Sermons
Trinity 9 2009
The use of the phrase ‘the Jews’ in John’s gospel has led on occasion in Christian history to shameful expressions of Anti-Semitism. John uses this phrase when he wants to refer to the opponents of Jesus, he uses it to identify those who couldn’t accept Jesus’ mission and who would eventually force Jesus towards the cross. Modern readings of the phrase ‘the Jews’ try to perform a sort of side-step to avoid the Anti-Semitism by showing that John is referring to the wicked legalistic leaders of the Jewish people in particular the Pharisees who are seen as religious jobsworths insisting on the application of the Mosaic law in fine detail whilst illicitly cashing in on the people’s gullibility through charging them a tax to worship at the temple. I am not sure this is much better than the Anti-Semitism. However you spin it, when John says ‘the Jews’ he means the baddies.
Now I have preached many times on the dangers of legalism in religion, on the dangers of taking your given sacred text and imagining that it dropped from the sky to provide the world with a rule book on how to eat and drink and reproduce and wash and worship and just about everything. The sacred texts of the monotheistic religions are quite often used in this way at the moment and the result is the quite modern invention we call fundamentalism. Reading the Bible as if it were the faultless divine rule book would have been alien in most periods of Christian history which have been throughout enriched by many subtle approaches to the text be it typology, allegory, or pondering the stories and songs and law and history meditatively through the prayerful reading techniques of lectio divina. If you read the Bible as if it were a manual for living which should have an index so that you can quickly look up some fine moral point then you are getting much less than half the story. And because we are familiar with fundamentalism as an essentially modern movement we can make the mistake of imagining that ‘the Jews’ were a sort of Biblical Taliban, imposing absurd ancient laws on helpless people. But I think we should probably give them a bit more credit than that. They may have found themselves administering the legal system but it is easy to paint almost any lawyer as being more interested in the letter rather than the spirit. The Pharisees wouldn’t have read the Mosaic law without reflection, they would have read it prayerfully. So why do they come across as so wooden and unimaginative in John’s gospel.
One of the difficulties for us reading today’s gospel story so many years after it was written is our physical and temporal and cultural distance from the events. Because we are so familiar with Jesus using phrases such as ‘the bread of life’ to identify himself we can forget how utterly shocking these words would have been and it is that shock, that outrage that colours how we read the reaction of ‘the Jews’ to what Jesus says. It isn’t that they would have been unfamiliar with the use of bread as a metaphor for something sacred, it is the fact that they are so familiar with it that outrages them. In Deuteronomy Moses taught the Israelites that God gave them the manna, the bread from heaven, to show them that they were not to live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Bread or manna are seen as images of the Word of God and of the Law of God and of the Wisdom of God. In Proverbs divine wisdom invites all to come and eat of her bread and drink of her wine. Ecclesiasticus says that through this feeding on the wisdom of God people will be so delighted with their understanding of God that they will return for more. So when Jesus says he is the bread of life they hear Jesus to be taking one their most sacred metaphors and applying it o himself. No wonder they are shocked, how can he say these things when they know exactly who he is and where he is from – and that is up the road in Galilee not up in the sky with God. It is one thing enjoying the man’s conjuring tricks with loaves and fishes but who does he think he is exactly saying that he has come down from heaven? When he says he is the bread of heaven he is proclaiming himself superior to those things which are at the very heart of the Jews’ religion, the sacred Law, he is saying that unlike the manna and unlike even the wisdom of God when people come to him and feed on him they will no longer be hungry or thirsty.
So perhaps we should have a bit more sympathy for the Pharisees having their dearest beliefs overturned, perhaps we should be a little more understanding about why it is all too much for them to take, why, in the end they cannot accept the mission of Jesus, why they must oppose him. In the short term the voices of opposition to Jesus in the gospels prevail. Jesus does not impose his new kingdom, he does not recruit a rival troop of religious lawyers or a religious army to force his vision on those who will not accept it. Quite the reverse, he goes to his death praying for those who seek his life. And in the end this must be our own pattern and model when we encounter angry disbelief in response to the Christian proclamation. There is a fair bit of it about at the moment led by the angry Mr Dawkins with his own very legalistic and religious atheism. The age of the Christianising crusade is thankfully over but we need to watch we don’t get drawn into a war of words with opponents of our faith. Our responsibility is to proclaim the truth with love. Aggressive defence of our beliefs even if only in words is quite contrary to the model given by Jesus. We are to proclaim the truth in love and to pray for those for whom our beliefs are a scandal. A legalistically-minded atheist will be just as shocked and affronted as the Jews in today’s gospel if we try to wrest from him his dearest unbelief.
The opponents of the mission of Jesus in John’s gospel are definitely seen as the baddies, rather narrowly drawn characters always turning up to oppose the good news, but in real life they would have been as mixed a bag as everyone else, and they were men of faith through and through. One can’t help wondering if Jesus had a bit of a soft spot for them, I am sure he has one for Mr Dawkins.