Return of the King

They uncovered the roof and had broken through. Is not this the case with Jesus? Has not the Father uncovered the ceiling of our world and broken through? Has He not flooded our dark dwelling place with Heavenly light? Has He not lowered His Son presenting us with nearly a paralytic .... at least by Heaven's standard? For to be one of us — frail, vulnerable, human, and in that sense crippled — Jesus was emptied of the glory He had before the world was made.

The roof of our world was uncovered at His birth, and Heaven appeared amongst us. This is the singular event He reveals to His future Apostles at the moment of their calling. "You shall see Heaven open," He told them.

In this morning's lesson, the "breaking through" we witness is done in the service of compassion. A paralyzed man is carried to a roof top and lowered down from above. Now, imagine carrying a quadriplegic man up on to your roof and then make your way to the center with him. This is considerable risk and self-sacrifice — an act of undoubted devotion, fulfilling the offices of love we associate with angels.

Do you see? Even at ground level, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, is coalescing, is materializing all around where Jesus is.

Consider the scene through the eyes of those inside. The scene is near darkness dimly lit with oil lamps. As Jesus is pressed in by a crowd — ".... many gathered together, so that there was no longer room to receive them, not even near the door"   (Mk 2:2) — what little light there was would have been mostly absorbed by their heavy, woolen clothing. You know, the darker the clothing, the more that light is absorbed.

This was not the age of bright colors and (Hollywood movies notwithstanding) whiter-than-white tunics. This was not the age of sliding glass doors or of large casement windows thrown open. A hut was built to seal off a noisome world of insects and harsh weather. It would have been a dark and stuffy place. Then, suddenly, there is a "breaking through"! The roof is uncovered! Light floods in from the Heavens! The air is cool and fresh! What relief! And all in an act of love. Angels are ascending and descending. Truly, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

We might easily imagine people leaving this scene or encountering each other in the public square, like-minded men and women, who salute each other with phrases like "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" or "Angels are descending!"

These phrases were unknown before Jesus articulated them. The formulations the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of God are heard ninety-nine times in the New Testament .... and in the rest of Holy Scripture, not at all.

Why would they not appear in the books that would become the so-called Hebrew Bible (really it was the Judean Bible). Why? ..... because talk of Heavenly life was forbidden by the Temple authorities, banned by the Sadducees, who governed the Temple's lifeworld. "There are no angels!," they taught. "There is no resurrection of the dead!" "There is no Kingdom of Heaven," therefore, "opening to God's human creatures." The mere mention of these things was sufficient to spark a riot. As we read in the Book of Acts,

Yet, these are precisely the signature phrases surrounding the greatest earth movement the world has ever seen: the Advent of God.

As we considered last Sunday, this is no revolution. For Jesus announces, not something entirely new, but its opposite: something most ancient .... ancient even unto the gates of Eden: where God and His angels trod and kept company with man and woman.

Does the Son of Man have authority, Jesus asked in our Gospel lesson today? Yes, original authority .... which is the whole point of the Prologue to St. John's Gospel.

Certainly, the Sadducees perceived the Jesus movement to be at least an insurrection. He is always hemmed in by large crowds as we see Him today. Multitudes followed Him wherever He goes. We hear of thousands in many scenes. Well might we ask, How?! How could this have come about among tradition-bound people? If He is saying things utterly opposite the authorities, how could tradition-bound people devote themselves to Him? And the answer is, precisely this venerable antiquity, this original authority.

Jesus is no translator or scribe. He does not present a school of interpretation. He does not present Targums or a new Talmud. He teaches the original and the Divine. We hear that men marveled, for He taught as one having authority (Mk 1:22) (there's that word again), a word that is inseparable from the its root, author — not an interpreter but rather the one who composed the original. No, this was no revolution, but rather a restoration of the most venerable and authoritative.

When the Forerunner and then later the Lord Himself cry out, "Metanoeite!" (meaning to turn around), they exhort everyone to re-turn — to return to the most ancient and the original: to Eden ..... and to abandon the innovation of Judah-ism.

This was Jesus "battle cry": the Kingdom of God has drawn near (Mk 1:15); the Kingdom of God is not far (Mk 12:34); the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand (Mt 3:2). What could be more venerable, what could be more estimable, what could be more incommensurably authoritative than the Kingdom of the Author of the World?

And the alternative in Judea? The alternative was the civil religion offered by the Temple in Jerusalem with its Mesopotamian customs of appeasing God with animals butchered alive at its altar. (What a choice!) Meantime, in a modest hovel somewhere in Capernaum, a roof was being removed and shafts of Heaven's revivifying light and life-giving atmosphere were flooding down onto the earth!

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But there are many who simply do not see it. Since we began these meditations on the ancient Hebrew religion set against the innovation of Judah-ism, we have been called to task. Many of these notes boil down to a single complaint:

Certainly, we have have quoted Prof. Yehezkel Kaufmann (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) in saying,

We emphasize his word, watershed. That is, the Exile marks a "turning point." The elite of Judea spent two generations absorbing the beliefs and customs of their powerful overlords, first of Babylon and then of Persia. Then, they returned speaking Mesopotamian Aramaic and practicing strange customs, rooting their new, hybrid religion in animal sacrifice (so popular in the Middle East of that era). Their preeminent leader, Ezra, indisputably had either revised or completely rewritten their Scriptures.

But, you see, the key question, is .... Did they establish a predominating, authoritative cultus which presided over the whole Levant for the next five hundred years? That's the question. If this is true, if their hybrid religion, Judah-ism, were indeed monolithic from the sixth century B.C. then right up through the lifetime of Jesus, then the idea of restoring ancient Hebrew religion would surely be controversial.

But this is not what the Gospels attest nor what the historical record documents. The idea of a longstanding, monolithic Judaism is a modern construct. We have no evidence for it! What the Gospels reveal, by contrast, is a pluralistic society having diverse beliefs. That the Sadducees and Pharisees bitterly disagree causing the Sanhedrin to explode in an uproar (as we just saw) is the tip of the iceberg. Beyond them were groups who were even more diverse, who bitterly disagreed with both groups. After all, the Sadducees and Pharisees at least agreed on the Temple cultus and accepted the centrality of animal sacrifice.

By contrast, the Essenes (to name one sect), a group roughly the same size as the Pharisees, rejected animal sacrifice and devoted themselves to virtue — or, as St. Paul would say, to the transformation of their minds. This fact was well-attested by contemporary commentators, Josephus and Philo. That the Lord Himself approves the Essene pattern of faith is vividly attested as Jesus disrupts the sale of sacrificial animals, beating men, and overturning their tables and cages.

There is no monolithic Judaism. There is only one group who, through alliance with the Persian Empire (also a center of animal sacrifice), built an imposing Temple, proposed a new set of Scriptures, and were installed as governors in Judea.

For centuries we suffered from a paucity of evidence, and we imagined Judaism's unopposed hegemony. There is no question that the Judaism we see today did derive from that group, soon to be called, "Rabbinic Judaism."

Today, the situation is different. For two landmark studies have recently been published adducing indisputable evidences that place the rise of Judaism in the first century B.C. As my teacher Msgr. Charles Murphy, the Rector Emeritus of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, used to say: "Wow!" Judaism begins, in a meaningful way, during the first century just before the birth of Jesus.

A third study — Shaye J. D. Cohen (The Beginnings of Jewishness (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1999) — published a generation ago, sees the coalescence of Jewish religion occurring in the last years of second-century B.C. under the tyrannical leadership of John Hyrcanus, instituting a forcible conversion to Judaism. It was only then, Cohen argues, that the well-known ethnic group, the Ioudaios, would henceforth be defined as "someone who worships the God whose Temple is in Jerusalem" (Cohen, 79).

Certainly, we cannot doubt the iron will and furious policies of John Hyrcanus. For his expedition into historical Israel destroying the ancient Temple on Mt. Gerizim, a center of Hebrew belief, is breathtaking in its cruelty and enormity.

The recent study The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 2017) has been offered by my own teacher, John J. Collins. Following an exhaustive study of documents, including those discovered near the Dead Sea, Prof. Collins sees a broad and diverse society that honored Wisdom literature (such as the Psalter, Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes) as well as traditional folklore. This was the literature of that pluralistic culture. The Torah, he said, enjoyed prestige, but people did not feel that it need govern their conduct of life. Yes, Ezra had attempted an education program based on his Scriptures, but it was short-lived and ultimately failed (Collins, 60).

But around the middle of the second-century B.C., Collins sees what he calls a "Halakic turn." Suddenly, the Law becomes central, and evidence of an observant Judaism is seen. The pivotal moment, Collins writes, is the Hasmonaean Revolt led by John Hyrcanus ending 160 B.C. The Seleucid Empire would prevail over the Maccabees. But this experience so traumatized the Hebrew lifeworld that was driven into a unity not seen since before the Exile. At the center of this unity was the Torah, a code of identity and life.

Orthodox Christianity is about faithfulness to the original and the untainted so far as it is possible attain this. I commend, therefore, a book released in only the past few months, Yonatan Adler's The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2022). In this book, destined to be called a landmark for generations to come, Adler summarizes the work of Cohen and Collins. He singles out Reinhard Kratz (Historical and Biblical Israel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), who after reading

Two Judaisms. We might say, generally, pluralistic vs. monolithic or, particularly, non-biblical vs. biblical. Writes Kratz, "Up to this point, non-biblical Judaism probably preponderated, with biblical Judaism then having rather marginal historical weight" (Kratz, 187).

Unlike his colleagues, Alder confines himself to a data-driven study of archaeological artifacts and texts. His findings are profound:

Wow! That's right! Prof. Adler said, "knew of the Torah" before the period just before Jesus' birth.

Of particular interest to us is his finding that the synagogue was a first-century invention instituted to promulgate the writings of Moses as found in the Torah. You see, they are rolling out a colossal program. The Hasmonaeans and their successors are rolling out a massive program of indoctrination. Every bumper stick would read (so to speak), "IT'S THE TORAH!"

The first instances of the synagogue came about with the Hasmonaeans but didn't pick up steam until the first century, especially the latter first century, when we saw an extensive network of synagogues springing up from Rome to Arabia reaching out to the Diaspora. This is a very thorough and determined campaign of indoctrination. As we can see in scenes of Jesus present in the synagogue, depicted in the Gospels, there is also an undercurrent of resistance to this.

When you consider the findings of Kratz and Collins, who saw a diverse Hebrew society preoccupied with Wisdom literature, you see that a natural spiritual trajectory not toward animal slaughter but rather toward personal transformation. This is the object of wisdom literature: the transformation of our minds and souls. As Saint Paul taught,

or, writing to the Church at Corinth,

This is the spirit of the wisdom literature! Here is the diverse Hebrew religion! .... we might say, the faith of historical Israel (the Northern Kingdom).

Our Lenten meditation today, I pray, liberates us that we might see the Advent of God in its proper setting. We see a great crossroads set before the children of Abraham on the eve of the Incarnation. And what was its goal? Jesus makes it plain, exhorting His Disciples:

These sheep are not wandering through "the land that time forgot"! They are not denizens of a lifeworld of mists from before the Exile! This is not some kind of biblical "Jurassic Park"! They are the children of Abraham, the contemporaries of Jesus, who grew up honoring the Fathers they cherished "at many altars" as the Scriptures attest. They remember a world where angels visited .... near the Oaks of Mamre. And lately, after enduring a campaign of indoctrination throughout the Levant and to the furthest reaches of the Diaspora, across the world, they then had to suffer the destruction of their ancient Temple in Samaria.

The lost sheep of the house of Israel are not scholars. Most could not read. Few knew how to resist the new and strange doctrines they were commanded to accept by a ruthless "Hyrcanian" regime.

It is this world into which God sends His Only-begotten Son. He has come. He has come to love them, to heal them, to reassure them, and to teach them. He has come to show them the Way and the Truth and the Life. And, as we lately saw, He has promised His Disciples the restoration of that magical world they glimpsed as children at the knees of their parents — the world of Heaven on the earth, of angels ascending and descending, and now recently, the Kingdom of God .... in their very midst.

The roof of the world has been uncovered. Heaven is opened. And the King of Heaven and Earth has returned. "You are the Son of God." Nathanael exclaimed. "You are the King of Israel."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.