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Sermon Index

WHO KILLED JESUS?

by the Reverend John Parker Manwell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 30th of April 2000

Reading (from the Baltimore Sun, April 7, 1995)

"I thought they were taking a nap in the sun. But indeed they were dead."

[These were the words of U.S. Army Lt. Col.Jim Moncrief, upon being summoned to Buchenwald in April, 1945. He had received an urgent radio message reporting piles of bodies at a nearby camp. He jumped into his jeep and soon found himself at Buchenwald. Fifty years later, at a reunion of Buchenwald survivors, he would recall the sight.]

Some of those who were still alive, he said, moved like zombies around the rows upon rows of filthy barracks. Going inside one of them, he saw "bony survivors lying on stacked bunks. Some of them didnt even have enough life to turn their heads to see the stranger coming in "

The world already knew of Auschwitz, the AP story said. It had been liberated by the Soviets nearly three months earlier. But reports from there were so horrific that many people did not want to believe they were true.

It became clear at Buchenwald that atrocities had been committed all across the Third Reich. Before the Nazis surrender May 8, 1945, approximately 11 million people died in about 520 concentration camps.

Buchenwald survivors told of the SS murdering inmates by injecting poisons into their hearts, of drowning prisoners in open latrines and working them to death at the nearby stone quarry Others have reported SS officers taking target practice on Jewish infants being tossed into pits. Their only emotional response was disgust when they missed.

After visiting Buchenwald, at General Eisenhowers invitation, war correspondent Edward R. Murrow reported in an April 15, 1945 broadcast: "I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words."

Sermon:

"For most of it I have no words."

How did it come to this? How could this have happened in Germany, the home of so much great literature and music, of so much leading edge biblical and theological scholarship that inspired our Unitarian ancestors, indeed the home of such a world-renowned Jewish community?

How can it be that on one fateful night in November 1938, all across Germany¾--the night of Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass--the synagogue windows were smashed and the buildings burned--and no Christian voice was heard to protest?

How can it be that Jews were rounded up, made to wear yellow stars, herded into cattle cars, given forced labor and starvation rations, and, when they were no longer useful, gassed, or shot, or simply left to die--and no Christian voice was heard to protest?

Oh, there were a few. A brave and perhaps foolhardy few, many of them rounded up and sent off to the camps as Jewish sympathizers. There was one camp for priests and ministers, some 3,000 of them, mostly Catholic. They, too, were forced to labor and die, most of them.

It began, I say, 2000 years ago, with the answer given by the early Christians to the question, "Who killed Jesus?" With this answer, a cancer began to grow that would spread wherever the gospels have been carried. To erupt in genocide, however, this cancer needs favorable conditions--a large and visible Jewish population, economic and political circumstances that invite scapegoating and, most critical, a population willing to remain silent.

We know the prominence of the Jewish community in 19th and early 20th century Germany. We know the Germans bitter resentment at the reparations imposed on by the Allied victors at Versailles. It is this last circumstance--this willingness to remain silent--that I want to address this morning.

But first: Who killed Jesus?

When I think of this question, invariably I think, "the Jews! the Jews!" Why does this thought come to mind? From the gospels, repeated every Easter. In Mark, "the chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him " (14:2); they have him arrested and brought before the high priest, who speaks of Jesus blasphemy and invites the crowds to ratify his conclusion; they spit on him and beat him. The chief priests bring Jesus before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, because only he can impose the death penalty. Pilate, too, turns to the crowd, asking whether they want him to release Jesus. "Crucify him!" comes the response and again, "Crucify him!"

In Matthew and Luke, who draw on Mark, the response is the same; Matthew adds that Pilate then washed his hands, ritually, to declare his innocence of Jesus death. John, too, reports the crowds demand for crucifixion.

All four gospels, then, tell of a plot by the Jewish leaders to do away with Jesus, Pilates reluctance to do so, and the Jewish crowds demand for crucifixion. It is all so clear.

And from a Jesus Seminar scholar, the Roman Catholic John Dominic Crossan, comes the passionate response that all of this is fiction! Partly, he says, it is what he calls "prophecy historicized," that is, the result of the combing of the Old Testament prophets by the gospel writers, who after all were all Jews, for passages that would help them to understand what had happened to Jesus. Spitting on Jesus and beating him; darkness at midday¾ these images come from Amos, and from the tradition of spitting on and piercing the scapegoat who, in popular culture, would bear away the peoples sins.

And second, says Crossan, this casting of blame on the Jews arises from the bitter resentment of the Christians among the Jews feeling increasingly frozen out by the rabbis, who were assuming leadership following the elimination of the Levite class of priests with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70.

Crossan calls these stories Christian propaganda. Inspired propaganda, but still propaganda. We simply have no historical evidence for them. True, the rabbis were just as vicious in demonizing the followers of Jesus, as the two groups fought for domination of Judaism.

Divergent groups within Judaism opposed one another in those [early] centuries [of the common era] with everything from armed opposition through rhetorical attack to nasty name calling. Read, for example, Josephus on any other Jews he dislikes, or read the Qumran Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame on those other Jews they opposed. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism and, here slowly, there swiftly, separated itself to become eventually a distinct religion. If all this had stayed on the religious level, each side could have accused and denigrated the other quite safely forever. But, by the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility. Think, now, of those passion-resurrection stories as heard in a predominantly Christian world. Did those stories of ours send certain people out to kill? (Who Killed Jesus? 16) Let us skip over the centuries, now--past the Crusades, past the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492; past the Inquisition; past the pogroms of Eastern Europe; past Martin Luthers infamous diatribes against the Jews in his last years.

Let us come down to 19th century Germany. Let us come down to those distinguished theologians, so revered by our Unitarian ancestors for their bold venture into biblical criticism. Increasingly, Lutheran and Jewish scholars engaged in a battle over the relationship of Christianity and Judaism. Luther, angry that Jews had not converted after he had shown the world "true" Christianity, began to paint Christianity and Judaism as opposites. Judaism was an oppressive religion of "the law," the very opposite of Christianitys religion of the heart. He built on Jesus frequent attacks on the legalism of the Pharisees--another fiction constructed by early Christians, the Jesus Seminar tells us.

Jewish theologians in Germany, led by Abraham Geiger, responded that the two major groups of Jews in Jesus time were the Sadducees, who were conservative, and the Pharisees, who were liberal! Jesus, for Geiger, broke no new ground: He was "a Pharisee who walked in the way of Hillel." Only later, Geiger said, with Christian persecution of Jews, did the Pharisees gradually become the legalistic sect that is described in the gospels. (Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, eds., in the introduction to Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999, 15-16).

This put the Christian scholars on the defensive. Ernest Renan, author of the best-known life of Jesus in 19th century Germany, admitted that Jesus began as a reformer of Judaism but insisted that he soon gave up. Indeed, after his condemnation in Jerusalem, he "was no longer a Jew." Scholarly difference? He added that "[one of the most prominent faults of the Jewish race is its bitterness in controversy, and the abusive tone which it always throws into it."

Adolf von Harnack, one of the best known of the German scholars as the century turned, conceded that Jesus drew his moral message from Judaism--after all, his "Great Commandment" of love of God and neighbor comes directly from the Torah--but explained that Jesus was such an "extraordinary rel>

Transfer interrupted!

to extract moral teachings from the sterile legalism of his day ... The spring of holiness . . . was choked with sand and dirt, and its water was polluted," he wrote; with Jesus, "the spring burst forth afresh, and broke a new way for itself through the rubbish" (17).

The next generation of German Christian scholars is especially critical for our purposes, because theirs was the generation that trained the pastors who, under Hitler, had to make moral judgments about Hitlers persecution of the Jews. Let us look at three of them, distinguished professors on three distinguished theological faculties.

First, Paul Althaus, of Erlangen, also president of the Luther Society. His books were standard theological texts for 30 years even in this country. What did he say? He greeted Hitlers ascension to power as "a gift and miracle of God." (Robert P. Ericksen, "Assessing the Heritage" in Betrayal, 23). He did not question Jesus Jewishness, but he called on the church to deny leadership positions to converts and other Christians with any Jewish blood. He found himself disturbed by the violence of Kristallnacht¾ but still, he never spoke out against it or Hitlers program of genocide. It is said that in 1950, when his son questioned him about it, he could only say, "You have never experienced the Jews" (25-26).

Second, Emanuel Hirsch of Gottingen, a close friend of Althaus. He welcomed Hitler as "a sunrise of divine goodness." He joined the Nazi party, and became a "supporting member" of the SS. He denounced colleagues and students whose enthusiasm for Hitler might be questionable. He announced that Jesus was not Jewish because, after all, he came not from Judea but from "heathen" Galilee. Early Christians, he said, had tried to cover this up. He called the Old Testament an "embarrassment" to Christianity and "no longer a genuine religious point of contact." He offered no protest at the removal of Jews from the Gottingen faculty (29, 32).

And finally, Gerhard Kittel of Tubingen, son of a famous theologian father. The rural Jews of the Holy Land, he wrote, had been corrupted by moving to cities, "mongrelized" by intermarriage, and now were conspiring to take over the world.

No one, of course, claims that these men killed any Jews themselves. But did they make the killing easier?

Franz Stangl, later the commandant of Treblinka, worked earlier in Hitlers German Euthanasia Program, which saw to the killing of anyone seen as defective. He seemed to have some doubts. He visited a participating hospital, where he met with the Mother Superior and a priest. The nun pointed to a very small 16-year old boy, who had been rejected for euthanasia. "How could they not accept him?" she asked. "No good to himself or anyone else." The priest nodded his agreement. Stangl would later write, "This really shook me. Here was a Catholic nun, a mother superior and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I, then, to doubt what was being done?" (1). The Roman Church continues today to search its collective conscience.

Did the Protestants do better? The Lutheran church in Germany was a state church. Early in Hitlers regime, its leadership divided into two factions. One, the "German Christians," set out to win Hitlers favor by outdoing him in the antisemitism department. First, they set out to remove all vestiges of Jewishness from the church. This was especially important to them, as the Nazis tended to see all the churches as modern-day extensions of Jesus Jewishness. To counter this they pointed with pride to Luthers anti-Jewish diatribe, calling on his followers to "set [the Jewish] synagogues and schools on fire, and whatever will not burn, heap dirt upon and cover so that no human ever again will see a stone or cinder of it" (47). They purged Old Testament stories and sayings from their teaching, and even struck out Hebraisms--such as "hallelujah" and "hosanna"--from their hymns. Their leader, Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller proclaimed in 1939 that "only a church devoid of feminine qualities like compassion and capable of manly resolve could become a frontline fighter against racial impurity" (48). They were never a majority within the church but their influence was great, since like the conservatives among todays Southern Baptists, they occupied key positions of religious leadership.

The other faction called itself the Confessing Church. It is best known for its "Barmen Confession" in 1934. But sadly, this group came together not out of moral resistance to Hitler, but to defend the churchs independence and traditions. The Confessing Churchs leaders started with a historic resentment against the Jews as those who killed Jesus, and then compounded their sin by rejecting Christianity. They shared the widespread view that there was a "Jewish problem" to be dealt with, and they viewed Jews as a "foreign" influence, whose domination made the German "Volk" the real victims. They also saw the Jews as deserving of their fate. Even the courageous Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would later be hung for his part in the 1944 uprising against Hitler, had written an article in 1933 acknowledging the "Jewish Problem" and the right of the state to decide how to respond to it (101).

This was Germany, you may say. But before we let ourselves feel smug, let us remember that our own American leadership, our own churches, were slow to speak out against Hitlers "Final Solution." As a nation, we turned away at least one ship loaded with Jewish refugees fleeing from Hitler. We did not want to believe what was happening¾ and, I submit, bought into a good bit of the German assumption that there was, in fact, a "Jewish Problem" and shared to some degree at least the German resentment of Jewish financial and professional success. We, too, accepted the dominant view that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, and today are an anachronistic remnant who should in all reason have accepted Christianity as the true inheritor of the Jewish tradition.

And so I leave you with these thoughts: It matters the words we use. It matters the stories we tell, the assumptions we make.

"Once to every soul and nation/comes the moment to decide." (Hymn #119, Singing the Living Tradition) Once to every soul and action comes some great and dramatic moment, the turning point of our lives. And so, at least once, it does.

But we find the courage to make this critical choice in habits of mind and heart developed in the choices we make in lesser matters over a lifetime, as we examine our own assumptions and stereotypes and speak out against scapegoating wherever we see it. Where do we learn to do this? Where do we find the moral support we need? Right here in this church. This church, where, if we do our work well, we will find the courage to stand up when the moment of decision comes upon us.

May we do our work well.