JESUS AS JEWISH PROPHET
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
May 20, 2007
Jesus concludes his ministry as he begins it: proclaiming that he’s the fulfillment of the Jewish prophets. This morning’s gospel lesson[i] is taken from the very end of the book of Luke. Jesus explains to his disciples that “everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”[ii] Near the beginning of Luke, after we’re told how Jesus was baptized at the age of thirty and then spent forty days in the wilderness, he returns to his hometown of Nazareth. He kicks off his ministry, which ends up lasting less than three years, by standing up in the local synagogue, reading from the prophet Isaiah, and then explaining that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”[iii] The words he read say: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free…”[iv]
It’s a message of freedom that Jesus brings, right at the beginning and then again at the end. We human beings have experienced oppression, but now we can go free. We’ve been captive, but now we’re released. We’ve been impoverished and we’ve been blind, but that’s all behind us now. We’re free to see what lies ahead of us clearly and to flourish. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” says Jesus, as reported in the gospel of John.[v]
By what are we imprisoned and oppressed? Here at Stanford, by stress in facing exams and term papers and theses, in finishing the academic year and perhaps a degree program at the university. We’re imprisoned and oppressed by financial stress, job and career stress, the stress of vocational discernment. We’re blinded by our material desires, our ambitions for power and prestige, our vices like arrogance and envy. But Jesus tells us at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end that there’s good news: we could be as free as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.[vi] All we need to do is to strive first for the kingdom of God, and then the fulfillment of our other needs will follow, or perhaps be transformed. As my own college chaplain used to say, “There are two ways to be rich: one is to have a lot of money; the other is to have few needs.”[vii]
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote his second book of twenty back in 1974 with the title This Hebrew Lord. He reminds us there that “The Bible is a Hebrew book telling the story of the Hebrew people. Jesus was a Hebrew Lord.” Spong asks us to develop “Hebrew eyes” and “Hebrew attitudes toward life” if we’re to gain anything of value from the Bible in our day.[viii] That means rather than being otherworldly and pious in our attitudes, we must be fully alive to this world and face its challenges head on with courage. The good person in Hebrew eyes is not a religiously-bounded person, looking to an afterlife, but a free person in this life, deeply committed to making this world a better place for all.[ix]
We must never forget that the historical Jesus was a first century Palestinian Jew, as so many anti-Semitic Christians have apparently forgotten or ignored since. He acted and taught within Judaismin the occupied nation of Israel.[x] Jesus was certainly involved in critiquing his own tradition, but his criticism was always from the inside. Rather than calling his people to abandon Judaism for a new and different religion, he was asking them to become the true people of the one true God. Jesus wanted Israel reconstituted – nothing more and nothing less.[xi]
Because of this Jesus was a prophet of Israel. I don’t mean that in terms of one who foretells the future, but instead I refer to one who calls the Jewish people to account, speaking on behalf of God.[xii] Jesus referred to himself as a prophet, he acted like a prophet, and he didn’t correct other people when they referred to him as a prophet.[xiii]
His main prophetic message came in his announcement of the coming of the kingdom of God. He wanted us to understand that it was breaking into the world, beginning the total transformation of all that was known. This was not a matter of military rebellion against the Romans, as many Jews of the time were hoping. The term “Kingdom of God” had been code for this kind of revolution. But instead Jesus seemed to mean that God’s rule was coming to replace that of all political authorities.[xiv]
In order to begin living in relation to this in-breaking kingdom of God, a radical equality was called for by Jesus. Class, rank and gender were to be all mixed up. Eating together was central to Jesus’ mode of operation, and he invited everyone to the same table -- women and men, slaves and free people, socially privileged and socially excluded, ritually pure and ritually impure.[xv] A world with God totally in charge, rather than Caesar or Herod, requires social justice. The poor become rich and the hungry are satisfied.[xvi]
Jesus was a political radical, therefore, even if he wasn’t a political revolutionary. He came from the marginalized peasant class in a marginalized village in the Galilee, a region north of Jerusalem that was undergoing rapid social change at the time. His hometown of Nazareth was just a few miles from the largest city of Galilee, Sepphoris, which was also the political center for the Jewish King Herod. So he could easily compare huge differences in wealth and culture within Judaism. His preaching and actions demonstrated an unusual sensitivity to the poor and the oppressed.[xvii]
During the last week of his life, when he arrived in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover, he went to the temple and violently disrupted its central fiscal, sacrificial, and liturgical operations,[xviii] as reported in all four gospels.[xix] He threw over the tables of the moneychangers and ran them out of the temple. He also threw over the seats of people selling animals to be sacrificed. The account in John has him using a whip to drive out not only the moneychangers and sellers, but also large sacrificial animals like sheep and oxen.[xx] This was likely the immediate reason for his arrest and execution, since neither Jewish nor Roman authorities could tolerate this kind of dramatic disorder at the very center of the capital’s life during this busy holiday season.[xxi]
Today’s gospel lesson has us out beyond the crucifixion and resurrection. It describes Jesus’ ascension, after he’s commissioned his disciples to go out and spread his good news of freedom from oppression, and freedom from captivity to sin, to as many as will hear it, starting in Jerusalem. For us, I think a central message of this first century Jewish prophet is how easily and thoroughly each of us can be captured by what we imagine to be the ways and demands of the world. As William Wordsworth once wrote, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”[xxii] Marion Wright Edelman, the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, has described having a great time growing up without a lot of money – making up games that didn’t need store-bought toys or directions from adults, going out into the yard with other children to play red light – green light, dodge ball, Mother May I, hide-and-seek and hopscotch.[xxiii]
What’s happened to us and our children that we’ve become so tied to our televisions and our computers and the consumer culture that surrounds them? Wordsworth two hundred years ago was lamenting that “Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”[xxiv] Edelman has written a prayer that goes like this:
O God, I thank You for this day of life
For eyes to see the sky
For ears to hear the birds
For feet to walk amidst the trees
For hands to pick the flowers from the earth
For a sense of smell to breathe in the sweet perfumes of nature
For a mind to think about and appreciate the magic of everyday miracles
For a spirit to swell in joy at Your mighty presence everywhere.[xxv]
It may have been much easier in the Galilean countryside where Jesus lived most of his life, than in the capital city where he died, to send up this kind of prayer as he preached his sermon on the mount and asked his listeners to behold the birds of the air and the lilies of the fields. But so also should it be easy for us here in the Bay area of California, with our magnificent weather and natural surroundings, to hear the birds, smell the flowers, and breathe in the sweet perfumes of nature.
Jesus, the Jewish prophet, promoted another kind of freedom that calls to us as well in the twenty-first century. He proclaimed good news to the poor, and he called for liberation of the socially, politically and economically oppressed. A recent result has been the “liberation theology” movement in Latin America[xxvi] which began after the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church in the nineteen sixties. Liberation theologians have challenged capitalist development that leaves the poor behind, as well as the military dictatorships and political repression that often accompany that development. “Base Christian communities” were established throughout Latin America during the late twentieth century that combined Bible study, mutual support, and practical work to improve living conditions.[xxvii]
There were politically radical aspects to the movement in its challenge to local ruling oligarchies for taking advantage of peasant peoples and in its challenge to the First World for profiting from the Third World’s poverty and oppression.[xxviii] Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer earlier wrote from a Nazi prison that the challenge for Christians is “to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”[xxix] This, of course, is what the Jewish prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, Micah and Jesus have always called us to do.
This is what leads a current, activist Christian like Marian Wright Edelman to write a prayer like this:
God, is America’s dream big enough for me?
For the little Black boy born the wrong color in the wrong place
to the wrong parents in some folk’s sight?
God, is America’s justice fair enough for me? For the little Brown or White girl
labeled from birth as second best?
God, is America’s economy open to us? For the many children who have to stay
Poor on the bottom so too few can stay rich on the top?
God, does America have enough for me in a land of plenty for some,
but of famine for others?
God, is America’s dream large enough for me? I who am poor, average, disabled,
girl, Black, Brown, Native American, White?
Is America for me?
From the perspective of the Jewish prophet, the question is whether or not life itself – in its potential fullness and abundance – is for all or only for the few, here and now, in this world. Jesus, the Jewish prophet, asked his disciples to pray that the kingdom of God would come, and that God’s will would be done, on earth as it is in heaven.[xxx] In his last instructions before his death, according to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus, the Jewish prophet, explained that there was nothing more important than feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those in prison.[xxxi]
So, in conclusion, I take two lessons away from Jesus’, the Jewish prophet’s, message of freedom: First, we’re urged to release our material yearnings, our anxieties and our stress and replace them with a deep appreciation of God’s creation in nature. Second, we’re asked to take part in the social liberation of our fellow human beings from man’s inhumanity to man – from poverty, bigotry, and oppression of all kinds. The prophet’s message may seem difficult and demanding, but it’s also one of hope and inspiration. Because it has a vision of how things will be when the kingdom of God finally comes in all its glory: a unified human race, nations living together as comrades, unconditional friendship, and life itself as a work of high art. So be it. Amen.
NOTES
1
[i] Luke 24: 44-53.
[ii] Luke 24: 44.
[iii] Luke 4: 21.
[iv] Luke 4: 18.
[v] John 10:10.
[vi] Matthew 6: 26-29.
[vii] William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 57.
[viii] John Shelby Spong, This Hebrew Lord: A Bishop’s Search for the Authentic Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), p. 31.
[ix]Ibid., pp. 33-34.
[x] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 103; Marcus J. Borg, “Seeing Jesus: Sources, Lenses and Method,” in Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), p. 8.
[xi]Wright, “Mission and Message,” in Borg and Wright, Meaning of Jesus. p. 51.
[xii] Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 11; See also Mark 6:4 and 6:15, Matthew 21:11 and 21:46, Luke 4:24, 7:16 and 13:33, and John 4:19, 4:44, 6:14, and 9:17.
[xiii] Wright, “Mission and Message,” in Borg and Wright, Meaning of Jesus, pp. 33.
[xiv] Wright, “Mission and Message,” pp. 33-35.
[xv] Crossan, Jesus, pp. 67-71.
[xvi] Borg, “Jesus Before and After Easter,” in Borg and Wright, Meaning of Jesus, p. 75.
[xvii] Borg, “Jesus Before and After Easter,” pp. 58-59, 64.
[xviii] Crossan, Jesus, p. 131.
[xix] Mark 11: 15-19; Matthew 21: 12-17; Luke 19:45-48; John 2:12-15.
[xx] John 2:15,
[xxi] Crossan, Jesus, p. 130, 152.
[xxii] William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much with Us,” 1807.
[xxiii] Marian Wright Edelman, Guide My Feet (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. xvi.
[xxiv] Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much with Us.”
[xxv] Edelman, Guide My Feet, p. 79.
[xxvi] Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries, p. 218.
[xxvii] Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, “A Concise History of Liberation Theology,” from their book, Introducing Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).
[xxviii]Ibid.
[xxix] Dietrich Bonhoffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, as cited in William Sloane Coffin, Living the Truth in a World of Illusions (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 113.
[xxx] Matthew 6: 9-13.
[xxxi] Matthew 25: 31-46.