May 4, 2014 – Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14a; 36 – 41
How do we preach the gospel without blaming the Jews?
Why should we be concerned about this today? Few of us Presbyterians across Canada have Jewish friends, neighbours, or co – workers. Yet we are all familiar with the stereotypes and suspicions that are embedded in our cultural DNA. We should remember the tragic history of the church, over centuries of teaching against Judaism, and advocating harassment and persecution, or tolerating it. Maybe we’ve been taught that our faith completes and supersedes theirs. Maybe we’ve been told that Jews, and Jews alone, crucified Jesus.
In medieval times, Christians in Europe advocated mass baptisms of Jews. They believed it would hasten Christ’s return. Some North American Christians today offer unquestioning support to the State of Israel. They believe Israel’s existence must be secure if Jesus is to come back on time.
Christians tend to read the Bible through a lens that doesn’t permit an unbiased view of the people of Israel and their faith in God. We ignore the plain fact that Jesus never denied the faith or rejected the people of Israel. Christians have used some of Paul’s words against Jews for generations, yet Paul never ceased to struggle with his identity as a Jew or the place of his people in God’s plan.
In our first reading today Peter preaches to “Men of Judea and all who are in Jerusalem,” about “this Jesus whom you crucified.” There it is, in black and white. Peter addresses the heads of Judean households and all people who have gathered in Jerusalem for the harvest festival. That includes Jews by birth and converts (Acts 2:10), Cretans and Arabs, too (verse 11).
Acts isn’t a journalistic account of the first days of the church. It’s a history, crafted with purpose, no doubt relying on many stories of events that may not have happened precisely as told. Luke’s purpose was theological and apologetic. History – writing in New Testament times wasn’t what it is today.
To the author of Acts it was simple fact that the people of Jerusalem and Judea were complicit in the death of Jesus. That’s what he was told. It didn’t serve his or anyone’s purpose to mention the Romans, who had both power and good reason to put an end to all the trouble Jesus caused. If we read the gospels without the lens that darkens our view of Jews, we find a story of influential religious leaders in carefully – maintained collusion with colonizers, setting Jesus up to take a fall and prevent serious trouble for all the people (John 18:14). We’ll also see Jesus, the Galilean Jew, in dispute with representatives of the authorized religion of Jerusalem and Judea. If we look for good scholarship about the gospels, we’ll learn the stories behind them were told in a time when many followers of Jesus were in dispute with their Jewish families and neighbours, a time when both Jews and Christians struggled to live as freely as possible within the Roman Empire.
The first Christian stories that are our inheritance in faith spoke first to circumstances very different from ours. None of those stories, and nothing in the New Testament, justifies blaming Jews for past events or present problems. We read Peter’s words today and we have to confess, “Yes, that’s how he probably saw it. So the story goes.” But don’t forget, Peter couldn’t say “you” without meaning “we.” He was a Jew who was in Jerusalem when Jesus was executed.
We hear Peter’s sermon today. When he says “you” we know he means “us.” When we put away our interpretive lens we can enter the story, join the crowd, and remember the cross was all humanity’s “no” to God’s “yes.” Then we can turn and hear God’s “yes” again.
