Radical of Spirit and Society:
Yeshua bar Joseph

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, VA), March 13, 2005, by the Reverend Audette Fulbright, minister: Unitarian Universalist Church of Roanoke (VA).

Parables Afresh: Understanding Yeshua in Context

Presented by Audette and Tayloe

Sermon

This morning’s sermon is one of those I both look very much forward to and also dread. There are some complex reasons for that. On the one hand, there’s so much to talk about on this subject, and then, on the other hand, there’s so much to talk about. Also, whenever I get to talking about or deal with Yeshua, I feel so personally challenged that I almost always find myself grappling again with how I am living my life. This was never the case for me when I was younger, when I was hearing some fairly common Protestant sermons on Jesus Christ. It’s only when I have to deal with the man in context that things shift for me.

Let me begin with the choice of name. I hope you all already understand that I am talking about the man we most commonly know as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Christ. I deliberately chose this form of his name to ground him as much as possible in his literal context, and to emphasize his human life, as well as to suggest that perhaps we do not know this man as well as we think we do. Most of the people who saw the sermon title ahead of time didn’t realize who I was talking about when I said “Sidhhartha Guatama, “ and “Yeshua bar Joseph.” The name Jesus is a translation, an Anglicanization of the name Yeshua or Joshua. “bar Joseph” would be his last name – Yeshua, son of Joseph. Some even here may question Jesus’ paternal parentage. This morning, I want specifically to leave aside the proposition of divine parentage. Regardless of that factor, we are talking about a man who grew up as the son of Joseph the carpenter, and Mary his wife. Grew up poor, most likely illiterate, and part of a persecuted and angry people under Roman rule. The world in which Yeshua walked was an occupied land; it was also a land where kinship bonds and local ties were both complete and hierarchical in the extreme. For Jews, in their own religious context, there were massive and detailed laws, prescribing and proscribing the tiniest acts of daily living. You hear it said that Yeshua spoke often and in quite a hostile manner of the Pharisees, and by now, in our context, the term “Pharisee” connotes to us quite negatively – these are “bad guys.” In his own time, this would not have made sense. The Pharisees were a much-respected group of Jewish scholars whose scrupulous attention to the laws earned them the joking title “bleeding Pharisees,” for in their anxiousness not to violate law by, for instance, gazing too long upon a woman’s form, they kept their eyes glued to the ground and had a habit of banging their heads into things. I think it would be best if we understood that they were responsible for the challenging task of not only being spiritually pure, religious leaders, they also had as their duty the awkward task of leading an essentially illegal religious group, and thus had to be invested in keeping a certain low profile. Yeshua seems to have charged them with arrogance and an inflated sense of their own importance. To the Pharisees, Yeshua must have been the most arrogant person they ever came across. Illiterate and itinerant, the son of a carpenter and from the nothing town of Nazareth, he mocked them? He chastised them? He stirred people up everywhere he went, encouraging them to defy the Holy Laws and break the order? He went around, suggesting that things could and should be very, very different, and he called the Unnameable “Dad?” He also seemed to be fomenting the dissent that was always around, and the precarious standing of both the Pharisees themselves but more importantly the Jews as a people were very much in jeopardy should they draw too much Roman attention. Who was arrogant? Is it any surprise at all that he may have incurred even their deadly wrath?

That is to paint a very brief picture of the landscape of Yeshua’s life. I want to go into some of what we do know about this man, about how he lived and what he preached. I imagine most of us in this room feel that we know pretty much what he preached. We’ve heard the parables, we know he said “Love your enemies,” and he was self-sacrificing. Many of us even have a particular awareness that he was intent on reaching out to the poor and the ill, those marginalized by society. We know he “dined with sinners and prostitutes,” and that he is credited with healing the sick, touching lepers and menstruating women. All of these things trend toward a quite appropriate appreciation of what he was trying to do, but I think most of us really don’t get exactly how radical this man was! Almost every single thing we feel we know he did or said was toward the purpose of a radical and utter transformation of society and spirit. I hope this morning to get us into a little deeper awareness of how shocking and absolutely radical this man Yeshua was.

I am very intrigued by and appreciative of the work of the Jesus seminar. The Jesus Seminar, begun in 1985, is now composed of over 200 scholars. To be a Jesus Seminar Fellow, one has to be a critical scholar able to work directly with ancient texts in their original languages – Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, Hebrew, or Latin. Dogma must be put aside in favor of empiricism: the Seminar only accepts what can pass the rigorous rules of evidence. The members of the Seminar work to determine the “true” words of Jesus by voting on texts using colored beads. A black bead means, “[I think] Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition.” A gray bead means, “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas it contains are close to his own.” A pink bead means, “Jesus probably said something like this.” A rare, very rare, red bead means “Jesus undoubtedly said this or something very like it.”¹

I wander into this territory very briefly to explain why you will hear me say, “Words attributed to Yeshua,” as opposed to “Yeshua said.” Since the Jesus Seminar ascribes very, very little to him directly as quotation, I don’t feel I should, but we will be talking about red and pink information today. To give you an example, the invocation I called “Yeshua’s Prayer” is a good example. Of that, the Seminar only codes red the word “Father.” The rest was coded pink, so they feel that he said something much like that. So why, then, did I further turn “Father” into “Daddy?” In order to give you a sense of what the ancient Hebrews would have heard when this man gets up and prayers to “his Father (Abba).” Jews did not and still do not call God by name. One does not even write out the name of God. So to suddenly personalize that and bring it so close, to name God, it is most analogous for us if we suddenly begin praying to “Our Daddy.” It was the personal and the familiar, and it was utterly shocking – so shocking and unexpected that the Seminar, for example, feels sure he specifically said it, because that’s the only way it would have gotten in and stayed in, it was so seemingly improper in its context. It also goes a long way to explaining how Jesus would begin to be seen as divine and as suggesting he was himself divine, but I think that interpretation is one of the millions of questionable, time-altered ones.

So let’s go then to the parables we retold. I think most of you already know that one thing we feel sure of about Yeshua is that he must have been one of history’s most dynamic speakers. He lived in an oral culture, where all information and learning was passed on from mouth to ear. This requires a style of presentation so unfamiliar to us that I doubt I can adequately convey what it is like, but perhaps a loose understanding is fine. We have lived most of our lives in a print culture – information transmitted by words and images on paper. We are moving swiftly to a visual culture, where information is passed on by images, usually moving. We are losing our language gifts, reading is declining in every sector, and as the world grows smaller our “language” of imagery expands exponentially. Just think of a restroom door. Where the Ladies sign used to be, there’s now often only the international symbol of woman – that bald triangularly dressed figure. No writing required.

In Yeshua’s time, no writing was required, but ears were. And he seemed inclined to want to remind you of their necessity – it seems he did say things like ‘listen up!” to emphasize a point. But much more than that, he had to speak in a culturally relevant, almost hip-hop style, and of course, he had to keep it short. Yeshua didn’t rap, but if you think of the most wonderful spoken-word poet you know, and then imagine that person spoke in the form of shocking haikus that were amazingly easy to remember, you might be getting there. Like the catchy refrain of the best song that ever made you cry, that was what it was like to hear Yeshua. He could capture an idea, shock you, and sear it in your memory with only a few words. Would that I had that skill. But let’s go back to the parables I asked Ami to help me with, and walk through them. I want you to really see how really radical his notions were. Remember, he was trying to tell people about his beloved Heavenly Daddy’s way of being, the way his rule really looked in human terms. It threw almost everything that a Jewish person, peasant or educated, would think about God on its ear, and it most definitely and primarily declared outright that the earthly hierarchy was dead wrong.

So, the mustard seed. We’ve heard this parable, and most of the time it is explained as being a seed that folks would have been familiar with, would have known that it takes root easily and quickly. Ok, true enough. One might hope that God’s imperial rule would be like that. But it grows into a mighty…shrub? This was a perversion of Ezekial’s well-known “cedar of Lebanon,” that tree that grew tallest and “the birds of the air made nests in its bough.” Well, if Yeshua wanted to talk about the mighty shading bird-nurturing qualities of God’s presence, then why didn’t he use the familiar cedar? Because he didn’t want to; people already assumed God was shading and mighty and yadda yadda, and so said all the Pharisees and learned folk, amen. No, Yeshua intentionally chose the mustard plant, which was one of the most nuisance plants of the age. Farmers hated the mustard plant; indeed it did get in the garden, and it spread like wildfire, and then sure enough all the birds did come – and ate all the seeds of mustard and field alike. This was God’s rule? Nesting birds would have been in real trouble making a nest in the mustard plant, too – it would have been a certain way to have broken eggs on the ground. It’s a shrub – not good for protection or housing. To top it off, it’s an annual. It only grows for a season before dying away. This is God’s rule?

Yeshua wanted to really catch people’s attention. He was constantly saying, “God’s will isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t limited to only the righteous, it isn’t concerned only with what we think of as holy. God’s will, opened up to, is like a weed that will grow rapidly inside you, and it will bring all kinds of things that will make your life harder, not easier!”

Or how about the woman leavening bread? This one really falls on a tin ear for us in our age; it seems pretty simple – a woman makes some bread, and God’s will is like that agent inside it that causes it to rise, and when she adds it to the rest of the flour, all the bread rises. Cool, right? It’s crucial to note that for Jews, holy bread is unleavened bread. One would never use leavened bread in any sacred ritual. When God led the Jews through the wilderness, he provided unleavened bread for them. And now Yeshua is saying God’s will is like putting something into expensive flour that is going to render it unusable for the Jewish household? One should also note the amount of flour that gets leavened. Three pounds may not seem like much to a people who shop at Sam’s Club, but to a Jewish peasant, you’d be talking about a Bill Gates’ wealth of flour. Then to top it off, Yeshua had a woman doing that leavening. Women were not allowed to participate in the holy rites of the Jewish tradition. Now this woman is touching the flour and putting yeast into a vastly expensive and huge pile of flour and just double-ruining it? So for us, we have mold on cheese – and not just any cheese, we’re talking about the good French stuff – and a cook with Hepatitis has his hands all over it. It’s not that you don’t love a person with hepatitis, of course – it’s just that you don’t want him cooking for you, most likely. Similarly, Jews loved their women, but they weren’t a typical image for a spiritual actor.

Finally, how about that lost sheep? Well, none of us are shepherds, and so we tend to miss out on a couple of points with this one. First of all, Yeshua was talking to the Pharisees at this point. These were educated men whose very existence was about keeping purely to the Law and making sure everyone else did, too. The first thing Yeshua does is suggest that they put themselves in the role of a lowly shepherd. Imagine wandering up to a Bishop of the Catholic church and saying, “Yo, you know, if you were pimping and one of your hookers ran off…” My guess is he’s going to be both shocked and offended. The majority of us can see the rest of the challenge in this parable by the interpretation I’ve chosen, with many thanks to one of my former teachers in seminary. The battlefield general who leaves her soldiers to go in search of one soldier who is AWOL is a pretty good example. You leave 99 people in danger to go look for one who shouldn’t be gone in the first place! Then, you rejoice with all the other generals after you carry the AWOL soldier piggyback all the way home. Questions fly. What about responsibility to the 99 brave and dutiful soldiers who were left alone? What is it about the soldier who was derelict that we should be rejoicing over him? Again and again, Yeshua would say, “God doesn’t think like you think, God’s love isn’t like your love. God is open to anyone anywhere under all circumstances.” He wanted to stress the unconditionality of God’s love and will. He wanted people to understand how open and how far it went. You might still ask about the other 99 who were left alone. I would argue first that they were not Yeshua’s point – they were there to be his counter-point. Second, as a UU, I have to point out that they were left together. They had each other. 99 hearts and hands in one place – God apparently was reaching out for the one who was alone. But mostly, Yeshua wanted to be very in-your-face about how disruptive to the system, how very utterly unlike human politics and earthly rules God’s rule is.

Yeshua understood that a person who is shocked and hears something very new is likely to remember it. He carefully chose words and images that turned traditional saying and understandings completely on their ear. He wanted people talking and whispering, perhaps somewhat upset – or maybe better said, emotionally engaged when he spoke. No longer passive, but irrevocably changed – that’s what he hoped for, I believe.

You may recall from last week that I talked about how Sidhhartha, as the Buddha or Awakened One, started a monastery. He intentionally created a community and it was housed in a particular location. It seems to me he was indeed content on developing what we in time would call a “religion,” though as we said, to understand it as a meaning-based living philosophy is much more accurate. Quite along a different line, it seems pretty clear that Yeshua was not trying to create a new religion. He was a Jew; in most cases he affirmed the Law of Moses but wanted people to understand where the openness needed to be, and did not have any interest in keeping it just for those who would be “insiders.” Quite the opposite, Yeshua was constantly, constantly talking about the outsider, the poor, the ill, the injured, the rejected ones. Yeshua did gather disciples; as a rabbi, as a teacher, it was just the way one taught best. But itinerancy was central to his message, as was poverty. Not poverty in the way we think of it. We think of poverty as a state of privation that is the result of misfortune or bad choices; it is a state best escaped as soon as possible. Yeshua knew that with stuff comes, well, “stuff.” Envy. A sense of greed. The need for more stuff, to either shelter the stuff you have, or protect it, or take care of it. Yeshua insisted that those who followed him and wanted to share his teachings must take nothing but the clothes on their back and a staff. Not even a pouch should they carry, lest of course, they collect stuff. He wanted his followers to be the message, and evoke in others a response to that message. Go and teach. Bless and heal. Allow others to take care of you as you take care of them. Offer the best of what you have freely. Yeshua also knew that by remaining itinerant, no school or temple would rise around him. Such a thing would have created just what he was trying to dismantle – hierarchy, a system wherein someone was on top and others were below.

To this point, Yeshua was always returning. I remember when I first heard the “hate your mother and father if you want to follow me” line. Even now, most preachers don’t know what to do with this line. Some try to explain it in the sense that Jesus meant that one must utterly give up everything in order to follow God. In a way, I agree. What he seems to be getting at, when you begin to add back in his context, is again a dismantling of the system at the time. One of our most respected Jesus scholars and a noted historian of Jesus’ time and place, John Dominic Crossan, points out that in Yeshua’s time, first-century Mediterranean peasant Judaism, the prevailing system was “groupism.” One was deeply imbedded in a system of kinship, defined by gender and wealth. There were only two groups, and you were utterly a part of each – the family and the political group. To reject your mother and father was basically unthinkable – and remember, in this time, your name was First Name son of Father’s Name, if you were a male. That’s how fully immersed one would be in family. Yet here’s this Yeshua, who spouts blasphemy at every turn, saying that you have to reject the essence of your kin-community in order to be in or even understand God’s. And that was the point. The only community that really matters is God’s community, and in that community, no one is greater or lesser, and no one is excluded, should they want to be included. God’s community values the mustard plant and the prostitute, comforts the leper, dances at the wedding of the rich and acknowledges the spiritual head start the poor have on those of us burdened and distracted by keeping up with our wealth.

There is so much more to say, but I want to end with this last point. In the end, if one studies the life and the real message that Yeshua risked and gave his life to share, one is challenged utterly. I have a home, a child and husband, and altogether too much stuff. I know I’m fettered in all the ways he warned about. And I’m reasonably well-educated; on the day I wrote this sermon I had sat on a panel in the morning and later, as I recognized the pleasure I had had being a part of that and sitting up next to the keynote speaker, I heard Yeshua in my head saying, “Oh, you Pharisees and doctors of the Law. You like to have the best couches at banquets and prominent seats at the synagogue, and you like to be called “Rabbi” by everyone…”

It’s the constant temptation that we all are prone to in our own ways; I may find myself uncomfortably tagged by his words because he specifically railed against the religious leaders of his day, when he found them eager to be honored for their position, their place in the hierarchy, but it’s in all of us, to want to be honored for our talent, our specialness, for others to notice our new car, new large home, new degree. Again and again Yeshua said “it’s a trap! It’s the way to sin, the way we end up being unjust, the way we become blind to the light that shines in each!” In the end, what he seemed to be saying was pretty simple: love one another as God loves you. Love everyone, not only those who are your friends and do nice things for you, or just those in your family. Work without ceasing in any way or at any moment for justice; don’t trap yourself with things, stay free, move on, give away yourself so you may receive God back. Touch those who are untouched. Share everything you have and anything you get. Don’t follow rules that don’t move you closer to God. And be not afraid. I think, in the end, that may be what I most remember. Yes, in the Bible, the words “Be not afraid” are put in the mouth of a heavenly messenger. Yeshua didn’t have to walk around saying “Be not afraid.” The way he lived and what he taught requires that of us. Maybe that’s not quite right. Undoubtedly, we might feel afraid. The greater point is, it should never stop us from pursuing the right course of action. Fear is just not an adequate excuse for not doing what is right.

I hope you have a better understanding of how radical Yeshua bar Joseph was. Whether you think he was a man or more than a man is an article of personal faith. What all people of reason should be able to agree upon is that this was absolutely no ordinary man, and what he taught changed history for all time. His friends were so convicted of his truth that almost every one of them was willing to die a painful, horrible death rather than renounce his ideas, and they did die painful, horrible deaths. But you can’t kill truth and wisdom; it has a way of enduring and speaking again and again. Yeshua bar Joseph showed us what can happen when one person is willing to speak the truth to power, regardless of personal cost.

¹ Funk, Robert W., Hoover, Roy W. et al. The Five Gospels: the Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1993.

UUC Home Page

UUC Sermons