Palm/Passion Sunday, Year B
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 24, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Looked at from a broad perspective, the Bible could be considered a history of sibling rivalry. Right toward the beginning of Genesis you have the tale of Cain and Abel, the first brothers, and their seemingly pointless jealousy that led to murder.[1] Moving forward to Abraham’s time, there’s Ishmael and Isaac, whose mothers’ conflict results in Ishmael’s exile.[2] Isaac’s sons, Esau and Jacob, are famous for their fighting, conspiracies, and manipulative tactics.[3] And ten of Jacob’s own sons then conspire to kill their brother Joseph, ultimately settling for “just” selling him into slavery.[4]
Moving on past the Exodus from Egypt, the tribes descended from Jacob’s children are often in conflict. After they finally unite under King David, we witness abuse, fratricide, and rebellion within the royal family.[5] Solomon ultimately takes the throne, but after his death, the tribal tensions once again grow to a breaking point, leaving us with the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom, also known as Judah.[6] The fighting continues until the Assyrian Empire sweeps through and displaces the entirety of the Northern Kingdom, with Babylon eventually following suit in Judah. Fast forward to the Babylonian exiles’ return to what’s then known as Judea, and the conflict begins anew, this time between those returning and those who were left behind in the first place.[7]
Once we arrive at the New Testament, the family had settled into three primary camps: the Judeans, who lived in the southeastern region surrounding Jerusalem, the Galileans up in the north, and the Samaritans in the southwest. As descendants of the people who had been left behind during the Babylonian Exile, the Samaritans functioned as a sort of distained half-brother: people coming from outside considered them part of the family, but within the family itself, they were outcasts. Judea, as the administrative and religious capital of the region, was sort of like the strict elder brother—the one who does carefully maintains and enforces all the family traditions (including rejecting Samaria). Galilee, then, which is where Jesus and most of the apostles came from, was, in some respects, the sort of clueless little brother. Judea didn’t hate Galilee, but they definitely looked down on them and their more relaxed attitude toward life.
Those inside the family would have recognized all of these distinctions—and probably a lot more. But those of us who come from the outside have a history of lumping them all together under the title of “Jews.”
As we enter Holy Week, particularly with our upcoming Gospel readings from John, recognizing these distinctions is essential to help us to avoid one of the Church’s most frequent and heinous historical offenses: fostering antisemitism.
You probably noticed that in today’s Gospel I replaced all references to “the Jews” with “the Judeans,” a change I’ve made throughout this week. There are two reasons for this. One is to emphasize the fact that the people we know today as Jewish—or even Israeli—have no direct connection to the events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion. In Jesus’ day the geographic, ethnic, and religious associations would have been closely connected, but in current usage the term refers to at least two distinct groups. One of those is people of ethnically Jewish heritage—those descended from Jacob, Abraham’s grandson. The other group is people who adhere to traditional Judaic religious teachings, many of whom no longer have any direct genetic connection to those ethnically Jewish. Some ethnically Jewish people practice or “believe in” Judaism (in the modern sense of “believing”), but many do not. The groups may overlap, but they haven’t been identical for centuries or even millennia. And neither is responsible for what happened to Jesus two thousand years ago.
The other reason is to remind us of this sibling rivalry, which, as I mentioned, is particularly pronounced in the book of John. If you pay attention, you’ll notice the regional identities popping up and being mistaken throughout that Gospel. When Jesus, a Galilean, chats with Nicodemus, who’s from Judea, there’s a bit of wordplay and teasing hidden within the text: the same phrase we translate as “born again” or “born from above” has a colloquial meaning of “born up north,” in other words, in Galilee. It’s a sort of play on words akin to “You can’t see God’s kingdom unless you’re from God’s country.” Shortly after, we see the woman at the well, a Samaritan, misidentify Jesus as being from Judea. When Peter enters the high priest’s house during Jesus’ trial, the local Judean people single him out as being connected to Jesus because of his Galilean accent. Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, then intentionally provokes the high priests and other religious leaders—and receives the expected reaction—by labeling this backwater Galilean Jesus as King of the Judeans. We miss these details because, coming from the outside, we’ve incorrectly lumped these distinct regional personalities into a single, homogenous group.
This kind of thing plays itself out constantly, and not just in what we would consider traditionally Jewish society. Driving through our own region, you’ll occasionally see a billboard about Las Cruces, “the real New Mexico.” We’re proud of our area’s heritage and don’t necessarily want our culture confused with Albuquerque and Santa Fe “up north”—all the time never even giving a thought to Navajo Land and its distinct history and culture. But no one from outside the state knows or even cares about our regional differences. To them, we’re all just New Mexico.
The Bible traces these kinds of internal fights and rivalries—this tendency to blame and isolate from one another—all the way back to the beginning of humanity. What we see playing out today in attempts to set “genuine” Christians against undefined “false” ones or “real” Americans against our just-as-American neighbors is simply that original sin playing itself over and over again: not the distraction of Eve eating forbidden fruit, but the blame Adam throws at Eve and then Eve throws at the serpent. We define ourselves against one another, reinforce our distinctions, demonize one another, and ultimately refuse to take responsibility for our own part in any conflict or mistake. We seek something outside ourselves that we can blame so we can replay our self-deceiving sins of pride and distain again and again.
So as we conclude our season of Lent, I’d like each of us to look at our own lives and to consider where we too may be perpetuating division and prejudice. Look for signs of antisemitism or racism in your own thinking. Check for indications of classism or other forms of partiality in your own behavior. Then, without pointing fingers at whoever your personal “them” might turn out to be, consider what you can do to change, what steps of confession and repentance you might need to take. As we complete our journey with Jesus this week, do something about it, nailing that sin to the cross and waiting in the darkness for God’s redemption.
[1] Genesis 4:1-8
[2] Genesis 21:8-14
[3] Genesis 25:25-34; 27:1-45
[4] Genesis 37:12-36
[5] See II Samuel 13:1-18:17; I Kings 1:5-2:34
[6] See I Kings 11:43-12:19
[7] See Nehemiah and Ezra