Pressure points of Holy Week: Reflections in light of Christian anti-Judaism
Even if we are not able to attend Holy Week services this year, we will hopefully be praying alongside each other, contemplating Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection; perhaps we will recall familiar parts of the liturgy, which have made an impression on us. At this, the apex of our penitential season and its resolution, the Revd Prof Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski reminds us to be mindful of the ways in which our liturgical practices might themselves require repentance. Fr Daniel is Duncalf-Villavaso Professor of Church History at the Seminary of the Southwest, TX. He is the author of The More Torah, The More Life: A Christian Commentary on Mishnah Avot (Peeters, 2018).
It is fair to say that until recently most Christians had thought the problem of prejudice and violence against Jews was in the past. When the horrors of the Holocaust had been fully revealed after the Second World War, many countries actively worked to discourage public expressions of animus towards Jews and ensuring fuller protection of their civil rights. Christian churches led the way in this regard. The Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council denounced the deicide charge that the Jews were uniquely responsible for the death of Jesus and continued to bear a bloodguilt for this action. In the conciliar document Nostra Aetate, the church declared that God continued to abide in a covenantal relationship with the Jewish people and that the church had a duty to reconcile with them. Many Protestant churches followed a similar trajectory, with Anglican bodies prominent among them. During World War Two, Archbishop William Temple founded the Council of Christians and Jews to foster greater harmony between the two groups in Great Britain. The Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church of the United States (to name a few) all issued teaching documents designed to reform and correct views towards the Jews.
Substantial work has been done across the Anglican Communion in ensuring that teaching and preaching moves away from harmful caricatures of the Jewish people. Where significant Jewish populations exist in provinces of the Anglican Communion, strong relationships typically exist with Anglican churches both regionally and locally. But work remains to be done, especially in the area of the liturgy, arguably the heartbeat of contemporary Anglicanism. Unfortunately, Anglican liturgies can continue to harbor tacit anti-Jewish sentiments or teachings. This essay highlights four such pressure points in the liturgies of Holy Week.
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While other seasons (such as Advent and Eastertide) and aspects of worship (like the lectionary or hymnody) can be occasions for anti-Judaism in the liturgy, Holy Week stands apart as having the most obvious problems to address.The reason here it twofold. As I have explained elsewhere, Holy Week, especially Good Friday, was historically a dangerous time for Jews living in Christian countries. Second, it is during Holy Week that the most perniciously false representations of Jews occur. If Christians, including Anglicans, are truly committed to restoring right relationships with the Jewish people, then attention must focus on the liturgies of Holy Week.
Palm Sunday
The first pressure point is Palm Sunday. It is customary for a dramatic reading of the Passion Gospel to occur after the Litany of the Palms as part of the service of the word. There have been multiple documents written about how to avoid caricaturing of the Jewish people during the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday. Here I follow the critiques and cautions offered by a group of American Roman Catholic biblical scholars. One of the key points is that we ought to be careful about the way in which the passion narratives foreground the complicity of Jewish leaders in Jerusalem over that of Pontius Pilate and the Roman imperial administration. The charge of blasphemy against Jewish norms is emphasized and the seditious nature of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is almost entirely absent. As such, the death of Jesus takes on an almost exclusively Jewish trajectory while eliding the Roman juridical and penal imposition of the death penalty. Moreover, this narrative turns Pilate into a simpering weakling, despite extra-biblical evidence for the brutal measures that he took to crush dissent as an imperial governor. Only Jewish leaders, it seems, would have been so misguided as to bring about the death of Jesus. And are not leaders representative of their people?
This brings us to the question of the composition and role of the crowds in seeking the death of Jesus. The crowds are depicted as Jewish, which would have likely been the case. Typically, a large assembly is imagined but if the presentation of Jesus before the crowds happened at Pilate’s quarters at night, as the gospels suggest, then the size of this crowd was likely limited by space and circumstance. Moreover, the historicity of the choice offered by Pilate is doubtful. There is no extra-biblical witness to the supposed custom of a prisoner being released on Passover (Matthew 27.15; Mark 15.6; Luke 23.17; John 18.39). And even if a “Paschal pardon” were offered, the notion that an insurrectionist such as Barabbas would have been made available for release by the Roman authorities is implausible. The episode serves a rhetorical purpose: to implicate the people of Jerusalem once more in the persecution and death of God’s prophets. This rhetorical and theological device as an internal Jewish trope of the first century was taken by later Christians as a sign of the singular propensity of the Jewish people to reject God revealed in Jesus and hence a sign of their enduring sinfulness.
For many Christians, Palm Sunday has tremendous appeal because of its emotional impact. This is an overarching feature of the liturgies of Holy Week. They are designed to elicit an emotional response to the suffering and death of Jesus on behalf of the world. But this affective piety also has a shadow to it. Many Christians find great meaning when they are able to inhabit the role of the crowds in the Palm Sunday passion gospel by shouting “Crucify him!” or even worse “His blood be on us and on our children!” In a way, to shout crucify does reflect long-standing church teaching that all humans are responsible for the death of Jesus insofar as he died for the sins of the whole world. But the Matthean cry of the crowd is a cry of bloodguilt. Christian theologians from the second century onward took this shout as a sign of the enduring bloodguilt of all Jewish people. From there it is not hard to understand the unspooling of violence against Jews seen throughout Christian history during Holy Week.
More pressing, what does it mean for Chrisitans for a brief moment to “act the Jew” on this day? What do Christians gain by having this moment of emotional release, where we can be the guilty Jews calling for the death of Jesus and then moments later, re-emerge as faithful members of the Body of Christ, preparing to receive the Eucharist and enter upon a somber week of preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus? If Christians today can safely act like the guilty Jews of Jerusalem long ago, where does that leave their contemporary Jewish neighbors? What is to become of them? I find that when I talk about Holy Week with Jews, their most pressing question is how we talk about and represent Jews. This ought to compel Christians to ask whether on Palm Sunday we are bearing true witness in how we represent Jews.
Certainly it is appropriate and foundational for Christians to engage in a meaningful commemoration of the death of Jesus. My argument here is whether this is necessary on Palm Sunday, which historically has been a remembrance of his entry in Jerusalem over a remembrance of his passion. If Christians are to continue to engage in a remembrance of his passion on this day, great care ought to be taken to sensitively depict the Jewish people also on this day. Scholars and church commissions have given careful consideration to these issues and their guidelines ought to be considered when discerning the celebration of this liturgy.
Christian “Seders”
A second pressure point during Holy Week occurs on Maundy Thursday. Because typically the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples is linked to the Jewish feast of the Passover, there is sometimes a conflation of this meal with the Jewish Passover Seder. At times, the Seder meal is also taken as an allegory for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and celebrated as such in some Christian congregations.
The primary issue here is the confusion between the Second Temple observance of Passover and later rabbinic developments. While in Jerusalem lambs were slaughtered at the Temple for the Passover meal, the festival itself is a household one. With the destruction of the Temple, sacrifices became less frequent. However, the decline of the sacrifice of lambs at Passover was not as rapid. This is because to some rabbis sacrificing at the Temple was not necessary to celebrate Passover. Only over several generations did the rabbis move Jewish observance to one that lacked a sacrificial lamb. The Passover Seder that most Christians are familiar with took final form among Jews living in western medieval Europe. In other words, the Passover we know with the Seder plate and Haggadah is not at all like the Passover meal that Jesus would have celebrated.
It is a good and appropriate thing for Christians to remember that the death and resurrection of Jesus occurs at Passover. Just as the Israelites were redeemed by the death of the lamb, Christians find their redemption in the death of the Lamb of God. This truth has been present for a long as we have had the Christian witness. But it is one thing to remember and reflect on this ancient bond and another for Christians to appropriate contemporary Jewish observances of the Passover for their own purposes. Often well-meaning Christians host Messianic Jews or other Christians who will visit their congregation around Holy Week and perform a version of the modern Passover Seder and then read into it Christological meaning. This makes no historical or theological sense as it misreads the history of the development of both Christiantiy and Judaism. Instead of appropriating the development of a post-biblical ritual for their own purposes, Christians who are truly concerned about fostering a better understanding and relationship with Jews have better options. The first is to invite a rabbi representative of mainstream Jewish communities (that is, not a Messianic Jewish one) to guide a congregation through a Seder. Even better is to take advantage of community Seders that synagogues frequently hold. This is optimal since it brings Christians into a Jewish context and allows them to understand the Seder fully on Jewish terms. Here the themes of redemption and deliverance that are bedrock for both Jews and Christians can fully resonate.
The Crucifixion (1457-1469), Andrea Mantegna.
Good Friday and the Gospel of John
The third pressure point concerns the passion narrative read from John’s gospel on Good Friday. As far back as liturgies of Good Friday exist in the historical record, the passion narrative from John has been read. There are good reasons for this. John’s gospel presents a compelling account of the arrest of Jesus, his trial and interrogation before Pontius Pilate, and his suffering, death, and burial. As with the rest of this gospel, the drama is heightened and the theological meaning of the events are foregrounded.
Yet the Gospel of John is notorious for its sweeping presentation of “the Jews” as the implacable enemies of Jesus and his disciples. Much attention has been given to this enmity with current scholarly consensus (though not unanimity) that this represents tensions between an early Johannine community and other Jews. Regardless of its source, this depiction of Jewish hostility culminates with “the Jews” causing the death of Jesus through the manipulation of Pontius Pilate. The effect of the annual liturgical reading of this passion narrative, when paired with a long tradition of Christian anti-Jewish teaching that blamed Jews for killing the Son of God, is that Good Friday became a dangerous time for Jews. Bishops and secular rulers in the Middle Ages even issued decrees forcing Jews to stay indoors on this day for their own safety. Nonetheless violence and bloodshed still befell Jewish communities at different points in history. The charge of deicide fueled by the ritualized reading of John’s passion, led to exclusion and persecution of Jews even when outright violence did not occur. And the homicidal rage of recent assaults against Jewish synagogues was in part stirred by the notion of Jews as “Christ-killers.”
The question then becomes what is the ethical responsibility for Christians who use this passion narrative on Good Friday? If the reading of it in the past has done harm, then what ought a Christian response be that demonstrates love for Jewish neighbors? I recommend the practical solution of looking carefully at the use of the term “the Jews” itself. The word here in Greek is hoi Ioudaioi. Although this is the word from which the English “the Jews” is derived, its literal meaning is “the Judeans.” Prof. Steve Mason has made a compelling argument that in the ancient world, ethnic designation, regional belonging, and religious belief formed a cohesive unity. While we see the word “Jew” and think today primarily of religious identity, to be a Ioudaios in the ancient world was to have a reinforcing collection of identity markers, only one of which is religious. Indeed, Mason argues persuasively that it was Christian leaders in the patristic era that reduced Judaism to a mere religion as part of the ascendency of the Christian empire.
To turn back to the Gospel of John, then, what would it look like to offer congregants a new, literal translation of the passion narrative where the opponents of Jesus are Judeans, specifically the Judean leadership? This foregrounds the struggle between a Galilean prophet and a Judean elite. Such a translation casts great irony upon the dialogue between Jesus and Pilate: Jesus cannot be the king of the Judeans because he is from Galilee after all, a point that makes the incident with Peter’s tell-tale accent more poignant (Matthew 26:73; Mark 14:70). The sentencing of Jesus to death by Pilate becomes a case of wilfully mistaken identity, an imperial misacarriage of justice against a Galilean Jewish prophet. Jesus’ kingdom certainly is not of this world, nor even of Judea. Scholars such as Amy-Jill Levine and Adele Reinhartz have rightly cautioned against removing all reference to Jews in the Gospel of John. Creating a Judenrein New Testament, as Levine calls it, would be a mistake. But, on Good Friday, when the tensions between Jews and Christians have led to bloodshed, this might be the day for nuance, context, and an ethically informed literal translation of the word Ioudaios.
The Reproaches
The question of rendering ancient texts in light of contemporary concerns leads us to the final pressure point of Good Friday, the tradition of chanting the Impropreria or Reproaches during the veneration of the cross. While this is a mandated aspect of the Roman Catholic rite, it is not a necessary or constitutive aspect of Anglican liturgies of Good Friday. Yet, the Reproaches remain a popular aspect of Good Friday devotion in some parishes.
In the traditional Reproaches, the choir chants in the voice of God reproaching Israel (the congregation) for its long history of faithlessness towards God. Moreover, the history of Israel’s faithflessness is directly linked to its murder of Jesus Christ. This tone is set in the very first stanza:
O My people, what have I done to Thee? Or wherein have I wearied thee? Answer Me. Because I brought thee out of the land of Egypt, thou has prepared a Cross for thy Saviour.
Here the deicide charge of Jews as Christ-killers is made plain except for those without ears to hear.
Often a defense of the Reproaches is made that these words are not aimed at Jews per se but at the Church itself which is composed of redeemed sinners. Insofar as all have sinned, all are responsible for the death of Christ. While the underlying theology here might hew with Christian teaching, the point remains that the Reproaches identify Israel (that is, the Jewish people) as solely responsible for the death of Christ. Once again, as in the Palm Sunday passion reading, the Christian audience gets to "play the Jew." There is a heavy affective emotional payoff here. Christians get to wallow in the drama of kissing the cross while the voice of God reproaches them, knowing in the back of their minds that Easter is coming and with it their forgiveness. But what of the historical and physical Israel of God, the Jewish people? They never get to move to that redeemed space in this liturgy. On Good Friday and on Easter they remain Jews and never part of the redeemed Church, at least not according to the devotional theology of the Reproaches.
It is appropriate to engage in acts of devotion on Good Friday that bring to mind the sinful state of the human condition. In the Common Worship liturgy for Good Friday, the Church of England has provided an alternate version of the Reproaches which does this work well. In this version God also addresses the faithful but it is clearly the Church itself, simultaneously sinful and justified, to whom God speaks. A representative stanza reads:
I made you in my image, but you have degraded body and spirit and marred the image of your God. You have deserted me and turned your backs on me.
This rendition does the emotional affective work that is so deeply resonant on Good Friday without any scapegoating or projection onto others. The fault remains with the faithful who have gathered, as the Christian tradition teaches.
Holy Week provides the necessary foundation for Easter. As the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner taught, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are a unitive event. Let us ensure that when we as Christians soberly engage in commemorating the last days of our Lord, we do not perpetuate the sinful harm against his own people that previous generations of the Church have. Let this be a time of full repentance, even from the sin of anti-Judaism.
