Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, October 23 2016
Joel 2.23-32; 2 Timothy 4.6-8, 16-18; Luke 18.9-14
Páraic Réamonn, St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew in the days of the second temple, calling his people to repentance and renewal.
Luke the evangelist was a gentile Christian two generations later, writing his Gospel and the Book of Acts at a time when Christians and Jews were just beginning their long descent into mutual hostility and hatred.
This makes a difference to how we are to understand today’s parable.
Traditionally, Christians have read the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector as condemning the first and praising the second.
Luke, as we heard, positively incites us to this reading. He introduces the story as addressed to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. He ends it by tacking on a stray saying of Jesus: “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” This almost compels translators to render the punchline of the story as they do: “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other”. But this is not the only way to translate the line and, when we read this short story by Jesus in its original context, not the most plausible.
The irony is that when we read the parable through Luke’s eyes, we end up exalting ourselves for our humility, thanking God that we are not like this Pharisee, and regarding him with contempt.
This can’t possibly be right, because Jesus regularly tells parables not to reinforce our prejudices but to pull the rug from under our complacent feet.
*
If we are going to understand this story as Jesus intended it, we need to cleanse our hearts and to cleanse our minds. We need to wash the whole tradition of Christian anti-Judaism right out of our hair. And we need to go back to his context in first-century Judea. In that context, how would his hearers have heard the story?
In first-century Judea, Pharisees were praised and tax-collectors condemned.
Pharisees were praised because they were scrupulous in the efforts to obey God’s commandments. Their guidelines for worship, prayer and righteous living were widely respected.
The Pharisee in this story is almost a caricature of a righteous Jew. He takes things to extremes. Jews were required to fast just once a year, on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. He fasts twice a week, most probably to make atonement for the whole people, for all Israel. He gives a tenth of his income, tithing even things that should already have been tithed, just to be on the safe side. When he thanks God, the Greek word is eucharisto, from which we get our English word “eucharist” – one of the words for the sacrament we shall shortly celebrate. We should not suppose that he is not really thanking God but rather congratulating himself on how wonderful he is.
Tax collectors, by contrast, were widely despised. They were agents of the Roman government occupying Judea, and they were notoriously dishonest. Later, in the Mishnah, they would be classed with murderers and robbers.
Well might the tax collector in this story stand far off, beat his breast, and pray for God’s mercy. And yet, says Jesus, he goes down to his house justified.
If we read the story as our NRSV Bible translates it, he goes down justified and the Pharisee doesn’t. But this is a translation choice, and not the most likely.
We need here to think in Jewish terms.
When the prophet Hosea says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (6.6), he’s not suggesting that the good people of Judah close down the temple or redevelop it as a night club. He’s saying that, even more than sacrifices and burnt offerings, God wants his people to show compassion and to do justice.
It’s the same thing here. Underlying Luke’s Greek is an Aramaic word, min, which is often used in an exclusive sense but can also mean “more than”.
Jesus, on this reading, is not saying that the repentant tax collector is justified and the righteous Pharisee is not. He is saying that even more than this Pharisee who fulfils all righteousness and then some, this corrupt, compromised collaborator goes down to his home justified – because he repents.
His first-century hearers would find this truly shocking, but repentance, after all, is the business Jesus is in – his Father’s business, calling all of us to repentance and renewal.
How are we, here and now, to live? How are we to show gratitude to God for God’s grace towards us? How are we to recognize humbly and realistically how little we return love for love – our love of neighbour and stranger for God’s love of us?
*
I’ve been labouring a point for half my sermon, but I’ve been labouring it for a purpose. Churches today are often critical of the state of Israel.
But Christians cannot criticize Israel without first recognizing and rooting out from our minds every last trace of Christian anti-Judaism. We have to earn the right to criticize, and we have to criticize for the right reasons.
Going round Scotland with Vivien last month, I found myself arguing a double case.
For centuries Christian Europe was unwilling to treat the Jews of Europe as human beings. Even after Jewish emancipation spread across the continent in the 19th century, many Europeans were unwilling to accept their Jewish neighbours as equal citizens. Emancipation in many places created a vicious backlash in the form of modern, racist antisemitism – an antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s Germany.
The Austrian journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl invented political Zionism because of his experience as a Jew in 19th-century Europe. He argued that Europe would always hate the Jews, and that Jews, therefore, had no other choice but to go somewhere else and create a state of their own. He was wrong about that, in my view, and it is part of our calling as Christians to prove him wrong, but he certainly had his reasons.[1]
The trouble is, when you go to Palestine to create a state of your own, you run into the problem of the Arab Muslims and Christians who are already living there.
What was for the Jews of Israel the war of independence in 1947-48 was for these Palestinians the Nakba, the catastrophe, in which 750,000 of them lost their homes and possessions, ending up in a contemporary exile from which they have yet to return.
And so it has continued to the present. Good news for the Jews has been bad news for the Palestinians. Today, it isn’t even good news for the Jews.
*
While we were in Scotland, I read a headline in Haaretz I never thought to see. “Israel,” wrote Arnon Degani, “is a settler-colonial state – and that’s OK.”
I half-agree with him.
Settler colonial states, Degani explains, are established by settlers moving from one part of the world to another, transforming that territory into their own independent country. In all historical cases, he admits, this transformation is achieved through violence: violence against the culture, the land possession, the political standing, and sometimes even the very existence of the original inhabitants.[2]
Many countries fall within this settler-colonial definition: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and most notably the United States.
Recognizing this, he suggests, pulls the rug from under those who single out Zionism and the state of Israel as especially or uniquely evil. I agree. Israel is not the only settler-colonial state in history and by no means the worst.
For 70 years, the Arabs of Palestine have paid a heavy price for the antisemitism of Christian and post-Christian Europe. They are paying it still today; and that will never be ok, until together we agree to put it right.
*
Let me come, finally, to the title of my sermon.
There are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t. We are called to be the second kind.
When we moved apartment a year ago, our next-door neighbour invited us to the Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies for a screening of the film One Rock, Three Religions.
It’s a documentary about our connections as Christians, Jews and Muslims to one of the world’s most revered and most conflict-laden places – the Haram al-Sharif on which the second temple once stood.
“Without memory there is no identity,” says David Neuhaus in the film. “You are nobody if you don’t remember where you come from.”
That’s true. But it’s also true that we are absolutely nowhere if we don’t know where we’re going or refuse to acknowledge those who are going with us.
We need to go up to Jerusalem to pray. We need to give thanks to God for all God’s goodness towards us and to admit to ourselves and to each other how poorly we respond to God’s mercy in acts of compassion and lovingkindness.
And then we need to go down from Jerusalem arm in arm and hand in hand. We need to go down from Jerusalem together, for only so can we find our common home.
Hymns
Great God, your love has called us here (CH4 484)
How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts (CH4 52: Psalm 84.1-5)
Children of God, reach out to one another (CH4 521)
For your generous providing (CH4 655)
God is working his purpose out (CH4 235)
Sources
Arnon Degani, “Israel Is a settler colonial state – and that’s OK”, Haaretz September 13 2016
Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover, 1988)
Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (London: SCM, 1992)
Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington & Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1993)
Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014)
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 2006)
One Rock, Three Religions
Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myth, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008)
Klyne R Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008)
Notes
[1] For the avoidance of doubt: I want to argue against Herzl’s view that gentile antisemitism is innate, written as it were into the DNA of gentiles, and that therefore the only solution to the Jewish question is (to borrow a Northern Irish phrase) a Jewish state for a Jewish people, with a built-in Jewish majority – and never mind the natives.
[2] Gabriel Piterberg (p.53) writes that colonialism is bad news for the colonized but settler colonialism is really bad news.