Over the weekend, I saw numerous comments from Jewish Twitter users expressing concern concerning the week to come back. The Christian celebration of Holy Week brings with it increased anti-Semitic comments, threats and violence, and it has for over a thousand years. The justification is all the time the identical: “The Jews killed Jesus.”
In fact, that reading of the crucifixion is totally mistaken. Popes have denounced it, mainstream publications just like the The Day by day Beast and Slate have decried it, and so have many Jewish and Christian writers and publications. America’s James Martin, S.J., wrote an article on the subject just last week.
Besides, you’d still be justified in feeling confused about where the church actually stands on the difficulty, because every 12 months in our Good Friday liturgy, we publicly proclaim the version of the Passion that again and again identifies Jesus’ murderers as “the Jews.” We have now 4 Passion accounts to select from, yet we proceed to insist on using the version that almost all closely echoes the anti-Semitic argument that “the Jews killed Jesus.”
The Christian celebration of Holy Week brings with it increased anti-Semitic comments, threats, and violence, and it has for over a thousand years.
Reading John’s Passion on Good Friday causes real harm. And our practice is way more a matter of tradition than any theological necessity. We want to make use of a unique Passion as a substitute.
The Gospel of John and “the Jews”
The term “the Jews” (hoi Ioudaoi in the unique Greek) occurs almost 70 times within the Gospel of John. Not every instance is actively hostile; within the Passion story, as an example, Jesus describes the synagogue as a spot where “the Jews” gather. But 29 times, including 11 inside the 82 verses of the fervour story, we see the term used specifically for many who need to eliminate Jesus and his followers. So, in Chapter 19: “[Pilate] said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” (Jn 19:15).
In The Oxford Handbook of Johannine Studies, the scholar Adele Reinhartz argues that the more hostile uses of hoi Ioudaoi “have a much stronger emotional impact” than other times the term is used. The explanation is straightforward: They engage the audience’s imagination. “By describing murderous intents and extreme behaviour,” Dr. Reinhartz writes, “they capture the eye and emotion of the audience greater than other kinds of references.”
At any time when you might be coping with a passage from Scripture that doesn’t appear to make sense, a great strategy is to dig a bit deeper. Is our translation truly accurate to the time and culture during which the text was written? What did the passage mean inside its proper historical context?
Reading John’s Passion on Good Friday causes real harm. And our practice is way more a matter of tradition than any theological necessity. We want to make use of a unique Passion as a substitute.
Relating to John’s use of “the Jews,” such analyses center on two principal questions: What did John mean by the term? And what may need been his reason for using it the best way he did?
Scholars generally agree that despite the way it sounds, John didn’t mean “all Jews.” Dr. Reinhartz notes how John uses the term interchangeably with the Pharisees, at one point even in the identical passage. For John, “first-century Ioudaioi weren’t a monolithic undifferentiated group,” she writes. Indeed, he continuously alludes to the Judaism of Jesus himself. As an illustration, John says that after Jesus’ death he’s wrapped in linen cloths “in accordance with the burial custom of the Jews” (Jn 19:40).
[Related: No, ‘the Jews’ did not kill Jesus]
The Jewish Scripture scholar Wesley Howard-Brook holds this view. “Neither Jesus in John nor John the Baptist in Luke could imagine God wanting people to desert the covenant,” he writes in The Jews Did Not Kill Jesus, an edited collection of essays from biblical scholars. “The other is true: they were calling people back to the covenant.”
Dr. Howard-Brook sees hoiIoudaoi in John as “an ideological category.” In a Zoom interview, he said that the term describes “those that discover with the Jerusalem temple and its system under Roman imperial control.”
This group of individuals, translated by Dr. Howard-Brook as “the Judeans,” see Jesus as a threat because he claims that he’s the living Temple of God. If Jesus is the Temple, Dr. Howard-Brook explained, then “you don’t have to come back to Jerusalem 3 times a 12 months and spend all of your money there. You possibly can go anywhere and experience God.”
Throughout the Gospel, John uses binary pairs to represent good and evil. As Jesus represents all things good, there must be some person or individuals who represent entirely the other.
Obviously, this threatened each the facility base and pocketbooks of the religious elite. But Dr. Howard-Brook insists that hoi Ioudaoi also encompassed lots of the strange people of Jerusalem. “Consider Washington, D.C., today,” Dr. Howard-Brook said. “In the event you run a restaurant or a gas station, you’re glad the federal government is there no matter your politics. Without it, you may have no business.” If nobody has to come back to Jerusalem, everyone from hotel owners to souvenir shop staff suffer, so that they, too, wanted Jesus brought down.
As to why John was so persistent and strident in his attacks on hoi Ioudaoi, Dr. Reinhartz identifies three possible interpretations, which will not be mutually exclusive: John is attempting to punish the Pharisees for expelling his community from the synagogue; John is trying to claim the distinctiveness and superiority of his community over that of the Pharisees; or it’s a product of John’s overall dualistic rhetorical framework. Throughout the Gospel, John uses binary pairs to represent good and evil—light and darkness, life and death, above and below. As Jesus represents all things good, there must be some person or individuals who represent entirely the other. That, for John, is the Ioudaoi.
An answer that doesn’t quite work: Explaining it.
In Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews, Jon Sweeney, the book’s editor, argues that one strategy for solving the issue of using John on Good Friday could be to take a moment before the proclamation of the Passion and contextualize the account within the ways in which I just did. John isn’t talking about all Jewish people. The church condemns any such interpretation and in addition any scapegoating of Judaism, and it teaches that Jesus underwent his death freely, “so as that each one may reach salvation” (“Nostra Aetate,” No. 4).
“It could take three minutes,” Mr. Sweeney told me in a phone interview. But just once in his life has he seen a priest attempt this. Truthfully, that’s more times than I even have seen—and that features the few times I even have presided at Good Friday services myself.
“The Good Friday reading just isn’t normally only a reading,” Mr. Sweeney notes. “It’s a performance,” something that is supposed to stir us on the deepest level.
But I ponder if we don’t see that occur on Good Friday because though explaining the context is the fitting solution, it comes on the mistaken moment. The church does need to elucidate these issues in John in order that Catholics understand what he is definitely saying. It also must proceed to discuss its own historical culpability in anti-Semitism and to face publicly with Jewish people in fighting against anti-Semitism.
But on Good Friday, we are supposed to confront the murder and self-giving sacrifice of the Son of God. Most homilists I do know will inform you it just isn’t a day where you really need to say much in any respect; the service itself speaks so eloquently.
This highlights one other problem with simply accommodating our use of John’s passion: “The Good Friday reading just isn’t normally only a reading,” Mr. Sweeney notes. “It’s a performance,” something that is supposed to stir us on the deepest level.
“Is there another moment within the church 12 months where we’re so attempting to discover with the suffering Christ?” Mr. Sweeney asked me in our conversation. “I’m there with him, I’m sorrowing, I’m in pain…. There’s an entire emotional identification component to Good Friday that’s different than another experience of church.”
From the Middle Ages, there are examples of Passion plays ending with Christians throwing rocks through synagogue windows and attacking Jewish people.
That makes Good Friday “the worst possible day of the 12 months within the church” for a seemingly anti-Semitic text, he said. He compares it to visiting a friend who has just been seriously beaten up after which running into individuals who fit the outline of his attackers. What are you going to do? “You kick their a**,” Mr. Sweeney says.
And historically, this is precisely what has happened. From the Middle Ages, there are examples of Passion plays ending with Christians throwing rocks through synagogue windows and attacking Jewish people.
A greater solution: Use a unique Gospel.
Why can we proceed to make use of John’s Passion when we’ve got three other selections? Mr. Sweeney wonders whether it is usually because of its theatricality. “Possibly it lends itself to dramatic performance in a way that the others don’t,” he said.
Based on John Baldovin, S.J., a sacramental theologian, John’s text is usually seen as “essentially the most triumphant.”
“John has this paradoxical approach to the crucifixion,” Father Baldovin explained. “Jesus may be very much on top of things, far more so than the opposite Gospels. So it’s normally considered the Gospel that best leads into the resurrection.”
However the tradition of reading John on Good Friday comes out of historical traditions that don’t have anything to do with theology. Within the seventh century, the earliest days of the Lectionary, Christian practice was to read all 4 passions during Holy Week, Father Baldovin said. The alternative of which Gospel to read when was simply a matter of publication order. “Sunday was all the time Matthew, Monday was all the time Mark, Tuesday was Luke, and Good Friday was John.” John was read on Good Friday “because that was the order of the Latest Testament,” said Father Baldovin.
On Good Friday, the purpose just isn’t to wonder who needs to be blamed for the crucifixion, but how far Jesus was willing to go for us, the depth of his love.
I asked Father Baldovin if there was anything stopping the church from changing which Passion gets read on Good Friday. As an illustration, could we use the Gospel of Luke, which we heard on Palm Sunday this 12 months? “Theoretically, there’s no reason,” he said. “Nevertheless it would take loads to alter it.”
He also notes that the church has already made some changes to the Good Friday liturgy out of concerns that it got here across as anti-Semitic. In 1962, the liturgy was modified to eliminate the term “the perfidious Jews” from the prayers of petition, but there are newer changes as well.
In 2008, after authorizing a latest edition of the Roman Missal the previous 12 months, Pope Benedict again modified the prayer. “It’s quite beautiful,” Father Baldovin notes. “We pray for many who share the traditional faith with us.” Among the many solemn intercessions, we ask: “Allow us to pray also for the Jewish people, to whom the Lord our God spoke first, that he may grant them to advance in love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant.”
However the indisputable fact that we’ve got modified other elements within the Good Friday liturgy doesn’t solve the issue posed by a yearly dramatic reading of Christ’s murder during which we’re repeatedly told that “the Jews” are his murderers. And changing the interpretation may not work either, as scholars have a variety of opinions on who exactly was meant by hoi Ioudaoi.
The Gospel of John actually has its place within the church and in our liturgical life. But on Good Friday, the purpose just isn’t to wonder who needs to be blamed for the crucifixion, but how far Jesus was willing to go for us, the depth of his love. The Passion we elect to read on this most holy and solemn of days should reflect that.