Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Sermon for 6th Sunday of Easter
By Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels -
When I was young, somewhere around the age I became a Bar Mitzvah, that is, around thirteen, someone introduced me to the theological brain twister, “If God is omnipotent, all-powerful, can God make a boulder that is too heavy for God to lift?” I loved pondering that. I never asked any of my teachers and mentors about it. I just thought it was something cool to bring up at a party!
The great American author, Phillip Roth, took that notion up a large notch in his short story, “The Conversion of the Jews,” which is part of the collection in his book, “Goodbye Columbus.” The story is about a boy named Ozzie, who like me when I started to throw around the line about God and the boulder, was about to become Bar Mitzvah. Roth portrays him as one of those wise-cracking middle schoolers any of us who’ve taught that age group would rather not have in a class. Over the years, I learned to compliment their challenging questions. It often led to a good discussion.
The rabbi in Roth’s story didn’t employ that technique. In fact, he pushed back, which led to confrontation. Ozzie’s question was, if God could make Creation in six days, “why couldn’t [God] let a woman have a baby without having intercourse.” Being the middle schoolers they were, Ozzie’s friends were more amazed that he used the word “intercourse” than the content of the question.
Unlike my more innocent party question, Ozzie asked his in Hebrew school class and...he asked a rabbi. When Ozzie told his mother the question he asked, his mother slapped him. This primed Ozzie to challenge the rabbi even more. In that struggle the rabbi accidently struck Ozzie as well. Ozzie runs up to the roof of the synagogue to get away. The rabbi, the entire religious school, Ozzie’s mom, onlookers and a fire brigade with a net eventually gather at the bottom of the building assuming Ozzie is going to jump. Ozzie had no such intention, but he uses the power of the situation to force the issue. He has everyone get on their knees and proclaim that an all-powerful God can, indeed, let a woman have a baby without intercourse. Then, in the most poignant lines in the story, Ozzie cries down to his mother, "Mama don’t you see-you shouldn't hit me. He (pointing to the rabbi) shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn't hit me about God, Mama. You should never hit anybody about God – “
There are some funny passages in the story, but these lines expose the story for what it really is, a sober polemic against religious and theological hatred, religious and theological supremacy, religious and theological supersession. Interestingly, the Lutheran texts for this week and the Jewish Torah portion also involve such bias and religious chauvinism. The oldest text in this gathering comes from the first few chapters of the book of Numbers, what we Jews refer to as Bamidbar, in the desert. The portion is mostly filled with a detailed census, but also takes a pointed aside to recall a passage detailed earlier, in the book of Leviticus. There we read of an incident that occurred after the ordination of the initial group of priests. Two of the freshly minted priests, two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, were so emotionally overwhelmed and inspired by the ceremony that they took their firepans and offered an incense sacrifice that was not requested by God. God is furious that they brought a spontaneous, unmandated sacrifice. The Divine anger is so venomous that it labels theirs an “alien fire,” spiritually excommunicating the young priests. God causes that same foreign, unkosher fire to leap out and consume the two young men. In the original telling of this tragedy, the text says: “Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD meant when He said: Through those near to Me I show Myself holy, And gain glory before all the people.” And Aaron was silent.” Moses’s insensitivity is infamous.
In a similar tone, in one of two passages from the Book of John assigned to this week, John recounts Jesus healing a man who was sick for thirty-eight years and who was so infirm, he could not walk. Jesus told the man to pick up the mat beneath him and walk, which he does. The text also notes, seemingly parenthetically, that the day of this event was the Sabbath, Shabbat, the seventh day. In a rather draconian manner, the Jewish authorities tell the man that it is against Jewish law to carry anything on Shabbat, showing no empathy for the man who’d been ill for thirty-eight years and was now walking for the first time. The man replied to the authorities that the person who healed him, whom the man did not know was Jesus, told him to do so. Apparently, the Jewish authorities, who at that point in history must have been priests, knew that it was Jesus who did the healing. The next verses from John say (15:16-17), “So they began to persecute Jesus, because he had done this healing on a Sabbath. Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is always working, and I too must work.’”
If you are unfamiliar with Jewish law and Jewish thinking, you may not realize that this passage not only paints the Jews as persecutors of Jesus and his followers but is also a major critique of Jewish thinking and Jewish law. When Jesus says, “My Father is always working, and I too must work,” he is not just identifying himself as divine (or John is) but is also turning the tables on Jewish understandings of the Sabbath. You may already be aware that, traditionally, Jews do no work at all on the Sabbath. There are exceptions, of course, and one of them is an intervention that will save a life when someone is in imminent danger of dying. In John’s depiction of Jesus healing, Jesus unilaterally adjusts the law so that he can intervene to heal the sick even though the situation is not immediately life-threatening and could have been done another day.
Further, it is not only the Jewish people who rest on Shabbat. The Jewish assumption is that God rests as well. This is the reason that all petitionary prayers are removed from our prayer structure for Shabbat. It is considered bad form to ask anything of God during God’s Shabbat, God’s day of rest. After all, listening to our prayers and answering them is what Jesus references when he refers to God’s work…and his own!
The Sabbath is a sacred institution in traditional Jewish practice and Jesus’s words “My Father is always working, and I too must work,” is a direct challenge. John couches the priests’ response as persecution, although it may have been the kind of structured, legal response they might issue for any, blatant Sabbath violator. On the other hand, it is also possible they were harsher with Jesus because they disagreed with those who felt he was the Messiah. John never explains this, but just leaves the implication that Jesus is right and the Jewish leaders are wrong…and cruel.
Through the centuries, that disagreement about who Jesus was, and, for Christians, is, has been the excuse for much more than the “hitting about God” against which Ozzie warned. When Christians became the majority under the Roman Emperor Constantine, a flood gate of persecution in the name of God, in the name of Jesus opened, with Jews bearing the brunt of the oppression.
Ozzie’s words are prophetic. “You shouldn’t hit anyone about God.” Let’s concretize this for a moment. Imagine that all the tales about a judgement day are exactly as envisioned by many in general Western society, that there will be an individual reckoning to which each of us will be subjected during which angels will parade before us all the major and what we thought were minor choices in our lives. We will be held accountable for them and we will be able to speak in our defense. “Look God,” we will say, “Look at what we did for you to make your name great. We plundered. We pillaged. We ghettoized. We restricted. We attacked. We asked for your blessing on our troops and our country. We killed those from other countries and blithely attributed the deaths of innocents to the messiness of war. Above all, we felt that our relationship with you was the right relationship. The only relationship.” Can you imagine God saying, “Thank you! That’s so wonderful!”
O, yes, Ozzie. We hit about God. We’re still doing it. With every small prayer or biblical reference that puts our own religion on a pedestal or, worse, envisions it as superseding and thereby nullifying spiritualities that came before, we hit about God. When we casually live in naiveté regarding the way others believe we hit about God. When we look at others’ perspectives as “interesting” instead of holy, we hit about God.
It won’t be easy to change our behavior…and we must. Imagine if we arrive at the judgement day and we’ll see what the prophet Micah saw – a mountain of God to which all people will come. These people will come from their starting places and their directions. The multi-dimensionism of a mountain is created by different paths, not one. If we negate one small path of one small people and their beliefs about God, the entire mountain disappears. It’s not a mountain anymore. If we struggle for position as we move toward the mountain and hit about God, the mountain disappears. The mountain of God is only a mountain when all arrive there in peace, integrity and mutual respect. Don’t jump, Ozzie. We get it. We can do this.
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels
Rabbi-in-Residence - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
Sermon for:
May 9, 2021
