What We Do

Congregational Project
2008

From Slavery to Freedom:
Jewish and Christian Readings
of the Exodus

As in week two, the third week's presentation began with a review of what had come before and a preview of the evening's activities. The focus of this session was to be placed on the ways in which the exodus story is woven into the fabric of the Christian story. The ques-tions to be explored were:

• How do Christians situate themselves in the story?
• Does the story belong to Jews and Christians in the same way or in different ways?
• Can Christians own this narrative in ways that honor both the Christian and the Jewish communities?

This third installment of the 2008 ICJS Congregational Project was led by Dr. Christopher Leighton, Executive Director of the Institute. Dr. Leighton invited partici-pants to try to do something that has yet to be accomplished by Christians and Jews, namely, to learn to read the exodus narrative in ways that create a sym-biotic interplay between the two traditions so that both may learn from the other rather than simply tolerate the other.

Dr. Leighton's Presentation

As the history of Jewish and Christian relations unfolded, Christians laid claim to the narrative of Israel's history with God in ways that superseded -- displaced -- the people of Israel. One of the key questions that must be answered, therefore, is whether that supersessionist dynamic is hardwired into the Christian narrative. Put more starkly, the question under consideration is: Are the affirmations of Christianity based on the negation of Judaism?

As a first step in moving toward an answer to this troub-ling question, Dr. Leighton presented a chart* that outlines some of the literary parallels between the exo-dus narrative and the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. The chart demonstrates that Matthew framed his Gospel so as to recapitulate the story of Israel in the story of Jesus. Jesus embodies Israel's history.

The story of Jesus as it is framed in the Gospel of Mat-thew suggests that Christians cannot understand Jesus' story without reference to Israel's story: Removing references and allusions to Passover from the Gospel narrative would, to a large degree, render the story of Jesus unintelligible. By the same token, the Church has maintained that the redemptive arc of the exodus narra-tive cannot be understood without reference to Jesus because Jesus unlocks the inner meaning of the story. When Christians reinterpret the story of the exodus in light of Jesus, however, it is no longer the story as it is encountered in the Hebrew Scriptures. So the question remains: Does the framing of the story of Jesus in rela-tion to the exodus story leave room for the Jewish people?

Responses to the Presentation

Dr. Leighton invited responses from his colleagues. Dr. Rosann Catalano began the discussion by suggesting that there are two ways of looking at the material in Matthew's Gospel. The first is the supersessionist read-ing of classical Christianity as outlined by Dr. Leighton: Christians cannot understand the Jesus event apart from the exodus narrative, but the exodus itself only makes sense with Jesus as the culminating point of the story. This reading, she said, dishonors the Jewish people by its implication that Jews do not understand their own story. She added that such a reading is unbecoming a community that claims it is formed by the gospel God made known in Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, we do not know what was in the mind of Matthew; we can only know the text that Matthew left us and what the Christian community did with that text. Dr. Catalano believes that this leaves room for a more benign reading. According to this alternative reading (a minority voice in the history of Christian interpretation), Matthew was doing what Jews always did: He was trying to make sense of important events in the present by mining his Scriptures.

Next to comment was Rabbi Joel Zaiman, who began by saying that the Christian retelling of the exodus story sounds strange to Jewish ears. Rabbi Zaiman remains unconvinced that the Jesus narrative is unintelligible un-less it is read through the exodus story, and he finds the last segment of the chart of literary parallels particularly troubling. If Matthew wanted to encourage Jews to accept Jesus, paralleling the life of Jesus with the exo-dus story made sense. But the last box in the chart is not a parallel, not simply a reinterpretation. From a Jewish perspective, what is outlined in that box changes the message of the exodus. It takes the story of the people Israel and uses it in ways foreign to the way in which the people Israel understood and lived it, leaving no room for them in the story.

The Rev. Grady Yeargin, thinking ahead to his own pre-sentation in week four, said he was beginning to realize that the retelling he will offer the group may be truer to the Jewish story than the retelling in Matthew's Gospel. In wrestling with the question of how one makes some-body else's story one's own story, he concluded that the only possible way to accomplish this is by retelling the story in light of similar situations.

Responding to his colleagues, Dr. Leighton declared that saying what the Passover means to Christians does not necessarily exhaust the possible meanings the story has for the Jewish people, and that points of overlap be-tween the two narratives make interpretive possibilities much richer than may at first seem to be the case. Nevertheless, the dilemma remains: How can Christians and Jews both lay claim to the story and, at the same time, honor the other community's rendering of it?

Dr. Leighton, responding to Rabbi Zaiman, argued that the story of Jesus was not intelligible to Matthew's com-munity apart from the narrative because the community believed that Jesus was the Messiah and that he would liberate them from the sin in which they felt trapped, but their liberator was ignominiously put to death on a cross. After the resurrection, they had the sense that some-thing extraordinary had happened, and they went back to the deliverance narrative in their foundational story to articulate their understanding of events.

When one of the Congregational Project participants asked why the Christian Church couldn't just accept the Passover story for what it is, the story of the Hebrew people's deliverance from slavery, Dr. Catalano explained that the ones who reinterpreted the exodus story were not Christians but Jews, and then pointed out that Jews didn't just accept the story either. They created a reality bigger than the story itself and used the reality they had created to interpret their entire history.

Text Study #1

A Portion of the Long Form of the Easter Proclamation
at the Beginning of the Easter Vigil
The Roman Missal (1985)

The Roman Missal is a compilation of prayers that con-stitute the liturgical rhythm of the Roman Catholic community. The prayer studied by the groups at their small tables is read at the beginning of the Easter Vigil, which takes place on the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday.

Dr. Catalano, the ICJS Roman Catholic Scholar, set the scene for the Easter Vigil. The church is in darkness. When the service begins, the celebrant and his associ-ates light a fire on the high altar in the front of the church. From that "new light" the Easter candle is lit, and from the Easter candle the light is passed through-out the church by the lighting of small candles held by everyone present. When the church is filled with candle-light, the prayer about to be studied is sung.

(Click here to read a pdf version of the prayer.)

In studying the prayer, participants were asked to con-sider the following questions:

• What is the condition of alienation (or degradation) that this prayer indicates is overcome?
• How does this prayer relate the exodus story to the Christian story of Jesus' death and resurrection?
• How does the understanding of the exodus story in this story compare with the rabbinic and biblical accounts that we explored during the previous two weeks?
• Why does the exodus narrative occupy such an important place in the Christian imagination?

Discussion

The condition of alienation was identified as sin, which is overcome through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, symbolized by baptism. When Dr. Leighton asked what that has to do with Passover, one participant mentioned that a key issue in both stories is remem-brance. Keeping the problem of supersessionism in the foreground of the discussion, Dr. Leighton then asked whether the notion of overcoming the power of sin in the Christian story eclipses the notion of redemption from political slavery in the exodus narrative. A Christian participant saw the Christian story as an extension of the category of political captivity that did not preclude laying claim to the story in a different way. A Jewish participant pointed out that the concept of sin in Juda-ism is very different from what Christians mean when they use the term. A third participant offered a simple but effective juxtaposition of the respective purposes of the Jewish and Christian narratives: For Jews the exodus story is about making sense of the story; for Christians the exodus story is about making sense of Christ. Christians tell the story so they know who Jesus is; Jews tell the story so they know who they are.

Text Study #2

A prayer from the Easter Vigil in the Episcopal Church,
taken from The Book of Common Prayer (1979 edition)
(This prayer is said immediately following the reading of Exodus 14:10-15:1.)

O God, whose wonderful deeds of old shine forth even to our own day, you once delivered by the power of your mighty arm your chosen people from slavery under Pharaoh, to be a sign for us of the salvation of all nations by the water of Baptism: Grant that all the peoples of the earth may be numbered among the offspring of Abraham, and rejoice in the inheritance of Israel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Once again participants were given a set of questions to ponder:

• How do the "[days] of old," specifically the events of the exodus, "shine forth on our own day"?
• What insight breaks forth as a result of this memory that sheds light on the present?
• What do you think is the hope that is articulated in the prayer?
• How does this prayer shape Christian understandings of the Jewish people?

Discussion

By this time the events of the evening had clearly made many of the participants uncomfortable. A Jewish par-ticipant understood the prayer to express the hope that all the people of the earth would come to God through baptism in Jesus Christ, which excludes the Jewish people from salvation. Looking for another way to read the prayer, Dr. Leighton saw in the words "that all the peoples of the earth may be numbered among the offspring of Abraham" the dream that all the peoples of the world might be connected in a familial way to the God of Abraham. But in the end, he admitted that the way in which the prayer is formulated and the way in which it is understood by the people who pray it ulti-mately do not recognize the distinctiveness of God's covenant with the people Israel and leave no room for the Jewish people.

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Endnote

*Dr. Leighton wishes to acknowledge Michael Goldberg, Jews and Christians: Getting Our Stories Straight: the Exodus and the Passion-Resurrection, Trinity Press In-ternational, 1991, as a major source in the creation of this chart.

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