The Harvey Lecture chapel talk on Acts 3:11-26, given by Professor Amy-Jill Levine in Christ Chapel on April 12, 2007

On this day, on the liturgical calendar, most folks, given the choice of Acts 3:11-26 or Luke 24:35-48, opt for Luke: Luke 24 has a resurrection appearance, a modified ghost story, joy and wonderment, a universal commission, apostolic witnesses, Jesus explaining the Bible in the ultimate classroom setting, and even a meal of broiled fish. What’s not to like? I wonder if the folks who put the lectionary together paired Luke 24 with Acts 3 as if to say to the homilist: go for Luke; take the better option; it’s o.k., leave Acts aside.

Alas, I could not set it aside.

The passage haunted me when I first read it, and it continues to haunt me.

Acts 3 is not an easy passage – Peter’s speech in Solomon’s portico is a true “text of terror” – to use the technical term from Seminary education. It accuses the Jews of “rejecting the Holy and Righteous One,” of requesting the release of a murderer in his stead, and finally of “killing the Author of Life.” This passage should cause consternation whenever it is read, because it lays the blame for the death of Jesus solely on the Jews. It tells us that Jews are “Christ-killers.”

That I, a Jew, am in this chapel, this morning, may well serve to increase the consternation. And if the proclamation that the Jews – all of us, at all times, and only us – are responsible for the death of Jesus, that we do not understand our own Scriptures, and that we who chose not to follow Jesus are lopped off from the root of Israel and the tree of life – if that proclamation has not seemed problematic to others, then I am even more haunted.

One could, of course, attempt to get around the text, or to make it seem less harsh than it sounds.

We could claim that Peter is not really talking to “Jews” – and certainly not all Jews – but just the folks there in Jerusalem that day. Yet the address is literally, “Men, Israelites” (which the NRSV, concerned for gender inclusivity but not the potential for anti-Judaism, reads “You Israelites” – and so winds up implicating women as well as men). “Israelites” is how Jews referred to each other then, and in fact it echoes how we refer to each other liturgically today. In the synagogue, we refer to ourselves as “Israel,” not as “Jews.” If we had any doubt that Peter was talking about the full community, he makes it clear that his audience is “the descendants of the prophets and of the covenant that G-d gave to their ancestors.” And if we still doubted that Luke meant Jews in general, we need only look at Luke’s language of “all the people” in verse 11, pas ho laos, a phrase used also in verse 9. “All the people,” that is, “all the Jews” are implicated.

Or, we could note that Peter does go on to say, “and now, brothers (or, the NRSV, which gives the ironic reading, “friends”), I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers.” A softening of the charge of deicide, perhaps: those poor Israelites, they just didn’t know what they were doing. They were simply following their equally uninformed rulers. Yet this is not much of a panacea either. First, it implicates in the death of the “Author of Life” not just the leaders but all the people, from the richest ruler to the poorest beggar. Second, it implicates all the Jews, but it manages to leave Rome off the hook. The most mention we have of Rome is Peter’s notice that the Israelites “rejected Jesus in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him.” Poor, misunderstood, sympathetic Pilate, here forced by the Jewish crowd to kill an innocent man. And third, this lovely passage does end with the notice that it is Jesus who will “turn each of you from your wicked ways.” The implication is thus that the people who do not follow Jesus will remain in wickedness.

Or again — because I really did try to find some good news, some gospel, in this text —we might assert that the Jews, or the Israelites if you prefer, should not be held responsible, since the death of Jesus was part of the divine plan. As Peter puts it, “In this way G-d fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer.” But this doesn’t much help either. It signals that the Jews were unable to understand their own Scriptures (which, by the way, as Jews understand the texts, say nothing about a suffering Messiah). Worse, Peter insists that the Scriptures of Israel themselves predict the damnation of any in Israel who would choose not to follow Jesus. As he puts it, “And it will be that everyone who does not listen to that prophet -- that is, Jesus the prophet like Moses – will be utterly rooted out of the people.” The true heirs of Israel are those who follow Jesus. Those, like me, my family, the members of my synagogue -- we have no place. The term for this view is supersessionism.

I looked at a number of commentaries to see if they would be of any help in addressing what sounded to me like harsh words, at best. Most don’t find a problem at all. The New Interpreters Bible, which has a homiletic section, offers the following: “When unrepentant Israel turns to Pilate… they freely choose death rather than life. Their bad choice represents every bad choice people make when rejecting the words of eternal life in favor of competitors that are disinterested in our future with G-d.” Such comments are not too supportive of interfaith relations: for the NIB, the Jews choose death and so come to epitomize the bad choices people make, and the followers of Jesus, of course, choose life.

And while the NIB does conclude this section by stating that the actions of the leaders, and so of the crowds who follow them, “Should not lead us to make negative judgments about the Judaism they represent,” it gives us no hint of how to avoid the problem. Why shouldn’t we make negative judgments, for the NIB has already done so implicitly?

Now, a few of you may be thinking at this point: It’s a harsh text, but it’s no more harsh than the book of Joshua, a book that commends what amounts to genocide; it’s no more harsh than condemnations of Canaanite worship; in other words, it’s no more harsh than what’s in those Jewish texts. And if this is what you’re thinking, you’re basically right. But this comparison does not resolve the problem either: if we were in the synagogue and we were reading Joshua or Isaiah, then I would be concerned about how those texts approached the “other.” But we are in a Christian chapel, and we are talking about Acts. Two wrongs don’t make a right – they just increase the number of wrongs.

Or, we could take the old default method, and say that criticisms of the Jews are really criticisms of the Church, or criticisms of all people, for we all need to repent, and turn from our wicked ways. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But I don’t think it fully works here in Acts – Gauls and Celts, Kenyans and Incas, Alaskans and Navaho were not responsible for the cross; the “men, Israelites” were, at least according to what Peter says. Peter is quite specific.

Or again, we could take the post-modern view and exculpate the text entirely – that is, we can claim it has no meaning save what the interpreters bring to it. But I do not think texts are innocent: if they can function to save, they can also function to hurt. To take a speech given by a KKK member, or a Nazi, or a homophobe, or just the average bigot, and conclude that it really does not mean to promote hatred is not simply naïve, it is obscene. And while Peter is not a KKK member or a Nazi or a bigot, his words in this speech nevertheless have power of their own. They cannot be so easily dismissed.

Or we could take another common excuse, and note that Peter is a Jew speaking to Jews, so the text cannot be anti-Jewish. Indeed, Acts has not begun its gentile mission. And yet Peter’s own speech distinguishes him and the other followers of Jesus from the Israelites. In his sermon, it is not “we” who killed the author of life, but “you.” More, while Peter may be a Jew talking to Jews, Acts is a book of the Church, an increasingly gentile church, proclaimed in places where there are no Jews.

I think Ron Allen and Clark Williamson got it right when they described this passage and Peter’s other speeches in Acts as follows: “In these sermons the church ‘confesses’ the sins of the Jews, not its own. The accusation tua culpa, you are guilty, is not the confession mea culpa, I am guilty.”

So what do we do? And how do we do it in two minutes?

Four suggestions –

First, I think we should be thankful that texts like Acts 3 can be discussed in places like the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest. The very fact that you so graciously invited me to speak here shows that you know that Scripture can prompt hatred and bigotry, but it does not have to do so. The Church, and the individual Christian, is bigger than the lectionary reading. As I’ll detail tonight, while a number of texts can be read as anti-Jewish, the basic message of Jesus is loving, gracious, compassionate. And it is also Jewish.

Second, the texts of terror are in the Bible to call us to account: to remind us that our histories are mapped with blood along with peace, to warn us that the proclamation of our good news may come at a steep price. Thus the lectionary passage today should call to mind the problems, and the pain, created when one group claims the truth at the expense of the story, and the proclamation, of another. The examples here are manifold:

Israelites and Canaanites

Christians and Jews

Israelis and Palestinians

Americans and Iraqis…

The point is not to scapegoat one group, exculpate another, or draw any sort of simplistic dualism. The point is to ask “who is hurt” and then to do something about ending the hurt. I am reminded here of an old story told by a Rabbi about a conversation he overheard between two Russian peasants. (This is, by the way, the moment in the sermon where we have the requisite heart-warming anecdote):

The first said: ‘Tell me, friend Ivan, do you love me?’ The second: ‘I love you deeply.’ The first: ‘Do you know, my friend, what gives me pain?’ The second: ‘How can I, pray, know what gives you pain?’ The first: ‘If you do not know what gives me pain, how can you say that you truly love me?’

Understand, then, my children,” continued the rebbe, “to love, truly to love, means to know what brings pain to your comrade.”

Third, the text calls us to take the logs out of our eyes as well as the cotton out of our ears. We need to hear how these texts might sound in the ears of others and so recognize that the gospel of love can be heard as a screed of hate. More broadly put, the text calls us to reflect, to repent, and to listen. Not all texts in the gospel are of the gospel.

And fourth, we must speak about the texts that haunt us, and the history that haunts us – to ignore them puts us at risk of repeating the very problems they recall. We do not excuse such texts, and such histories, we confront them, and we confront our own tendencies to repeat them.

How do we do this?

To prevent my own students from falling into the pit of implicitly bigoted sermons, I have been known to bring my son into my New Testament Introduction. Alexander is, however, now 16 and too old to be fully effective, so I’m looking for someone else’s children to borrow. But each year, I’d introduce Alexander, who went through his elementary grades at Nashville’s Orthodox Jewish day school, to my students. I’d place this really cute kid, with his kippah (head-covering) and tzitzit (fringes) in front of the class and then say, “When you speak about “the Jews” or “Pharisees and Sadducees,” or – as we heard today, the “people of Israel” – I want you to picture this child sitting in the front pew. Don’t say anything that will hurt this child, and don’t say anything that will cause someone in your congregation to hurt this child.” The exhortation is theatrical, and it is manipulative, but it is remarkably effective.

And for those who were still not inoculated against anti-Jewish preaching, I had another image: Picture me sitting in the back row of the church (and if I’m in a new church doing a Bible study or an adult education program, I’ll often go into the sanctuary to hear the sermon): don’t say anything in front of your congregation that you would not say in front of me.

Or for that matter, don’t sing anything that you would not sing if you were aware of anti-Judaism in the Church. What messages are conveyed, for example, in “Lord of the Dance,” the Office Hymn which I selected for this morning. If you were to sing:

I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame;

The Holy People said it was a shame.

They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high,

And they left me there on the cross to die….

Tra la la

If you were to sing this, you would be repeating, from the curing the lame to the charge of deicide, the material in Acts 3.

The Bible must be read; with hymns we have a choice. And so we could choose to sing this hymn, but leave out verse 3.

G-d bless you for granting me the privilege of speaking with you today.

G-d help you if you find yourself asked to proclaim a text of terror.

G-d be with you as you walk in the ways of the Church

And G-d be with all of us as we wait, in Peter’s words in Acts 3, for the “time of universal restoration that G-d announced long ago through his holy prophets.”

G-d bless you for granting me the privilege of speaking with you today

G-d help you as you find yourself proclaiming a text of terror.

And G-d be with you as you walk in the ways of the Church.

And G-d be with us all, as we wait, in Peter’s words, for the “time of universal restoration that G-d announced long ago through his holy prophets.

Clark W. Williamson and Ronald J. Allen, Interpreting Difficult Texts. AntiJudaism and Christian Preaching (London/Philadelphia: SCM Press/Trinity Press International, 1989), p. 10.

http://learn.jtsa.edu/topics/quote/archive/111201.shtml.