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Unmasking Our Truths (2010 02 24)
The Other Dark Side of Holy Week (2010 03 01)
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Easter 2010
Easter 2010
One of the questions I often find myself asking is this: “What is the difference for me between Jesus and the numerous other people who have lived before and after him? All kinds of people have spoken prophetically, accomplished incredible things, risked their lives and yes, even died in the process.
Consider the lives of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who lived in Hitler’s Germany, who lost his life because he was involved in a plot to murder this man. Or Martin Luther King, who must have had some sense that if he continued to fight as he did for the rights of African Americans that he would likely die in the process. Even the young among us have witnessed the life of Nelson Mandela, who spent years in prison because of his stand against apartheid in South Africa.
What is the difference between Jesus and these others? Some people find this to be a simple matter – the difference lies in the fact that Jesus was both human and divine. It is a difference in “kind,” they say. But this difference in kind is something that we have inherited, that we have read about in scripture, that we have learned from the history of the church. It is not something I know from personal experience. It is what I have been taught – so I am still left questioning… Admittedly, I can be a bit of a sceptic at times but I’m not sure I’m that different from many other people.
Personal experience, in fact, is what it comes down to for me. My first encounter with Jesus was through a priest in Newfoundland. Yes, he directed me to scripture and I then read about Jesus who lived and ministered 2000 years ago, but if I hadn’t experienced what I now understand to have been the presence of Christ in that priest, I never would have bothered to read the gospels. Since that time, I have come across this presence of Christ in so many people that I have lost count. The faith that shines through them, the love that they share with others because of this faith has been key in my own journey, in my own understanding of how God in Christ lives within each of us. Herein, lies my answer.
For me, it is the way in which Christ is able to make a place in each of our hearts that is different from just anyone. It is God’s ability through Christ to so deeply touch us that we are unable to do anything but reach out and share this touch with others. The resurrection that we celebrate at Easter is a remembrance of the Christ who lives in each of our hearts and draws us into a relationship with others in our midst.
We are undoubtedly truly blessed when we experience the healing touch that so often comes to us through those who follow Jesus and carry Christ in their hearts.
The Other Dark Side of Holy Week (2010 03 01)
I have been a Christian for 30 years. It is now so long ago that many of the moments leading up to the day I was baptized are a distant memory. On occasion, I find myself pondering whether or not I have regrets about my decision to convert from Judaism. More often than not, the answer to
this question is no. Honesty, however, prevents me from suggesting this is always the case.
Over the years, the hardest thing to swallow has been the historical animosity between Christians and Jews; the seemingly inherent anti-Semitism in the church and in the church’s gospels—
writings revered by followers of Jesus. Speaking as a Jew (which in many ways I will always be), the most difficult moments for me in the Christian calendar are the latter days of Lent, and then Holy Week, culminating with the crucifixion on Good Friday. If there is any one time in the year that I find myself “in conflict with myself” this most definitely would be it.
Unfailingly, at this time of year, I am unable to shake off what has become a recurring twinge of guilt brought on by my conversion. Small wonder... As the calendar moves closer to the events of the crucifixion and the resurrection, the readings from the gospels—most particularly John’s gospel—become increasingly more hideous in their depiction of the Jewish people in the time of Jesus.
Yes, if one reads the texts carefully, as two Christian authors, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, suggest in a book entitled The Last Week, it becomes clear that the references to “the Jews” are references to the Jewish authorities in consort with the Roman officials. No different than what we experience in our own day and age, it is usually those who are in power who wield the words and the weapons, rather than the average citizen who is just trying to make it from one day to the next. Yet, other than a few academics, and a few priests and laypeople who read these academics, who actually studies the texts that carefully? What, I wonder, do average church-goers pick up from these readings as they sit in the pews during the week before Easter and hear them proclaimed year after year? I wonder this because each time I hear them, I cringe at what seems to be their unequivocally racist overtones.
A couple of years ago, I was a participant in a conference in which, during a question and answer time, someone asked the guest speaker about Christian exclusivism and his own attitude toward other religions. The response seemed a perfectly reasonable one; Christianity is not the only truth for all people, he said, but the truth for those who call themselves Christian, one of a number of different roads which leads us to the divine. Unsatisfied with this response, however, I questioned the speaker further, referencing our liturgies and our scriptures which, I suggested, depict the very opposite; proclaiming, instead, that because Jesus is divine, there is something unique about him, and not just about him but also about the religion of those who follow him.
The response to this second question was brief—what we say in our liturgies is said in the context of the Christian community, expressing what we believe as followers of Jesus.
What I heard in this response was that as long as we say things about Jesus in the context of our own liturgy, it is an expression of ourselves as Christians rather than an expression of what we think others are also to believe. While I did not pursue the point any further, feeling discretion was the better part of valour, I found myself still left unsatisfied; in fact, perhaps more unsatisfied than before I had asked the question.
For me, the answer was a cop-out. If liturgy is intended to be symbolic of what is our true experience, then we can’t be doing one thing inside the church and saying another thing outside
of it. Yet, in my encounters with many in the institution this is precisely what we do. Whether it is history or tradition or a fear of critiquing either one of these things, we continue to mouth words in worship and read passages from scripture which at best, are archaic and meaningless and at worst, depict some rather unsavoury things. When we do this, we end up in the place in which I find myself each year as we wind down from Lent and rev up for Holy Week—possessing a terrible uneasiness as I read and hear passages from scripture that contain an unholy and unacceptable attitude towards Jewish people.
In the congregation in Ontario in which I served for 15 years as one of their priests, over the last several of these years, during Holy Week, we tried to find a way to make what is unacceptable more acceptable, what is unpalatable more palatable. We emphasized our recognition that the crucifixion is not just something that happened a little over two thousand years ago in first century Jerusalem, but something that has continued and still continues to happen in the world today. We proclaimed that the crucifixion of Jesus is not unique and somehow worse than other human atrocities that have been carried out over the centuries; rather, that the crucifixion exemplifies the horror of all this carnage. Yet, even as we did this we continued to read the
passages from scripture as they have always been read; the very passages that many theologians and historians regard as having, in the first place, provoked many of these same atrocities.
Sometime ago, my son asked me if I thought we should be able to judge the actions of previous generations based on our 21st century morals and ethics. My response was a qualified yes, believing as I do that if we don’t make these judgements we probably will never change.
However, I also suggested that I am not in favour of banning such things as the writings of these earlier generations simply because they express things with which we are no longer comfortable; for example, because of its anti-Semitism, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
I do think we should be reading literature, listening to music and studying art even as it expresses racist, sexist and hetero-sexist attitudes with which we no longer agree. We should be doing this with a view to critiquing it from the perspective of our present day values, thereby giving us a chance to learn from our mistakes. Following on from this, if this were our approach to the bible, perhaps I would be more comfortable with those not so holy parts being read in church. However, week by week and year by year, most of us do anything but critique scripture. Instead, we refer to the bible as the Word of the Lord, we rise for the proclamation of the gospel and we barely raise an eyebrow at the passages which proclaim a rather exclusionary and supremacist theology. Yes, sometimes we interpret these passages, but only sometimes, and even when we do this we are careful to say that we are interpreting rather than critiquing them because, somehow it seems untoward or unseemly to critique anything that is written in these sacred texts.
Always at this time of year, I can’t help but ask myself, “What are we doing?” And worse still, “What am I—a Jew by birth—doing?” In the original Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the infamous Good Friday petition in which people prayed for God’s mercy “upon his ancient people the Jews” and by consequence, for their conversion, was removed from the liturgy when later generations began to recognize the harm and the error of maintaining this prayer in our worship. In similar fashion, it is time we stopped repeating, proclaiming and defending things simply because they are written in scripture. There is nothing godly about references to the devil as the source of Jewish lineage (John’s gospel) or the infamous line from Matthew’s gospel, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Not only are these kinds of references not benign; in fact, they are dangerously malignant.
We all know that there is a dark side to Holy Week. How many of us are aware or even care that there is also this other dark side?
Unmasking Our Truths (2010 02 24)
My first crack at theological college was in 1978 when I did a year’s study at Salisbury and Wells in England. I was the only woman among about 65 full and part-time students—the college has since closed, which some might think was related but alas, it was a lack of money rather than the presence of women that finally shut its doors.
Being the only woman had its advantages—like a more elegant room in a quiet corridor and, more to the point, a bathroom all to myself. Thank heavens for small mercies!
My closest neighbour was Tony, a third-year student who lived in the room directly above me. He was an extremely witty fellow whose sense of humour usually produced the college pantomime each year. In England, a pantomime is a local take-off of one of a number of traditional children’s fairy tales, with men often taking women’s parts. Written by Tony, the 1978 pantomime at Salisbury and Wells was no different save for one thing: Tony added a real woman to the cast, a woman who actually had the leading role. Not so hard to guess who that was.
The script for this pantomime was the customary Cinderella tale with a few revisions, major among these Cinderella herself, who was cast as a neurotic American princess who couldn’t handle being touched by the prince let alone being married to him. Whenever I think back on this role, I find myself hoping against hope that the part was created for me because of my magnificent sense of humour rather than my incredible neurosis. Truth be told, it was probably a little bit of both. The Cinderella that Tony produced for this pantomime was what you might call a caricature of Nissa Basbaum, and we all know that most caricatures bear some resemblance to the real thing!
I was a mere 23 years-old when I attended Salisbury and Wells. Fairly recently graduated from journalism, I had just completed a year and a half of employment as the cub reporter for the Grand Falls Advertiser in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. I was also a ‘cub’ Anglican, having only converted to Christianity about six months prior to this move to England to study theology. Combine all of this with being Jewish, well, no wonder I was neurotic! I am reminded of a line from one of the episodes in an old television series entitled Joan of Arcadia, a line from a character known only as Freedman: “Dude,” he said to one of his classmates, “I’m Jewish. Neurotic goes with the territory!”
I had chosen to study theology because I had chosen to give up journalism, at least in the manner in which I had recently been employed in that profession. I thought religious affairs journalism had a nice ring to it so it seemed to make some sense to give myself a little more grounding in theology. Hence, my sojourn to England and specifically, to Salisbury and Wells. At the time, it seemed as good a place as any and, more to the point, it was far away from home, which meant I could work out the recent changes in my life in relative seclusion from close family and friends.
As I reflect back on that first year in England and recall some of who I was and just what it was about me that produced that neurotic American princess called Cinderella, thankfully, I recognize that all of us have bits of our past that have to be reworked and reshaped in order to become the potentially divine creation that each of us is intended to be. And the way we do this is to let go of some of the attachments to which we have held for so long, attachments which we think make us feel secure even as we know deep down, they are generally the very things that have a way of shaping and setting in stone our innermost insecurities.
Living behind the mask of humour that produced that “neurotic American princess” allowed me to hide the fears that I probably had about being the only woman at the college, the only foreigner at the college and the only new Christian at the college. That mask protected me from having to deal with so many doubts about my own competence. And it’s certainly not the only one that I’ve ever worn. Over the years, there have been many, all of them related to one anxiety or another that, for some reason, I have felt needed covering up.
Each one of us wears a mask at some point in our life, some of us more often than others. We hide behind these masks in the desperate hope that people won’t be able to see what we have convinced ourselves are our frailties and our failings. We fervently pray that these masks will hide the real us from the real world.
One of the most powerful images for me about the final moments of Jesus’ life is what he was wearing when he died. If any of the pictures come near to the truth, and I think they do, the reality of those final moments is that Jesus was pretty much naked in front of the crowd, stripped of anything that might have protected him from the gawking eyes of friend and foe alike. He had few clothes to cover him up, let alone any mask.
It’s been a long time since I’ve considered giving up something specific for Lent. I used to forgo eating ice cream for the season until I realized that sometimes ice cream is the only thing that gets me through the day. As I have reflected upon my time at Salisbury and Wells, and I consider that time alongside other moments in my life, I have thought that perhaps there is, indeed, something worth giving up, not just for Lent but for life.
It would be a good idea for me to attempt to divest myself of some of the masks I wear.
The way I figure it, the reason for giving something up is to bring us closer to God and to those whom God loves. What better way to accomplish this than to rid ourselves at the outset of the very things that inhibit us from doing this?
Nissa Basbaum |
