Prejudice is not new to humans, no sin is. Our racial prejudice in America is a pseudo-scientific spin on the human sin in hating and exploiting someone different than the favored group. For most of history, this prejudice has happened on religious, ethnic, or social grounds. Social status can be marked in many ways and a feeling of superiority is for many one of the better perks.
I am not like those people.
Jesus faced prejudice by being from Galilee and Nazareth when He ventured south for Holy Week. He was called a Nazarene and that wasn’t always a compliment. Galilee even had a different political system instead from the Roman Empire, allowing two leaders to implicate themselves in killing Jesus. Pilate sent him to one of Herod the Great’s litter, King of Galilee, but this mini-Herod sent Jesus back to Pilate. As often happens with tyrants, sharing in a murder made them fast friends.
If you were from the part of Israel governed by the Romans directly, it was because you were too restive for your own local king. The Jews had been Roman allies when Rome still needed allies. The Maccabean Kingdom of Israel was no more absorbed into the mighty Empire though Augustus had tried to reward them with their “own” King. Like many who impose on an outside culture, Augustus chose badly. He picked a friend, Herod, who was not really a Jew and who turned out to be a monster. When it is safer to be Herod’s pig than his son, you know things are bad.
The people of Jerusalem and the surrounding area, Judea, were the core of the Kingdom. They had been the last part of Israel to fall in ancient times and the seat of the great Empire of David and Solomon. If they were not much now, they still had delusions of grandeur. If northern Israel was becoming more important, having greater contact with the Greco-Roman culture, Judea remained the Jewish heartland. More Jews by far lived outside of Israel in the Roman era than in it, Alexandria in Egypt was a great center of Jewish learning and study, but the homeland, the great city, was still Jerusalem.
There was (evidently) a northern Palestine accent that a Judaean Jewish person could catch. This tone did not mark you as a rube, but an outlier, someone from that part of Israel that had split with David in ancient times and was not the seat of the Temple. If Herod the Great had done nothing else, he had built a glorious Temple and it remained a symbolic center for Jewish life. If the synagogue had become the beating heart of Judaism already, the Temple still existed and could not be ignored.
There is an even more subtle prejudice: the superiority of those who “get it” by nature over those who are mere “outliers.” There are Jews and then there are the real Jews. If you are a Christian, you know the look, the eyebrow raised, the concern that you might not be one of the insiders: there are Christians and then there are the real Christians. There are Christians and those who did not just convert to the church, but grew up in her sacred spaces. Converts or outsiders can seem so boorish. Don’t they know we have heard it all? Don’t they know we have the high priest for our pastor?
If you were from the area of Jerusalem, then the Temple was close enough to visit often. If only a few of the Jewish people dispersed throughout the world could ever visit this sacred shrine, you could go daily. You saw the great feasts where they knew how to do them correctly. Everyone else might be drifting into nominalism when it came to the sacrifices commanded in the Pentateuch. You were there to smell the savor and see the smoke.
If you were from Jerusalem, you were not in the future, that would have seemed more like Caesarea, but locked in the glorious past. David had made Jerusalem his city. Solomon had made it the seat of a potent economic Empire with a greater Temple. The Jewish State with the City of David had stood at the center of salvation history for centuries. If it was tattered now, the water might still be coming from courses built by real Jewish kings.
Some Christians live this way as well . . . if only we could return to the Golden Age when . . . Of course, we could recall that the 1950s had segregated drinking fountains, the 1960s riots, the 1970s Jimmy Carter . . . The glorious past is past, but not so glorious. We do not recall the blemishes, our equivalent of David and Bathsheba, because times are tough. We valorize our Founders or the Christians of the last generation because the troubles they faced (Nazis, Communism, the Great Depression) were defeated. We want them to be winners in every way so we can know some pride, but it is a false pride and a trap that can end our lives. Nothing can waste a life faster than living in yesterday, especially a fictional yesterday.
If you lived near the Temple, then a sense of superiority might develop combined with a frustration at impotence. You could keep doing the same old things, but even in Judaism you could question your relevance. Most Jews never visited your Temple or your city. Most Romans scarcely thought of you and the government viewed you as a source of revenue and military problems. Nothing is more dangerous than a country that feels like it is better than its present status and also cannot do anything about it.
Acting on this feeling led to the destruction of Jewish Jerusalem in 70. It is easy to talk to yourself, forget Rome, and become a triumphalist. The Zealots presumed on the grace of God and the Temple of God. They did not have the first and brought on the destruction of the second. All their triumphalism did was produce an Arch of Triumph in Rome showing Caesar talking loot from the holiest of places.
I grew up in the church: a pastor’s kid, grandson of deacons, great-grandson of a pastor. I loved church and going to church. I never have had a bad pastor for any length of time. And so the dangers of being an insider are there for me.
I know how this thing called Christianity is done. I have right doctrine (and I do!) and God has blessed my church in the past (He has!). And yet that is nothing today. Today is the day that the Lord has made and though God is not done with the past, He will command us to remember it, He is also making history now. Can I be in that place? Can I ignore what is happening on the official schedule of Temple events to go hear the Son of God who is speaking today?
God help us if we become people who worry that Jesus is too untidy, too loose a cannon, too out of control and so miss Him when He comes. We have a program on Thursday night that will keep us out of the Upper Room. We are busy on Friday and when the eclipse and storm comes it will merely irritate us by throwing off our day. Easter morning we will be getting ready to start the week without realizing that we have just entered the Eternal Eighth Day of Creation. All things are being made new.
We keep puttering around with the rocks that did not cry out and miss the kids who do. We look out for the pious Jews from Galilee, you can tell a Nazarene by his accent, to turn them into the authorities. Jesus is no heretic, but He is not part of the establishment. It would easy if he were a liberal, or a radical, or a revolutionary. Instead, Jesus is a faithful Torah Jew who will not play the game. Who does He think He is?
We are conservatives, like Jesus, but we back the establishment even when backing the establishment is wrong. We know who talks like we do, sounds like we do, gets it, combs his hair right, wears the right clothes, and knows all the right people. Can anyone good come from Galilee? Who is this carpenter’s son from up north? Who is Mary? Who is His father? And if you were His disciple, maybe it is time to reconsider when the good guys turn on Him . . . the Temple establishment, the only ones who believe our teaching with any real power. Maybe you should consider it especially if you had grown up in the heartland.
Judas Iscariot was, after all, the only one of the Twelve from the right part of Israel.
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