Today, the 5th Sunday in Lent is known as Passion Sunday – beginning the two weeks of Passiontide. The second week of Passiontide is Holy Week beginning next Sunday with Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. There is much more to unpack about the controversial nature of Jesus’ entry into the city – but you’ll have to tune in next week for more on that.

At the heart of our Holy Week and Easter observance lies the thorny question – is the Jewish-critical language – that is language highly critical of the Jews – in the passion stories antisemitic? A response to this question requires us to know more specifically – how to read and hear Jewish-critical language in the passion story through the lens of historical context?

In common speech, we talk about the gospels – plural. But if we look at the title of each of the four gospels, we discover that there is only one gospel – the gospel of Jesus Christ according to –. The according to – reminds us that this is the gospel of Jesus Christ through the lens of this particular writer – who gives us his interpretation of the life and times of Jesus – shaped through the lens of his own history and context.

Matthew wrote for the emerging messianic Jewish community recently expelled by the Rabbinical reforms that had categorically rejected Jesus’s messiahship. Matthew’s messianic Jewish community and the fledgling Rabbinic movement struggled for the upper hand in a contested revisioning of Israel’s ancient story. 30 years later, John was writing for a Jewish broad-tent melting-pot community comprising open and closeted messianic Jews, the remnants of John the Baptist’s movement, a sizable Samaritan contingent, and as today’s gospel reveals – increasingly, curious gentiles. This patchwork of messianic remnants – often in tension with one another – faced fierce oppression by the anti-messianic Judean-Jerusalem religious establishment.

Thus the tone of Matthew and John’s Jewish-critical language represents the intense intra-Jewish factional conflict in their time and context. But is it antisemitic within the modern meaning of the term? This question evokes resonances with a similar question today. Is Israel-critical language – that is language critical of Israeli policy and action in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict antisemitic? These are both crucial questions as we prepare to commemorate the events of Holy Week and Easter in 2024 against the backdrop of the Israeli devastation of Gaza as our heightening awareness of the injustice and brutality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank trigger a resurgence of antisemitism nation-wide and around the world.

It’s important at this stage to more closely define antisemitism as the hatred of Jews. Its roots lie not in the New Testament period but in later Christian acceptance of the doctrine of supercessionism or replacement theology – according to which God had rejected the covenant with Israel made through Moses in favor of a new covenant with the Church as the New Israel.

Despite St Paul’s vehement rejection of the doctrine, by the 4^th-century, supercessionism or replacement theology had led to the scapegoating of the Jews as being collectively – and for all time -responsible for killing Jesus. Antisemitism was further strengthened by the peculiar position Jews were forced to occupy in Christian society from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period.

Despite their cultural and religious exclusion and isolation, the Church’s prohibition against usury – Christians charging interest on loans – resulted in the Jews becoming the lenders of choice for Christian monarchs and merchants. Deprived of the right to own land, lending money was one of the few activities allowed for Jews. Thus Jewish money bankrolled European mercantile and political expansion in the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

Everyone hates bankers. What I mean is – we all resent those to whom we owe money – those to whom we are indebted. After all, what’s not to dislike in Shakespeare’s stereotype of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice? What’s not to resent in Victor Orban’s antisemitic stereotype of George Soros as the face of an international Jewish conspiracy controlling world affairs and pulling the strings behind international events in a gradual subversion of Christian civilization?

The belief in an international Jewish conspiracy dominated the 20^th-century and led directly to the Holocaust. The aftermath of the catastrophe of the Holocaust compelled mainstream Christianity – Protestant and Catholic – to emphatically reject supercessionalism and reaffirm Paul who as the earliest Christian writer taught that despite the inauguration of the new covenant with the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God nevertheless remained faithful to the earlier covenant made with Israel. What’s not to like in the image of a god who does not renege on previous promises.

Two difficulties arise from the Jewish-critical language in the passion story as interpreted by Matthew and John. The primary difficulty is the projection of their political context back into the Jesus timeline – presenting their intra-Jewish conflict as Jesus’ conflict with the Jews of his day. The second difficulty is that later on, Christianity misinterpreted the gospel’s Jewish-critical bias as supporting fully-fledged Christian antisemitism.

On Good Friday -our encounter will require us to substitute John’s drum beat refrain the Jews, the Jews with alternatives. When John uses the phrase to refer to the incitement of the crowds we might substitute the people, the people for the Jews. When John uses the phrase to refer to the religious authorities spearheading Jesus’ journey to the cross, we can simply say the authorities to distinguish them from the people? In doing this we are not trying to exhonerate John of the accusation of antisemitism – quite the opposite. We are taking care not to project later antisemitic tropes back into the gospel text.

More importantly, however, substituting terms as I’m suggesting allows us to more clearly understand the nature of Jesus’ growing conflict in Holy Week. His was not a conflict with the Jews of his day despite his presentation by particular Evangelists. His was a much larger conflict – a confrontation with the agents of empire.

We need to understand Jesus’ final week leading him to the cross from both a historical and a cosmic perspective. On the historical level, we need to see in the events of Holy Week the culmination of Jesus’ nonviolent resistance to the forces of empire that establish and maintain peace through violence. On the cosmic level, we need to understand the events of Holy Week leading to the cross and resurrection as God’s struggle against the powers and principalities that take up lodging in the human heart – so to enlist us in their conspiracy against the coming of the Kingdom.

We enter Passiontide in 2024, particularly aware of the nature of so much suffering in the world around us. We find ourselves wriggling uncomfortably beneath the shadow of the cross where we are tempted to feel daunted and overwhelmed by the scale of the work God calls us to collaborate in. We are called to work tirelessly to dislodge evil from its inhabitation of our hearts through truth-telling, justice-making, and spiritual restoration – to disembody conspiracy and give it no place to hide by exposing it to the light one truth, one heart, one act of courage, and compassion at a time.