Thomas Kleinert
A lectionary is basically a reading plan for public worship: Certain texts are assigned to a congregation’s weekly gatherings and holidays. The practice has its roots in ancient synagogue worship, and, to this day, is shared by most synagogues and many churches. The intention is to reflect the full breadth and depth of the biblical witness over the course of a year or, in the western tradition of the church, three years. Each Sunday is allotted a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, and passages from a Gospel and one of the Epistles.
The result represents a pretty comprehensive selection—but there’s still plenty left to be read and studied between Sundays, or skipped for another day. From the book of Judges, over three years, we only get to hear seven verses, from Song of Solomon, only five, and from Zechariah, three. Ezra, Obadiah, Nahum, and Jude aren’t included at all.[1] Psalms 55-61 are skipped in their entirety, and every year on Pentecost, there’s the curious case of Psalm 104: we hear verses 24-34, and 35b—which makes you wonder what’s wrong with verse 35a, doesn’t it? There are good reasons for all that skipping over verses, chapters, and entire books—and many of the passages are indeed included in daily lectionaries or other reading plans and study resources; there’s simply a broad consensus that they are not essential for public worship.
But occasionally, it’s critical to hear some of the verses not heard, to hear them loud and clear, in morning worship. Back in July, members of Nazi groups showed up in downtown Nashville, not for the first time, accosting tourists and residents on Lower Broadway. Some were wearing masks and shirts that said “Pro-White” and “Whites Against Replacement”, they carried swastika flags, shouted anti-Jewish epithets, and raised their arms in Nazi salutes.[2] Before disrupting a City Council meeting that week, they talked with other visitors, including my friend Pat. One of them told her that he hated Jews, and when she let him know that she was Jewish, he stuck his finger in her face and said, “Tell your rabbi, we’re coming for him.”
Seven years ago this past week, “on August 11 and 12, 2017, white supremacists, as the Washington Post reported, ‘mostly young white males,’ gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally, ostensibly to protest the removal of the statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee by the City of Charlottesville and the renaming of the park in which the statue had stood as ‘The Emancipation Park.’” Magda Teter recalls,
The rally attracted hundreds of white protesters and a diverse group of counterprotesters, each representing different – and clashing – visions of American society and polity. On the evening of August 11, the white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia, torches in hand, chanting “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” and “White Lives Matter,” with some donning medieval Christian symbols. The next day the events turned violent. A white supremacist drove into the crowd of counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, and injuring nineteen others, while still many others were physically attacked and beaten.[3]
Like I said, occasionally it’s critical to hear some of the verses not heard, to hear them loud and clear, in morning worship. This morning we heard Hebrews 8, declaring with great confidence,
If that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one… In speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, and what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.
You may be hearing not-so-subtle overtones of replacement in this language.
Fred Craddock called Hebrews “the finest example of homiletical rhetoric available to us from the first century CE.” It’s not a letter, more like an early theological essay, and its “paragraphs are not written in such a way that they can easily be extracted for devotional or sermonic use” — no neatly packaged clusters of verses that present themselves for spiritual reflection, but a single, grand-scale portrait of the redemptive work of Christ, in an idiom foreign to most of us. “The writer takes us inside the cultus of the tabernacle of Israel’s wilderness journey,” and we’re invited to consider the rituals on the Day of Atonement, the role of the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, and the blood — a very strange world indeed to modern readers.[4] In this portrait, Jesus is presented as “both the preeminent and perfect sacrificial victim as well as the preeminent and perfect high priest,” and as “superior to any other figure: Abraham and Moses, Aaron and the priests descended from him, even angels.”[5]Jewish scholars, A.J. Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, note,
Hebrews claims that Jesus is the “mediator of a better covenant,” for “if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one” (Heb 8:6-7). … [And] just as perfection replaces repetition, so the Christ replaces the Torah. Along with permanence and perfection comes replacement.[6]
And they add, quoting Alan Mitchell, that it is not surprising, that “from the second century C.E., Christians have used [the Epistle to the Hebrews] to promote the view that Christianity, according to God’s plan, has replaced Judaism,” and “the language of Hebrews and its author’s style lend themselves to this kind of interpretation.”[7]
I wonder why so many white folk, men in particular, feel so very threatened by black and brown people and why they are so afraid of being replaced, and I wonder how much of it is because, like all of us, they have grown up in a culture where, for centuries, subjugation, assimilation or replacement have been the dominant ways of coping with difference. And some texts in our Bible, including Hebrews 8, texts we hold sacred, lend themselves to supersessionist interpretation, sowing the seeds of replacement ideologies.
James Dunn observed that
where what became known as 'Christianity' and '(rabbinic) Judaism' were only beginning to emerge in the distinctiveness of their identities, the polemic and name-calling have … the character of the sharp tensions between the different factions [within the Judaism of the time]. The embarrassment of the anti-Jewish or anti-semitic charge against the NT for Christians only arises when the historical character and context of the NT writings are forgotten or ignored.[8]
That is a very careful and accurate observation, but what he didn’t take into account is that for centuries that is exactly how the Scriptures were read and their meaning created and absorbed — with their historical character and context forgotten or ignored, through the lens of “a theology of boasting triumphalism.”[9]And that long history of supersessionist reading has left thick layers of unquestioned assumptions in our theologies, our politics, and our daily interactions.
Where do we begin with the work of pulling back the layers? Five things come to mind:
1. When we hear or read lines like, In speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, we aren’t afraid to say, “Wait a minute, I’m not sure I agree with the writer. Nothing Jeremiah says in this quote, actually implies that God’s covenant is made obsolete by the promised new covenant. And frankly, when I look at the church over the centuries, I don’t see much evidence for a covenant written on the heart, a covenant that leads to a obedience as spontaneous as breathing. We’re not there yet, are we?”
2. We remember that the biblical testimony comes to us not in a single voice, but in a chorus of voices among which we listen carefully for the voice and word of God. And when we wrestle with the claim in Hebrews, that in speaking of a new covenant, God has made the first one obsolete, we are grateful for fellow readers who remind us that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, insisted that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,”[10] and that God’s covenant with Israel cannot ever be “obsolete,” for God is faithful.
3. We celebrate that after centuries of anti-Jewish teaching, the church in the 20th century, led by the Catholic Church, finally began to repent. In 2015, on the 50th anniversary of a landmark declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a Vatican commission stated,
On the part of many of the Church Fathers the so-called replacement theory or supersessionism steadily gained favour until in the Middle Ages it represented the standard theological foundation of the relationship with Judaism: the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognised Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God. … [But now a] replacement or supersession theology which sets against one another two separate entities, a Church of the Gentiles and the rejected Synagogue whose place it takes, is deprived of its foundations.[11]
It will take time for that new teaching to make its way into the hearts of the faithful, but we celebrate institutional repentance. That same year, 2015, an international group of orthodox rabbis declared,
Now that the Catholic Church has acknowledged the eternal Covenant between G-d and Israel, we Jews can acknowledge the ongoing constructive validity of Christianity as our partner in world redemption, without any fear that this will be exploited for missionary purposes. [12]
4. We mustn’t ever be afraid to look at the whole story of how we got where we are, or think we are. We must bravely ask the question that may take us to the next layer, unafraid to seek honest answers, with courage to hear them or speak them. We mustn’t be afraid to look at the whole story, not afraid to let our children and grandchildren read every book in the library, because freedom awaits those who do the work.
5. We rejoice in hope. Or as Gary Baum put it, “Christianity is a messianism that is unfulfilled. … Christians stand together with Jews looking for the fulfillment of the promises in the future, restless in this world, ever discerning the injustices and the evil in the present, and open to the victorious coming of God’s power to renew human life on this earth.”[13] Or in the words of A. J. Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, “both Judaism and Christianity are unfinished projects awaiting the messiah, though they differ in beliefs about this messiah’s identity and job description. … Both await fulfillment—each in its own way.[14]
Amen to that. We await fulfillment—with joyful hope, for God is faithful.
[1] Along with 1 and 2 Chronicles and 2 and 3 John. See the helpful index at https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/sunday-citations/
[2] https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/07/15/for-the-second-week-in-a-row-neo-nazis-take-over-nashville-streets/
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2024/07/16/neo-nazis-disrupt-nashville-council/74434069007/
[3] Magda Teter, Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2024), 1.
[4] Fred Craddock, Hebrews (NIB), 4-5.
[5] Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 137.
[6] Ibid., 146; emphasis added.
[7] Ibid., 147.
[8] James D. G. Dunn, Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity (United Kingdom, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 649.
[9] Franklin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews, 1975, 29.
[10] Romans 11:29
[11] “THE GIFTS AND THE CALLING OF GOD ARE IRREVOCABLE” (Rom 11:29): A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of “Nostra ætate” (No. 4) http://www.christianunity.va/content/unitacristiani/en/commissione-per-i-rapporti-religiosi-con-l-ebraismo/commissione-per-i-rapporti-religiosi-con-l-ebraismo-crre/documenti-della-commissione/en.html
[12] To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven: Toward a Partnership between Jews and Christians https://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/documents-and-statements/jewish/orthodox-2015dec4
[13] Gregory Baum, Introduction, in: Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism(United States, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1996)
[14] Amy-Jill Levine, Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 418.