Fourth Sunday of Easter : 21 April 2002

A detail from a painting by Giovanni Cimabue, in the lower level of the Basilica at Assisi.

The National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in San Francisco

Homilies from the National Shrine
of Saint Francis of Assisi

FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
21 APRIL 2002

[Acts 2:14, 36–41; 1 Peter 2:20–25; John 10:1–10]

OVER AND OVER AGAIN, the canonical Gospels and the rest of the New Testament make it unmistakably and undeniably clear that the early Church was Jewish. Nor is the essentially Jewish character of early Christianity a mere historical accident or an infantile phase through which the Church would first pass only to repudiate at a later point. The cultural milieu within which the Christian Gospel is first announced is Jewish. The most fundamental aspects of Apostolic doctrine are Jewish. The Christian Messiah is Jewish. Indeed, through Christianity, Jewish ethics, Jewish attitudes toward sexuality and Jewish monotheism have exerted a formative influence upon the whole world.

Yet in spite of the heavy debt of doctrine and culture which Christianity owes to Judaism, the New Testament records the fact of explicit conflict, both rhetorical and material, between the traditional Jewish cultural and religious authorities of Jesus’ time, on the one hand, and the emerging ministry and evangelical zeal of the very Jewish disciples of Jesus, on the other hand. Today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles (Ac 2: 14, 36–41) begins with an explicit reproach which Shimon bar Jonah, whom we call Simon Peter, himself a Galilean Pharisee, directed to his fellow Jews: “Let the whole House of Israel know beyond any doubt that God has made both Lord and Messiah this Jesus whom you crucified.” Moreover, though the brief selection we heard today from the Gospel of John (Jn 10: 1–10) seems innocuous enough, were we to have read the whole of that Johannine discourse together, we would have seen immediately that the fourth evangelist has picked a fight. John the son of Zebedee, also a Galilean Pharisee, has deliberately framed the “Good Shepherd” discourse of Jesus within a rhetorical context that explicitly criticizes those elements of first-century Palestinian Judaism who do not recognize in the person of Jesus of Nazareth the fulfillment of the long-held Messianic expectations of Israel.

To be quite fair both to the evangelist of the fourth Gospel and, for that matter, to Saint Luke, the Gentile convert to Christianity who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, these NT texts often embody, at least in part, a real struggle within first-century Palestinian Judaism itself. Early Christians, by and large, took sides with the Pharisaic or rabbinical positions on such doctrinal controversies as the resurrection of dead and the inauguration of a Messianic age of fulfillment. Unlike their brother Pharisees, however, the disciples of Christ will claim that both Mosaic doctrine and prophetic tradition point to Jesus as Messiah and Lord.

Indeed, a close, historical-critical reading of the NT makes it clear that doctrinal and intra-cultural controversy was the order of the day in the Israel of the Apostles. Zealots opposed Herodians and supported Essenes. Essenes implicitly criticized the monopoly that Sadducees exercised upon the temple cult. Likewise Pharisees had their famous disputes with Sadducees, one of which Saint Paul, who describes himself as a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin (Phil 3: 5), quite deliberately manipulates in order to throw a tribunal of the Sanhedrin into total chaos and so to escape their judgment. (It backfires on him, though.) Finally, within the larger aggregation of Galilean Pharisees themselves, Jesus and his disciples explicitly criticized those adherents to their own Pharasaic tradition in whom they saw a superficial or insincere expression of the common spirituality and doctrine. For what it’s worth, contemporary Roman authorities and scholars, who had a vital interest in understanding and controlling Jewish religious controversies, could barely detect a difference between the first-century factions that we now so confidently call Christian and Jewish.

If, then, controversy is part and parcel of the first-century Palestinian Jewish experience and the Christian scriptures merely reflect a specific partisan position within a larger context of unquestionably Jewish identity, what then does account for the long and painful history of anti-Semitism so deeply embedded in Western culture, a culture presumably shaped in large measure by the values of the Christian Gospel?

Sandra Schneiders, who teaches Scripture at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, has this to say of the somewhat inchoate, but nevertheless discernible, anti-Semitic features of the Gospel of John: “Undoubtedly, the evangelist would today repudiate absolutely [a] generalized anti-Judaism and its horrendous anti-Semitic progeny. But they arise from the internal literary dynamics of this symbolic text and thus are extremely powerful. Therefore, a heavy obligation is incumbent on anyone who teaches or preaches this Gospel to deal explicitly with this issue and to counter the natural tendency of readers to take ‘the Jews’ in John as a literal designation of all Jews, either of the time of Jesus and the Johannine community or of later times.”^[1] Well, at least today, I am that preacher upon whom the heavy obligation is incumbent.

Now, it cannot possibly have escaped anyone’s attention as to how terribly up-to-the-minute the issue of anti-Semitism really is. For one thing, the current eruption of seemingly unstoppable violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories has recently, in the words of an official in the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, “given cover” to long-standing sentiments of anti-Semitism that are deeply embedded in some parts of American culture. Moreover, the Bay Area, precisely because it sees itself as liberal and tolerant, has a harder time than some places believing that allegedly anti-Semitic activity isn’t really just a extreme or imprudent manifestation of anti-Zionist sensibilities.

Frankly, I’m not so sure. You see, I grew up thinking that anti-Semitism was a beast of the past, one that had been definitively slain, drawn and quartered by virtuous global liberalism’s indignant overthrow of Hitler’s National Socialism. And then I went to prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. There, at the very heart of liberal New England and among the children of America’s elite, I not infrequently heard the ugliest and most ridiculous statements about Jews that I had ever encountered. It seemed somewhat incongruous to me at the time, but the most salient feature of anti-Semitism is precisely its incongruity. Anti-Semitism could not, I believe, survive were it not for that necessary disjuncture between rhetoric and reality. But because America, like so much of the rest of the world, labors under the illusion that rhetoric is reality, anti-Semitism in our country thrives.

This condition of thriving, but often hidden, anti-Semitism as a cultural phenomenon really impedes America’s ability justly to address the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Most of the world believes that America favors Israel because American Jews, it is said, “control the media and control finance.” Shockingly, plenty of Americans believe the same thing. But this way of thinking, rooted as it is in reflexive, historical anti-Semitism, clouds our collective judgment and allows us to skip conveniently over the real issues. Blaming the Jews allows America to ignore its own disproportionate acquisition of the energy, food and other economic resources of the planet. Consequently, we never ask ourselves whether our country maintains its affluence and tranquility at the perpetual expense of the non-white, non-Western and increasingly non-Christian (therefore non-Jewish) rest of the world. Thus, Israel and the modern Jew become all too easily the symbolic scapegoat upon whom America projects its own sins.

Since my high school days, and certainly since I entered the Franciscan Order, I have come to believe that the way in which a community, even the Church, addresses the issues clustering around anti-Semitism provides a real litmus test for its commitment to justice and peace.

The moral credibility of the Catholic clergy in this country has perhaps reached its lowest point ever and so it may seem somewhat ironic for me to call for a rededication of Christian commitment to justice insofar as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is concerned. But no Christian can remain silent while Israeli snipers surround the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem attempting to starve out both the alleged Palestinian terrorists as well as the Franciscan friars and nuns who gave refuge there to Palestinian civilians. Nor should Christians, remembering that Our Lord Himself inaugurated the sacrament of the Eucharist at a Passover supper 2000 years ago, remain indifferent to the suffering of contemporary Jews whose loved ones are blown to bits by suicide bombers sent like angels of death at Passover from Palestinian enclaves where Hamas leaders scorn Arafat and express only contempt for human life.

As Christians, we must engage ourselves and our government in the search for peace and in the demand for justice, but ultimately we will have no credibility in calling for justice in the matter of Israeli aggression against Palestine or of Palestinian terrorism directed toward Israel if we are not capable of looking squarely into the eye of our own prejudices and overcoming them as well.

Therefore, when we hear Peter’s Pentecost sermon in the Acts of the Apostles, we ought not to identify ourselves too closely with the Apostle who reproaches the House of Israel for putting Jesus to death, as if the scripture intends for that to be a stable Christian attitude toward Judaism. Rather, we should identify ourselves with the ones who, upon hearing Peter’s words, took his reproach to heart and reformed their lives according to the Gospel of peace that Peter preached.

Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
THE NATIONAL SHRINE OF SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Pax Christi et bonum

1. Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. (New York: Crossroad, 1999) 76.