Download Sunday, July 19, 2015 Communion Sunday “The Jewish Messiah

Sunday, July 19, 2015
Communion Sunday
“The Jewish Messiah”
Readings:
Old Testament Readings: Jeremiah 23: 1-6; Isaiah 11: 1-10; Micah 5: 1-5a
New Testament Readings: Matthew 2: 6
When I was in Sunday School, I was given a very simple explanation for why Christians
believe that Jesus is the Messiah and Jews do not. Jews expected a warrior Messiah
who would liberate Israel, but Christians know that God planned all along a gentle
Messiah who would die for our sins, and return later to finish the work of cleaning up the
mess of the world.
For all of its elegance and simplicity, it is too simple an explanation, and has the
unfortunate effect of making Christians seem so much smarter than the Jews about
their own scriptures and so much further from the true God than we Christians are.
I commend two websites for further study: simpletoremember.com “Why Don’t Jews
believe in Jesus? And the bibleunitarian.org “What is Messiah? Jewish Messian or
Christian God?” The latter article I draw heavily from today. It was written by Rich
Richardson, a man I don’t know, but ho heavily documents his work.
Richardson begins his article “Many Christians do not understand that the major
difference between Christian and Jew is not a question of WHO Messiah is, rather it is a
question of WHAT Messiah is. When we ask a Jew to ‘accept Jesus,’ we are not asking
her to accept Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, but rather to accept the Christian God.”
Let’s see what he means. The Shema is often called the “Profession of Faith,” because
it begins with the most basic of Jewish concepts: “Hear, O Israel, our God the Lord is
one.” This prayer is so central to Jewish practice that the Mishnah (the earliest Jewish
commentary on scripture) allows it to be uttered in any language, not just Hebrew. It is
a prayer uttered at least three times a day by observant Jews. Rabbi Akiva, a secondcentury sage tortured to death by the Romans, died with the Shema on his lips. Many
Jews who died in the Holocaust also died reciting the Shema.
In Mark 12:28, when Jesus is asked the most important commandment, he answered
“Shema Yisrael, Adonai elohenu, Adonai ehad” (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is
One”). And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And
the second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus announces monotheism as the major profession of Jewish faith. Messiah is
never confused with God, and is never believed to be God. In fact, Jesus never refers
to himself as God, though he does, eventually, claim to be Messiah. The doctrine of the
Trinity and the three-in-one God was still centuries away, and would have surprised and
perhaps dismayed the Jewish Jesus.
“Mashiach” is the Hebrew term; “Christos” the Greek; “Anointed” the English. The term
is applied in the Old Testament to the High Priest, the Kings of Israel, Israel itself, and to
Cyrus the Persian when he conquered Babylon.
The hope for the Messiah to end all Messiahs is found in some of the Old Testament
passages we read today. The following was the most common Jewish expectation of
the final Messiah and the Messianic age:
1. Messiah would build the third temple.
2. Messiah would gather all Jews back to the Land of Israel.
3. Messiah would usher in an era of world peace
4. Messiah would spread universal knowledge of the God of Israel, which would unite
humanity.
None of these things happened during the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth.
Also, there were a number of things which were not supposed to happen to the Messiah
which did happen to Jesus. The Messiah was supposed to be a descendant of David
on his father’s side. Matthew and Luke both say he was born of a virgin, so he couldn’t
have descended from anyone on his father’s side, having no earthly father. The
Messiah was not supposed to be born of a virgin, be crucified, and be the ‘suffering
servant” of Isaiah 53, which refers to the entire nation of Israel. Furthermore, Messiah
was to be fully human, not God.
Christians reply that the Jews did not understand their own scriptures, that Jesus was
the suffering servant foretold, and all of the Messianic predictions he would fulfill would
come at the second coming. Jews reply that nothing in their scriptures predicts a
second coming.
Jews reject the Trinity. They don’t, per se, reject the teaching of Jesus, which were
largely consistent with Jewish tradition. They further reject that prayer to God need be
directed through an intermediary, such as Mary, Jesus, or the Saints. Judaism further
does not demand that everyone convert to their religion.
Many of the early Christians were pious Jews, and did not proclaim Jesus to be God.
That was a later development. By the time Christianity had fully developed creeds
regarding the Messiah’s identity to a tripartite God, most of the Jewish followers were
dead, and the Church was in the hands of former pagans, who all had heroes born of a
virgin, who knew myths of a dying and rising God, who performed ceremonial rituals
much like we perform today in honor and remembrance of their God. This was a final
breaking point between Judaism and Christianity, and although we talk of the JudeoChristian tradition, since about the year 70, the traditions have gone their separate
ways.
Early Unitarians (who were split off from Congregationalism at the beginning of the 19th
Century) would often boast that they were “the religion of Jesus,” not “the religion about
Jesus.” But the religion of Jesus was 1st Century Judaism.
It is my hope that Jews not be proselytized, for our Lord was Jewish. It is also important
for me that we remain anti-creedal, that Unitarian and Trinitarian Christians are equally
welcome, and equally passionate about the teachings of Jesus Christ, and trying to
apply them to our lives. We can begin by trying to understand the world Jesus lived in,
debating his cryptic parables, and trying to live a life we feel he could be proud of.
That, for me, is the single most important task of the Christian Church.
Amen.