The Church’s emphasis during Lent on repentance and self-examination can sometimes feel individualistic. But Lent is about more than admitting our individual faults and being forgiven by God: it is a call to be reconciled to one another. In our Confession of Sin every Sunday, we confess “that we have sinned” against God, “in thought, word, and deed.” This “we” does mean the collection of individuals: and it also means the collective, the whole community. There are many ways in which the Church has sinned over time, and for which we need to repent: of all these, the sin of antisemitism has been one of the most deadly.

This Sunday we read the well-known story of the Cleansing of the Temple, when Jesus drives people and animals alike out of the Temple. In a few weeks, on Good Friday, we’ll hear again the Passion According to Saint John. In our state, and across our country, antisemitic incidents are on the rise. There’s an opportunity here to connect the dots, and to ask the question: How do the ways we read and mis-read our own Bible perpetuate antisemitism?

I want to share brief thoughts on three areas where we, even as well-intentioned Christians, can verge into antisemitic or anti-Jewish readings.

Accidentally reading later stereotypes into the New Testament. I think of this one every year, when we read John’s story of the Cleansing of the Temple in church, in which Jesus went to the Temple and “found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.” (John 2:14) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this accidentally misremembered as “Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the Temple.” Do you see the difference? “Money changers” carried out an important function, allowing pilgrims traveling to the Temple to exchange foreign coins for the half-shekel coin used to make an offering for the Temple tax. Likewise, the animals are sold to be used in sacrificial worship, by worshipers coming from too far to bring animals or who don’t raise them themselves! The accidental “money lenders” here comes from a thousand years later, when Christian rulers forbid their Jewish subjects from working in many trades other than finance, and encouraged violence against them by Christians unhappy with economic conditions. When Jesus “cleanses the Temple,” he’s not making an anachronistic and antisemitic attack on a corrupt financial system by throwing out “money lenders”; he’s putting a stop to the ordinary course of worship by kicking out “money changers,” perhaps as a symbol of the way in which he himself is the Temple of God on earth.

Confusing ethnic/regional/religious terminology. This comes up most frequently in the Gospel of John, and especially in the Passion narrative. John customarily refers to Jesus’ rivals, opponents, and critics as “the Jews”: in Greek, hoi Ioudaioi. For example, when Jesus heals a man in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, John writes, “so the Jews said to the man who had been cured, ‘It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.’” (John 3:10) This is inherently an odd way to put it: everyone in this story is a Jew, from the critics of Jesus’ actions, to the man who’s been healed, to Jesus himself! Some scholars propose that the best way to translate or interpret John’s Ioudaioi is as “the Judeans,” since he clearly means a specific set of critics of Jesus in Judea, but never uses the term for Jesus or his Galilean Jewish disciples. Others say this is a kind of whitewashing or attempt to hide the legacy of Christian antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Whatever we choose, we need to reckon with and repent for the fact that Good Friday sermons and the Passion Gospel associated with them were used to whip up antisemitic mobs for centuries, and to remember that “the Jews” were not uniformly opposed to Jesus, nor were “the Jews” responsible for Jesus’ death; only the Roman authorities had the power to execute someone.

Jesus, and all his disciples, were Jews. This simple fact can be the easiest to forget. Jesus was not “born a Jew,” or “raised a Jew.” Jesus was—depending on how you understand the Resurrection, perhaps it’s even best to say that Jesus is—a Jew. Jesus, and every one of his disciples and apostles, was Jewish. Modern Christianity and modern Judaism exist as something like cousins, but the story of early Christianity is one of the expansion of the people of God, not of replacement: we believe that Christ was the one through whom the promises of salvation God made to the Jewish people came to encompass us Gentiles, all the other people of the world.

When we forget these simple facts, it’s easy to verge into theology that is anti-Jewish or antisemitic. Remembering them allows us to appreciate Jesus in a new way: as Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, would say, even though she’s not a Christian, she loves studying Jesus and finds him inspiring precisely because he was such a good Jew, precisely because he embodied the love and faithfulness that are at the heart of the Torah, and helped spread that very Jewish message of the love of God and of our neighbors throughout the world.

This year, our diocese is hosting workshops for our clergy on avoiding anti-Judaism in our liturgy and theology by Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, an Episcopal priest and Director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. I’ll look forward to sharing more with you after that session! In the meantime, I hope some of this might be helpful for your reflection as we approach Holy Week.