VIPERS AND DOGWHISTLES: RECONSIDERING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND JEWS
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But when John the Baptist saw many Pharisees and Scribes coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3: 7)
I don’t know how you react to those words; for me, they elicit shock and distaste. Shock, at the harshness of the rhetoric; fear, that I might be among the condemned; and, I’m sorry to say, when I’ve been really frustrated about the state of the world, gratitude that God’s messengers can be so passionate about injustice — because that implies that God cares about it passionately, too. I think we’re probably intended to feel all those emotions. These are words meant to provoke repentance — a reconsideration of what God yearns to bring into being in ourselves, in our societies, and in our world.
For Christians, that repentance needs to include another dimension of this text, one which is often overlooked: this story presents us with a man using dehumanizing language to describe a crowd of Jews. And not just any man: Jesus’ cousin, a revered spiritual leader in his own right, one whom the church considers to be a saint.
There’s been a lot of that kind of language recently, coming from all sides. From the far right, rehashing antisemitic dog-whistles. From the left, inflamed by the continuing oppression suffered by the Palestinian people. Newscasters are starting to speak of the “normalization” of antisemitism, but it’s more dangerous than that. Historically, antisemitism has been considered “normal.” It was only in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust that major denominations began to examine their own antisemitic teachings, to repent, and to seek respectful engagement with their Jewish neighbors. It is that rapprochement which now seems to be in danger.
Antisemitism precedes other forms of racism. As Ibram Kendi has demonstrated, much of what we consider to be racism today was developed during the fifteenth century in order to create an ideology which would make enslavement palatable to Europeans. (1) Those more recent forms of racism propagate the lie that a group of people are, somehow, subhuman: less intelligent, less capable, less motivated. Sadly, we all know the drill.
But antisemitism has existed as long as the Christian faith; it is a Christian heresy. It is also self-contradictory, arguing that Jews are both subhuman and super-smart, controlling the finances and power of this world. And the hateful words — vipers, rats, old black shoe, and worse — are intended to strip away our understanding of the humanity of the Jewish people and to open the door to various forms of oppression.
What, then, are we — people of good will; people who yearn for our societies to embody kindness, to treat each person with fairness and compassion; people who work for a world without hate — what are we do to in face of this dark tide? Christianity and the Church have propagated these lies, and so we need face into that past, understand it, and talk about them.
As we all know, John the Baptist and Jesus were themselves Jews. During the first two centuries following the death of Christ, the Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah began to separate themselves from the Jews who did not, and to join instead with Gentiles who believed that Jesus was the Savior. To justify this separation, the Jesus-following Jews began to teach that the others were somehow inferior: corrupt, unfaithful, legalistic. Those tensions were reflected in our sacred texts, which tend to emphasize the differences between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Jews, rather than their profound similarities. (2) And that has led to a major distortion in our theology: When we speak of Jesus, we often speak as if his Judaism were irrelevant to who he was. As if his teachings sprang fully-formed out of his head, in spite of the background of his family and society. As if his criticism of the Jewish teaching of his time was intended to sink the ship, rather than to right it.
So let’s start again, from a more informed understanding. Let’s assume that Jesus and John the Baptist became the people they were, not in spite of the teachings and practices of their faith, but because of them. Let’s acknowledge that when they criticized Jewish practice (as both did) or called for its intensification (as Jesus did throughout the Sermon on the Mount), they were embracing and upholding a specifically Jewish form of righteousness as the desire of God for all people. Seen in this light, John the Baptist’s harsh rhetoric plays the same role as any fire-and-brimstone sermon today: it calls out the people of God for failing to live into the divine precepts they’ve been given. When John called on soldiers not to oppress, or on tax collectors not to steal, he was upholding Torah, not rewriting it. In fact, many of Jesus’ own disciples were drawn from among the Pharisees, who were the spiritual seekers of their time, the ones who were eager for a deep and personal relationship with God.
Once we accept the essential continuity between the teachings of Jesus and those of Torah, then it becomes clear that the Scribes and Pharisees are not “some other group” whom we can vilify: the Scribes and Pharisees are us! Faithful people who want to know God and to serve God’s purposes in the world. The key question is how we react to them: Do we identify with them or dis-identify with them? The former path leads to humility and salvation; the second, to objectification, division, and destruction.
For all that John the Baptist was the Forerunner of Christ, Jesus’ advance-man, there was a significant gap between their understandings of holiness. John the Baptist preaches a form of purification-by-deletion: that we can make the world ready for God by eliminating or cutting out impurities before they can fester. He calls out, “The axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 3:10) The idea is surgical: we must prune our sins and eliminate injustice. It is this metaphor which became distorted when later Christians applied it, not to sins, but to people, scapegoating them and supporting so-called ethnic cleansing, as well as centuries of social and economic stratification based on fictional ethnic or racial hierarchies.
But Jesus modeled a different way: the path of radical inclusion. Jesus holds those who have been seen as unlovable in the love of God. He teaches us a spirituality of gentleness, learning to hold the aspects of ourselves that we have seen as unlovable up to the healing power of that same divine love. Holiness, in Christ, is not a process of amputation, but of making whole. He does not “break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick” (Matthew 12:20, quoting Isaiah 42:3). Instead, he lifts the poor from the ash-heap and restores them to a place of honor. (1 Samuel 2:8)
Jesus spoke of a man who had a hundred sheep; one of them got lost. And the shepherd left the ninety-nine on the hillside and went to find the lost sheep; when he had found it, he lifted it on his shoulders and bore it home, rejoicing. Do you see the difference? John would have castigated the sheep for getting lost, but the good shepherd seeks it out and brings it home. Instead of marginalizing or abandoning the suffering and imperfect, he brings them home. He is not about severing ourselves into sanctity, but about healing us into wholeness.
We see this in his interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). Over and over, the woman speaks out of her experience of division: Jews and Samaritans do not speak with one another, do not help one another, do not worship in the same place. But Jesus gently pushes all that aside, names it as irrelevant, and invites her in. It is that warm and gentle inclusion which leads her to understand that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world.
Why does it matter? What we are willing to do to ourselves, we are willing to do to one another. There is a direct trajectory between despising ourselves and despising one another; between striving to disown and deny our own sin, and casting out others whom we allow ourselves to see as unclean: women, people of color, those whose ethnic heritage is different than our own, the poor, the sick, the elderly, those who live with mental illness, those who come from the wrong countries; unclean we label them, unclean, unclean. And yet, Jesus welcomed them all.
Like the brattiest of younger siblings, we have gone through history trying to push our older brother onto the ash heap, saying, “God loves me; therefore, God must not love you!” As if even human parents are not able to love more than one child, utterly and completely — and how much more our God. It would be comical if the consequences had not been so bitter.
We cannot welcome Jesus unless we welcome all that he was: his Jewish holiness as well as what has flowed from it. The Gentiles did not replace the Jews as the people of God, but join them. St. Paul is clear that, in Christ, the Gentiles are being included in the salvation that was already being offered to the Jews. That is the truth we need to proclaim and uphold in face of rising bigotry: that God’s love is not fickle, but enduring. That God is gathering people together, rather than casting them away. Joining together what had been separated; healing the divisions of past, rather than perpetuating them. Then we will be able to sing with St. Paul, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people [i.e.,the Jews]” (Romans 15:10). God’s vision draws all peoples to praise God, together.
Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, Chapter 2.
Throughout this essay, I am speaking of what Christ taught, and not of his ontological status as the Son of God.
