Showing posts with label Judaism. Show all posts

Resurrection as a concept is not a Christian invention; it entered Judaism during the post-Exile period (cf the Book of Daniel) and by the time of Jesus it was widespread among Jews.  Not uniformly, however, since some factions like the Pharisees embraced the notion enthusiastically, while the Sadducees, strict adherents of the Pentateuch, rejected it.   NT Wright in a recent article points out seven ways in which the resurrection view of the earliest Christian community differed from that of its Jewish matrix.

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1. There is virtually no spectrum of belief on this subject within early Christianity.  The early Christians came from many strands within Judaism and from widely differing backgrounds within paganism...Christianity looks, to this extent, like a variety of Pharisaic Judaism.
2. In Second-Temple Judaism, resurrection is important but not that important...But in early Christianity resurrection has moved from the circumference to the center...
3. In Judaism it is usually left vague as to what sort of a body the resurrected will possess...But from the start the early Christians believed that the resurrection body, though it would certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object, would be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, would have new properties.  That is what Paul means by the "spiritual body".
4. ...The resurrection, as an event, has split into two...the resurrection itself has happened to one person in the middle of history, anticipating and guaranteeing the final resurrection of his people at the end of history.
5. ...The early Christians believed...that God had called them to work with him...to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.
6. ...In the Old Testament "resurrection" functions...as a metaphor for return from exile [Ezekiel 37]...in the New Testament resurrection is used [metaphorically] in relation to baptism and holiness...though without affecting the concrete referent of a future resurrection itself.
7. No one in Judaism had expected the Messiah to die, and therefore nobody had imagined the Messiah rising from the dead...It is impossible to account for the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah without the resurrection.

Since Passover falls during Holy Week this year, it is most appropriate to consider possible connections between the Passover seder and the Christian Eucharist.  (And even if the Last Supper did  not take place during a seder, as some New Testament scholars maintain, Passover was definitely in the air.)

A worthy effort in this direction is Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Roman Catholic scholar Brant Pitre (Doubleday 2011).  Pitre documents parallels between the Eucharist and a number of Jewish concepts such as messianism, Exodus, manna, the Bread of the Presence, and the paschal lamb.  What Jesus and his followers did was not to discard the seder but to reinterpret it in a radically new way.  Examples are found on pp 70-74.

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...the Last Supper was also different--radically different--from an ordinary Passover meal.  Any ancient Jew, including the apostles, could easily have seen this.  For one thing, most Passovers were celebrated within families, with the father leading and acting as head.  At the Last Supper, by contrast, Jesus acted as host and leader of the Twelve, even though he was not the father of any of the disciples.  Even more, at an ordinary Passover, the focus was on God's covenant with Abraham, the exodus from Egypt, and the entry into the promised land of Canaan.  Yet Jesus spoke instead of the "new covenant", prophesied by Jeremiah to be fulfilled in the age of salvation...Perhaps most significant, at an ordinary Jewish Passover, the entire liturgy revolved around the body and blood of the sacrificial Passover lamb.  First, the lamb would be slaughtered, and the priests in the Temple would pour out the blood of the lamb on the altar.  Then the Jews would bring the body of the lamb from the Temple to the Passover meal, and the father would explain its meaning at the meal.  Yet at the Last Supper, Jesus did something entirely different.  With his words of explanation, he shifted the focus away from the body and blood of the Passover lamb (of which there is no mention), and turned it toward his own body and blood.

... Along the same lines, before the Temple was destroyed, the climax of the Passover sacrifice was the pouring out of the Lamb's blood by the priests in the temple...[Jesus calls the Passover wine "my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many".]...When we compare Jesus' actions to these ancient Jewis traditions, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out his point.  By means of his words over the bread and wine of the Last Supper, Jesus is saying in no uncertain terms, "I am the new Passover lamb of the new exodus.  This is the Passover of the Messiah, and I am the new sacrifice".

Shawn Tribe of The New Liturgical Movement has put together a most informative post on the liturgical use of the so-called "righteous of the Old Testament" (mainly prophets) in the Eastern churches. Figures such as Abraham, Isaiah, and Elijah are commemorated with their own propers and icons, such as the one of Moses and the burning bush above. In the wake of Vatican II the western churches very laudably recovered the use of the Hebrew Scriptures in public worship, but could still stand, in my opinion, to incorporate some of these "ancestors in faith" into their liturgical calendars.

You can also click here for another Roman Catholic interpretation of typology.

Pinchas Lapide (1922-1997) was, among other things, an Orthodox rabbi, the Israeli consul in Milan, and a lecturer at Bar Ilan University. He also believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. To be sure, he did not think Jesus was divine or that he was the Messiah anticipated by the Jewish people. But he was convinced that God raised Jesus from the dead so that his followers would be galvanized into preaching Jesus' message throughout the world. In this way Jewish ethical monotheism would transcend the ethnic boundaries of the Jewish community.

Lapide expresses his ideas in The Resurrection of Jesus: a Jewish Perspective (Augsburg 1983). The excerpts below are on pp 85-93.

Did the cause of Jesus really end in failure?

Did the cross definitively refute any hope for the kingdom of God?

That must not be the case! That dare not happen! Many a heart must have cried out like this. For here more was at stake than the death of a proclaimer of salvation whose radiant confidence had infected a group of believers. They were not just concerned about consolation or the end of their own distress, but about God himself and the meaning of their life...

Jesus must rise in order that the God of Israel could continue to live as their heavenly Father in their hearts; in order that their lives would not become God-less and without meaning.

This categorical must was not the illusory wishful thinking of a deceptive flight from the world which conjures up for itself a mirage, but it was based on the Jewish insight that the God who is willing to love and to suffer with human beings cannot be a cruel despotic God like the idols of the Greeks and Romans. The Jewish God does not dwell high in the heavens in order to impose his will imperially on his subjects, but is a loving Father God who permits retort...

The categorical must of the resurrection which can be considered a part of the saving plan of God, therefore, was applicable only and alone to the small group of disciples of Jesus whose life it was able to change so that they became the founders of the church...

A few hours..before sunrise of the "third day" after Good Friday, that undefinable Easter experience took place which we cannot explain further, which as such is never described in the New Testament, but which has carried its effect into the whole world, phrased either as Jesus' "being raised" or "rising" from the dead.

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, has an interesting essay in Timesonline on a strong Darwinian argument for religion. Darwin noticed that all cultures value altruism; people generally hold those who make sacrifices for others in high regard. However, in strictly Darwinian terms, if evolution is nothing but a struggle to survive, then ruthlessness should prevail across the board. How to explain this paradox?

In The Descent of Man Darwin hypothesized that cultures with many altruistic individuals would have a selective advantage over societies in which everyone was looking out for Number One. However, for Darwin the precise mechanism for accomplishing this was "at present much too difficult to be solved".

But, as Rabbi Sacks states:

...that of course is precisely the function of religion. God is the voice of the other within the self. It is God who taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves, to welcome the stranger, care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, heed the unheeded, feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, and temper justice with compassion. Nietzsche, Darwin's younger contemporary, saw most clearly how unnatural these things are. Nature is the will to power. Faith, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is care for the powerless.

Without fully realizing what he had done, Darwin was pointing us to the central drama of civilization. Biological evolution favors individuals, but cultural evolution favors groups. So, as Judaism and Christianity both knew, there is a war within each of us as to which will prevail: self-regard or concern for others, egoism or altruism. Selfishness is advantageous to individuals, but disastrous to groups, and it is only as members of a group that we can survive at all. As Darwin himself put it, "Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected".

My commitment to Christian spirituality of a traditional cast does not preclude forays into other traditions, especially those within the Abrahamic family. The Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) combined academic rigor with a deep grounding in Kabbalah and Hasidism. A native of Warsaw, he attended an Orthodox yeshiva (religious school) and received Orthodox rabbinical ordination. He then studied at the University of Berlin and the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums where he received both a doctorate and a Liberal (= Reform) ordination. He escaped the Holocaust (many of his relatives did not) and ended up at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Besides writing a number of books, he was active in civil rights and Jewish-Christian dialogue. He met with Thomas Merton several times.

Man's Quest for God contains a number of insights into prayer that are worth mulling over. I am grateful to Michael K Marsh, a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas, whose blog Interrupting the Silence has a recent post citing several quotes that I reproduce below. I've also included the site in my own blogroll.

Of all the things we do, prayer is the least expedient, the least worldly, the least practical. This is why prayer is an act of self-purification. This is why prayer is an ontological necessity.

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live.

In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble, and climb, discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and what course we should choose. Prayer makes visible the right and reveals what is hampering and false...Sometimes prayer is more than a light before us; it is a light within us.

To avoid prayer constantly is to force a gap between man and God which can widen into an abyss.

The purpose of prayer is not the same as the purpose of speech. The purpose of speech is to inform; the purpose of prayer is to partake.

The privilege of praying is man's greatest distinction.

To live without prayer is to live without God, to live without a soul.

He who has never prayed is not fully human.

The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God.