Therefore, many of the Jews who came with Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him. 46 But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
47 Then the chief priests and Pharisees called together the council and said, “What are we going to do? This man is doing many miraculous signs! 48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him. Then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our people.”
49 One of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, told them, “You don’t know anything! 50 You don’t see that it is better for you that one man die for the people rather than the whole nation be destroyed.” 51 He didn’t say this on his own. As high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus would soon die for the nation— 52 and not only for the nation. Jesus would also die so that God’s children scattered everywhere would be gathered together as one. (Common English Bible)
“We Were There: Lenten Edition,” Week Two
I look out over Jerusalem from the temple, and there is much to behold. Workers going about their daily labors, merchants peddling their wares and animals, families hustling to and fro, there is a certain routine to all of it, but the activity also imbues the city with an undeniable energy and purpose.
And legions. I see everywhere reminders of the foreigners from Europe who occupy our ancestral land and claim it as their own. And their purpose…well, their purpose here is unmistakable.
But the land is not theirs to take. It is not theirs to claim. And it never was.
Resisting that reality is complicated for me. And this newly-arrived carpenter from the Galilee does not help matters. The Romans have claimed divine kingship for their Caesars, and if they hear divine kingship proclaimed for this itinerant laborer, I fear that the price they will exact from the people—my people—in retribution will be violent in the extreme.
Perhaps it is wrong of me to live in such fear, but experience has taught me that it is necessary. My experience and the experience of my ancestors.
We have already lost the temple once, to Nebuchadnezzar when he came with his Babylonian soldiers six hundred years ago. We have not forgotten that trauma and loss. We never will.
And so long as I remain high priest,we will not lose the temple a second time. I swear it. As long as I wear the robe, the temple will remain. Even if it means this Galilean does not.
This is a new sermon series for our first Lenten season together. Across the board, feedback concerning Valley’s Advent devotional series, We Were There, was overwhelmingly positive, especially for the first-person voice it was composed in by its many contributors. Buoyed by this feedback, Dr. Lola Kiser and I crafted a similar focus for not only our upcoming Holy Week devotional book, but for this sermon series as a way to lead up to that devotional. This means that each Sunday through Lent, all the way up to Easter Sunday, my message will begin in the first-person, through the eyes of someone who would have experienced Holy Week, just as we did with Advent last year. We began this series last week with Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead earlier in John 11, and we continue pretty much straight on, verse-by-verse, in John 11 to arrive at the high priest Caiaphas.
Caiaphas is an integral character to the Holy Week drama, but the complexity of his role in that drama—and the consequences that have borne out in prejudice over the centuries against Jews—led me to assign his installment to myself. This will be, then, a bit of a different sermon than you may have become accustomed to from me so far, but I think there is a lot we can take from this passage.
But for now, lets start more broadly with John’s Gospel, and a term he uses frequently, including to start this passage in verse 45: “hoi ioudaioi.” It literally means “the Judeans,” but because translation is inherently interpretation, and because antisemitism has been a part of Christian history for centuries, it has traditionally been translated as “the Jews.” But “the Jews” and “the Judeans” are not synonymous. Judea was a geographical designation, denoting historically Israelite territory under Roman occupation and governed by Roman-approved client kings. There were multiple such historically Israelite territories—not only Judea, but Samaria and the Galilee as well.
That distinction plays a critical role elsewhere in Holy Week—it is Peter’s Galilean accent that gives him away as a follower of Jesus, and in Luke, Pilate sends Jesus to Herod Antipas over it. And the distinction of Samaritan identity crops up in both John and other Gospels, most prominently in the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4 and the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.
Finally, by the time of Jesus, there was already a significant Jewish diaspora across the Middle East and North Africa, none of whom could reasonably called Judeans any more than Jesus, as a Galilean and a Nazarene, could be called a Judean. Yet we have repeatedly chosen to translate a geographic identifier as an ethno-religious identifier, implicating Jewishness itself in the accusations of Jesus, which is both ahistorical and harmful, because that designation has been used to cultivate prejudice against Jews by Christians for centuries.
Adele Reinhartz, in the Jewish New Testament Study Bible, writes, “In using the term “the Jews” to indicate, and to condemn, those who do not believe in Jesus, the Gospel of John encourages its readers to dissociate themselves from any who would identify with that designation…The Gospel is not antisemitic in a racial sense, as it is not one’s origins that are decisive but one’s beliefs. Nevertheless, it has been used to promote antisemitism.” That last sentence by itself should push us to create new interpretations of John’s Gospel that change not only our theological understanding of Judaism but our political understanding, because for Caiaphas, the two are inextricably intertwined.
For the political implications where Caiaphas as the high priest becomes a vital part of the story. His role was never a purely religious one—if you remember from Josiah’s story that we spent three Sundays studying together just recently, it was Josiah’s high priest Hilkiah who brought to the king the Torah scroll, which inspired Josiah’s reforms. The office of the high priest then, for at least hundreds of years, has had to simultaneously tread religious and political waters. And during the time of Jesus, those political waters involve the Roman imperial occupation of ancient Israel, and that of the Seleucids prior to the Romans.
Caiaphas, then, acts as something of a buffer, or an
insulation or intermediary, between the people and Rome. The territory is
governed by the Roman viceroy, Pontius Pilate, and Rome’s stable of client
kings like Herod Antipas. However, with this history of the office of the high
priest being both a religious and a political office, Caiaphas has a role to
play in the occupation, and it is in this passage of John 11 that we get the
clearest picture in Scripture of how he understands that role. His fellow temple authorities come to him, understandably fearful of Roman reprisals to this proclaimed divine kingship of Jesus, which would contravene the divine kingship claimed by the Caesars. And it is a scene that we ought to be able to feel at least some familiarity with Caiaphas's place, because of how that scene is handed down to us across the years.
One of my favorite musicals growing up was Jesus Christ Superstar—I loved the live televised version from a couple years back with John Legend as Jesus—but it missed a real opportunity to unpack Caiaphas’s dilemma because after the 1973 movie version of the musical, it omitted an early song called “Now We Are Decided,” in which Caiaphas and his predecessor Annas discuss their conundrum. One of the lyrics from that song, “What about the Romans? Were they seeking Jesus crowned? Do you think they’ll stand around cheering and applauding?” lays pretty bare for them the threat of not towing the Roman line—it isn’t just a matter of them keeping their offices, it’s a matter of staving off additional Roman violence towards the people. But that song was cut from all subsequent productions of the musical, to the musical’s significant detriment.
None of this is to say that Caiaphas was in the right here. Jesus’s own vehement objections to Caiaphas’s leadership are well-documented across the Gospels, but we should read those objections as Jesus—a rabbi—engaging in the longstanding rabbinical practice of debating other rabbis. And Jesus’s objections should inform our own ethical decisionmaking--but emphatically not our prejudices. So, my aim is twofold. First, that we can at least understand, if not empathize with, Caiaphas’s thought process—that we do not like his conclusion, but that we can see how and why he arrives at it. Second, that we can appreciate how our blame of Caiaphas and the Judean leaders has historically contributed to Christian antisemitism, and how that by itself is reason enough for us to change how we interpret the Passion narrative.
I realize a lot that I have said to you here today may have been unexpected to you—either that it represents a commentary you are unfamiliar with on the Biblical text, or that you didn’t anticipate me going there with the sermon series at all. I realize that because I had to arrive at this point myself after years of Biblical study, thoughtful counsel by rabbinical colleagues and Jewish friends, and being taught new and better ways of understanding God’s Word by my professors. So I have come by this outlook on the text honestly, through years of striving and self-growth. I had to be, and have to continue to be, humble enough to admit that my past interpretations of the text had missed the mark, and that I needed to do better if I was going to preach God’s Word in spirit and in truth.
I am chagrined to admit to y’all that you did not call a pastor who has it all figured out! If you were hoping that you had, I fear that my 90-day money-back guarantee has long since expired. But if you are open to unpacking our Scriptures together in ways that may confound some of our earlier interpretations of them but lead us ever closer to God, I am all-in. I am here to be a part of that.
We, as Disciples of Christ, are called by our denominational affiliation and identity to be ecumenical, to look outward towards other faith traditions and not merely inward, only at our own. Part of that calling must be to recognize not only where we can better understand the faith traditions of our neighbors, but also where our past understandings have fallen short. And that is a lifelong process! As I talked about last week with Lazarus, we may be transformed in an instant, from dead to living and from tomb-bound to walking into new life. But what happens after the first transformation? Our growth into life and love must continue. We must continue cultivating that growth and transformation in faith.
May we continue in that faithful growing, under God’s watchful gaze, in all the days of our lives.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
February 28, 2021