Palm/Passion Sunday, Year A | Matthew 27:25
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
April 2, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
We don’t give a whole lot of thought to gods anymore. We consider them to be, for the most part, fantasies and superstitions. Gods were something people believed in when they didn’t know any better, before we had the scientific and technical capabilities to understand things like we do today. Our advancements have allowed us to move beyond all those bizarre ideas—to become the rational, enlightened beings that we are. But most of that thinking is simply pride—hubris, really, when it comes down to it.
We still encounter the ancient gods—many of them on a daily basis. We’ve simply stripped them of their names and titles and refer to them as natural or psychological phenomena. Who the world used to know as Ares, Skanda, or Chiyou is now simply “war.” Pluto and Ebisu have become “wealth.” Poseidon, Apollo, and the like are now simply the sea and the sun. In erasing their identities and abstracting them, we imagine that we’ve stripped the gods of their power, that we’ve finally attained some measure of control over them. But all we’ve actually done is blinded ourselves to their existence, their influence, and how we, even today, continue to worship them.
The old gods are alive and well, our view of the world has simply become too narrow to comprehend them anymore. Once we’ve become aware of their presence, some are fairly easy to identify, like the ones I mentioned earlier. Others are a bit trickier. Gods can present different faces from culture to culture, so one people’s idea of any given god sometimes has conflicting elements with another’s. But there is always one certain way to identify any god, no matter how someone might describe its attributes, and that is how it’s worshipped.
Over the centuries Jewish people have received a nearly unending stream of abuse from Christian societies, and one of the reasons for that is found in a broad misapplication of today’s Passion reading. As we spoke about a few weeks ago, when we see the word “Jew” in the New Testament, a better translation is often “Judean”—referring to particular subgroup of people from a particular region within greater Palestine. As outsiders to the family conflict among the Judeans, Samaritans, and Galileans, we’ve lumped everyone together and then brutalized the whole. Due to the outright genocide supposedly Christian cultures have committed against them, it’s essential we recognize that people we know as Jewish today have nothing to do with the Judeans the Church has historically and foolishly scapegoated for Jesus’ crucifixion. Religious and ethnically Jewish people were not responsible for Jesus’ death then or now. Nor should we ever have persecuted them—then or now. To have done so is inherently antichristian.
The truth is, if we had paid closer attention to our own scriptures—today’s text in particular—we could have seen that no matter appearances, associations, or our misidentifications, these particular Judeans were not servants of the God described throughout the Hebrew Bible.
How do we know? By how they worshiped.
We like to confine worship to the formally religious or “spiritual” parts of our lives, but as created beings all our life is worship. Everything we do—the choices we make, the ways we behave, our actions toward and words about others—ultimately reveal the god we serve, whether that’s the Lord God of Heaven and Earth or something else entirely. In our reading today, when those particular Judeans took responsibility for Jesus’ execution, they announced, “His blood be on us.”[1] If they had stopped their curse there, we’d never be able to identify their god. But when they continued with the phrase “and on our children,” thereby offering up their progeny, they revealed exactly to whom their lives had become dedicated.
Despite our imaginations about the ancient world, child sacrifice has never been a particularly common way to honor a god, especially within anything related to broader Jewish culture or history. The only god the Bible mentions who embraces that particular form of worship is named Molech. Unfortunately, we don’t have many records or descriptions of Molech beyond the Bible’s brief references.[2] We basically know three things about him: his name is a variation on the ancient Hebrew word for “king;” people sacrificed children to him; and the One True God considered him and his worship to be an utter abomination.
Although we might not have much information about Molech, we do know a good bit more about related deities elsewhere in the greater Mediterranean basin. The Phoenicians recognized Molech as a version of one of their own gods, Baal Melkart, the patron of their capital city, Tyre. Carthage, another of their major cities, also considered Melkart to be their protector, although they knew him under a different name, Baal Hammon. And once the Phoenicians encountered the Romans, they were quickly able to identify Baal Hammon with a god known as Liber.
Liber isn’t a particularly well-known member of the Roman pantheon now, but we still frequently speak of his wife, Liberty. Many gods in the ancient world were couples, with the masculine representing the more externalized or even aggressive nature of the concept they embodied while the feminine held sway over the more internalized or nurturing aspects. Like poles on a magnet, neither could exist without the other. Overemphasis of one pole would always result in chaos.
Liber was the common man’s version of Jupiter or Zeus. He was the god of free speech, self-expression, and fertility. On his holiday, food and wine flowed freely and even the lowest members of society could say whatever they truly thought without fear of repercussion from the government or other authorities. Honestly, Liber seems like a pretty cool god overall, provided Liberty was around to balance him out. Left to his own devices, Liber would become divisive and destructive, a drunken, unrestrainedly violent embodiment of raw individualism, self-centeredness, and self-promotion.
As I said, thanks to their extensive travels and trade, the Phoenicians recognized these four characters—Liber, Baal Hammon, Melkart, and Molech—to be the same god. So even though history doesn’t tell us much about Molech himself, we can infer a good deal of information about him. However, even if Molech’s followers thought about or described him in an entirely different light, ancient people knew these gods were the same being because of how they were worshiped. So despite what the Judeans calling for Jesus’ death might have tried to tell us about themselves and the God they likely assumed that they served, as soon as they proclaimed, “His blood be on us and on our children,” we can know that in their heart of hearts their lives had become dedicated to Molech.
Fast forward a few thousand years, and despite our obliviousness, the ancient gods are still alive and well. And among them stands who I believe to be the true god not only of our nation but of vast swaths of Modern American Christianity. We can protest all we want. We can try to talk ourselves out of it. We can pound our Bibles and point at our crosses and praise the Trinity with our mouths all day long. We can delude ourselves with songs about love, grace, mercy, and new life until our bodies rot and even our bones turn to dust. But we must face reality: the god before whom we pledge allegiance, the god our currency claims to trust, is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nor is he the God of Moses or David or Isaiah or Jeremiah. And he has absolutely nothing to do with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. How can I possibly say this? How do we know?
Because of how we worship.
On March 27 we as a nation once again sat in the congregation as witnesses of what has become a regular occurrence. Columbine. Sandy Hook. Uvalde. Covenant Presbyterian. And who honestly can remember how many others? We might have been able to say the first few were tragedies that we wish we could have prevented, but our behavior since then has proven otherwise. The continuing regularity of this experience throughout our lives and across our land reveals it not to be simply lamentable fate or the result of mental illness or the work of an imaginary pack of disgruntled “lone wolves.”
This is worship.
Someone told me that this week’s mass shooting was the 129th in the United States just this year. If that’s accurate, we’ve now reached the point of offering sacrifices to our god three times every two days.[3] I can only wonder when we should expect our rituals to embrace morning and evening prayer. And how soon after that will our god begin to demand noonday offerings as well?
Again, we can protest all we want, yet we literally speak of the “necessary sacrifices” we as a society must make in order to protect our precious “Liberty.” But we aren’t worshiping Liberty or her idols. She never accepts this kind of behavior. Our method of worship reveals that our god is Liber, aka Baal Hammon, aka Melkart, aka Molech, the abomination condemned throughout the Hebrew Bible.
We cry about how there’s nothing we can do, but we all know exactly what to do. It’s become “just the way things are” only because this is the way we, as a people, have chosen it to be. We refuse to restrict or regulate Molech’s sacrificial altars or ceremonial blades, tools intended exclusively to destroy human life. But how could we? What would our god say? Molech secures our freedom to do whatever we want! He provides us with food and drink and luxury! He showers us with unrestricted access to his idols so we need not recognize our all-consuming fear! Yet the price he asks in return is so small—maybe what? Three to five feet tall?
We, as a culture, can confess and mourn until our throats grow raw, but we have chosen our course. We will ourselves not to repent; we refuse any steps toward change. We’ve collectively agreed that Molech’s demands are an acceptable exchange. So we, as a people, will continue to regularly serve up our children at his banquet table.[4]
Holy Week has begun, but we remain a deeply unholy people. Good Friday draws near, but it is unquestionable that we—not Jesus—deserve the sentence of death. We are stiff-necked. We are rebellious. We walk in the legacy of those Judeans who chose to sacrifice God’s only-begotten child. We have made our choice, and we will not change. Not out of reason. Not out of love for country. Not out of a commitment to freedom. We cannot amend our behavior—we will never change our ways—so long as we, as a people, continue to refuse to change our god.
[1] Matthew 27:25 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Leviticus 18:21 & 20:2-5; I Kings 11:17; II Kings 23:10; Isaiah 57:9; Jeremiah 32:35
[3] 31 days in January + 28 days in February + 27 days of March=86 days. 129 divided by 86 is exactly 1.5.
[4] Even the recent rash of legislation targeting the LGBTQ+ community can be read in light of worship. We say we’re trying to “protect the children,” but that protection is simply an attempt to maintain the purity of our sacrificial lambs so they’ll be spotless when we offer them up to our god.