
It's that ancient, very Jewish, teaching tradition; pushing us to look deeper into our self-deceptions; pushing us to pay attention to what is really going on between people in our interpersonal relationships, rather than whether or not we are obeying somebody's moralistic rules; pushing us always to strive for a deeper level of intimacy in community that was the heart of that first layer.
Sadly, none of that is to be found in "The Passion of the Christ."
And that's the story that I own and I hope you don't get deceived out of.