ACTS 4:5-12

PSALM 98:1-5

1 JOHN 1:1-2:2

LUKE 24:36b-48

 

Sermon – May 4, 2003

 

      In seminary, as you might expect, students study a lot of theology – including not only ideas about God which the Christian Church has accepted as true, but also ideas about God which the church has rejected as false: that is, heresies.  Seminarians study heresies not, hopefully, to be swayed by any of them, but to understand how the Church’s understanding of the truth grew (under the guidance of the Holy Spirit) partly in response to the ideas the church rejected, often after very tempestuous debates.

 

      The other reason seminarians study heresies is so that, as priests or as theologically trained lay leaders, they later can recognize them when they surface once again in our own lifetimes.

 

      And with that introduction, I’d like to tell you about the first big-time heretic who made a major splash, forced the church to confront a major issue – and to embrace a position 180° removed from his.

 

      The man’s name was Marcion, he lived in the second century, and he believed that God as revealed in Jesus Christ was the One True God – and that God as revealed in Christ was a totally new revelation to humanity with nothing to do with the Hebrew Scriptures.  To underline his point, he developed a “Canon of Scriptures”, a list of writings which he considered to be authoritative.  Naturally, he threw out all of what we call the Old Testament; he also threw out the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, keeping only a heavily edited version of Luke – with all the parts mentioning Jesus’ ritual circumcision and naming in accordance with Jewish Law, worshiping in the Temple and preaching in his home Synagogue and any other incidents revealing Jesus’ Jewishness removed.  Luke was the only non–Jewish writer in the New Testament, so Marcion kept him, plus Paul’s letters – headed not by Romans but by Galatians, a letter Paul wrote to a church which was reverting to Jewish ritual practices (which Paul considered both unnecessary and to undermine faith based on, well, faith).

 

      In response to Marcion’s efforts, the leaders of the Christian church threw up their hands in horror and said, “This is not the faith we received from the apostles.”  On the contrary, they affirmed, the Hebrew Scriptures – which were the only Bible Jesus and the apostles knew – continued to be an essential part of the Bible for Christians, the apostolic witnesses to Christ declared his Jewishness, and all four, unedited Gospels are sacred scripture.  The leaders made it clear that Marcion was not a Christian, but a heretic – someone spouting off-the-wall ideas trying to masquerade as Christian.

 

      Why, you may ask, does this matter to us now?  Wasn’t all this settled by the church 1,800 years ago?  Well...tell me this.  Has anyone ever heard anyone say, “God in the New Testament is a God of Love, but in the Old Testament God is vengeful, violent and angry”?  Such a statement is at least half-way to Marcionism: presuming that God is radically different in the two sections of the Bible makes it easy to slide into believing that God as revealed in the New Testament is not only “better” than God as reveled in the Old Testament but not even the same God...no matter what the New Testament itself says.

 

      So let’s talk for a minute about love and grace in the Old Testament.  The Creation itself is an act of self-giving love by God: God did not have any “needs”, the Creation was an act of complete generosity – including the creation of freedom for human beings, including freedom to disobey God.  When human beings disobeyed God, we were given second chances by God again and again and again.  The second chances for humanity began with Adam and Eve, continued in our poetic pre-history with Noah, and then continued into history with Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, Joseph’s brothers.  The Hebrew people were chosen by God and delivered from slavery in Egypt not because they were especially virtuous or powerful or good-looking but because God loved them and chose them.  Same reason God gave them the 10 Commandments, a succession of brilliant and resourceful leaders, wisdom and saga now recorded as Scripture, and brought them back out of exile in Babylon into the Promised Land.  And then, as the climax to a very long-running story, God in Jesus Christ became incarnate as one of them.

 

      The New Testament is the final, climactic movement of a symphony that began long ago.  As the Risen Christ himself says in today’s Gospel, “Everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  The New Testament is unintelligible and indeed inconceivable with the Old Testament.

 

      This is important to remember not just for its own sake (and to remember God’s many acts of love as I very briefly alluded to), but because Marcionism has a vicious and nasty twin brother who is alive and well today: and that vicious twin brother is Christian anti-Semitism.

 

      Start down the road “dissing” the Old Testament and you end up “dissing” the Jewish people, not least because “they” did not embrace Christ...which conveniently ignores that all the apostles were Jews, all the New Testament writers except Luke were Jews, and of course, Jesus himself was a Jew.

 

      It is of course true that most First Century Jews did not embrace Jesus as the Messiah, but that is no reason to denounce them; in fact, as St. Paul insightfully discusses in Romans Chapters 9-11, resistance to the message about Jesus by many Jews pushed Jesus’ followers in St. Paul’s time to reach out to the Gentiles – to an extent that might never otherwise have happened.  Paradoxically, if so many Jews had not resisted the message, faith in Jesus as the Savior might never have blossomed among millions of Gentiles, and what we now call Christianity might have simply been a development in the history of Judaism. (In which case, how many of us would know Jesus Christ as our Savior?)

 

      The first years of the Christian faith were in fact the years of, essentially, a schism within Judaism between those Jews who thought Jesus was the Messiah and that the Gentiles could be saved without adopting Jewish ritual and dietary laws and those Jews who believed neither thing.  By the late 1st Century, the Jesus–believing Jews were seen by the other Jews as no Jews at all – and when the Gospel of John was written down, in that time, its Jewish author refers to Jesus’ opponents by the catch-all phrase “the Jews”, which to us means ignoring the obvious Jewishness of Jesus’ supporters.  (In last week’s Gospel, for instance,

John says the apostles were in hiding “for fear of the Jews” – meaning those Jewish leaders who were opposed to Jesus, since the apostles themselves were Jews.)

 

      My point is this: Christians cannot be Christians without the Old Testament as Scripture, belief in the Son of God’s incarnation as a Jew named Jesus, and an acknowledgement of how inextricably linked the Old and New Testaments are.  All those things combine to forbid Christian anti-Semitism – which hasn’t stopped the greatest threats to Jews from the Middle Ages until 1948 from coming from Christians.  It is a long and painful history which Jews know all too well but which many Christians are woefully ignorant of, and includes the programs of Czarist Russia, the Spanish Inquisition, the banishment of all Jews from England for 300 years, and yes, includes the Holocaust, which was carried out primarily by baptized Christians.  These horrors are thankfully past, but Christian anti-Semitism is still around like a spiritual “low-grade virus” – to which we can act as “antidotes”.

 

      So if you hear someone talking about “the God of the New Testament” as “a God of Love” while “the God of the Old Testament” is “a God of Vengeance”, please point out some of the incredible acts of love by God in the Old Testament, like the Creation, the calling of Israel to be God’s people, God’s word spoken through the prophets, the deliverance of the people from exile in Babylon and a thousand other acts of grace peppered through the Hebrew Scriptures.  And yes, there also is judgment in the New Testament.  Read all of it, and see what the future holds for those who are both unloving and unbelieving.

 

      The other great heresy which is decisively smashed in today’s Gospel is the docetic heresy: the idea that Jesus was not really human, that God did not become incarnate but only “appeared” to be while maintaining a purely spiritual existence.  Jesus clearly debunks this: not only was he real and tangible during his pre-crucifixion ministry, he was real and tangible as the first resurrected person – able to do things mortals could not, like appear out of thin air in a locked room, but solid and real nonetheless.

 

      From this we can conclude that the ultimate destiny through Christ at the End of Time is not an escape from life as we have known it, but the completion of life: “life2”, perhaps we could call it, recognizable and yet incomprehensible in the way that a three dimensional solid form would be both recognizable and incomprehensible to a two-dimensional drawing of the same form.

 

From Christ’s incarnation and resurrection we can also conclude that our bodies matter – not as objects of worship or desperate self-preservation (as materialists believe) but because they are gifts from God for our lifetimes which may, by God’s grace, be made perfect in the future.  Since we have our bodies as precious gifts from God, our self-care and dedication to health and to right behavior both are holy duties.

 

And you thought Easter was something we could reflect on and intellectually digest in just one day?  There’s a reason the Church celebrates Easter for 50 days: there are many truths and much Good News to be absorbed.  May we rejoice in all the millennia of our holy heritage, joyfully and seriously consider our holy responsibilities, and look forward with hope to being made new, and experiencing “life2”.

 

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

 

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church