If you liked Christopher Nolan's repentant Odysseus, you'll love Jesuit Thomas Reese's Jesus, who repents of his un-Christian ways

  

We Should Treat Foreigners Like Jesus Did 

Thomas Reese, Religion News Service 

(RNS) — This past Sunday (Aug. 16), in the Gospel read in many churches around the world, Jesus comes across as a real jerk. He sounds like President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. 

The Gospel was Matthew 15: 21-28, the story of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus pleading for him to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon.

Jesus at first ignores her, pretends she is not there. But she keeps following him, calling out to him. She ignores the disciples’ attempts to get rid of her. They finally ask Jesus to send her away.

He replies that he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” His mission is to Jews, not Gentiles. But the woman keeps coming and begs him, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus responds in a very un-Christian manner: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, he calls her a bitch.

I prefer to believe that this unflattering story was made up by Matthew. But why would Matthew make it up? Perhaps because he had an important message to teach the early Jewish Christians — and us.

This Gospel story reflects the reluctance of early Jewish Christians to accept Gentiles into the Christian community. ... Peter changed his mind when he saw that Gentiles had received the Holy Spirit. ... Jesus at first rejects the Canaanite woman because she is not from the house of Israel. But he changes his mind when he sees how much faith she has. He changes his mind when he sees how much she loves her daughter. The Gospel is telling the early Jewish Christians that, like Jesus, they must change their attitude toward the Gentiles. ...

Of course the text doesn't say that Jesus actually "changed his mind" about accepting the foreign woman, which is what repentance would have to be to be repentance.

Only that Jesus makes an exception in the case of the foreign woman's request, while not repudiating his Jewish chauvinism.

It bothers us that Matthew is a co-conspirator in this offensive bigotry that the Gentiles aren't even an afterthought in the mind of someone who is supposed to be their Saviour.

It evidently bothers Reese because it's his job to worship Jesus, so he prefers to state that Matthew must have put the bad words in Jesus' mouth in order to convey a deeper meaning.  

Unfortunately that deeper meaning is foreign to this text, and the bad idea turns out to be part and parcel of  Jesus' very parochial eschatological message in Matthew. A lot more is at stake than just this one pericope from Matthew 15.

To wit: that the Son of Man was imminently coming on the clouds with the angels to bring God's kingdom to Israel, who would save the few Jews who had repented, but who would also condemn the many Jews, who were guilty, he said ominously, of the blood of all the prophets who had come before him, going all the way back in time to Abel. 

The Gentiles might have been happy to learn that they were completely peripheral to all this.

Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. 

-- Matthew 10:5f., 23 

It is interesting that Homer's Odyssey bothers us for a similar reason.

We don't like Homer's Odysseus because he doesn't feel the slightest bit of remorse over what he did to the Trojans, to the Cyclops, or to the suitors. The hero is not humane in punishing the malefactors.

Instead film-maker Christopher Nolan now offers us a Pauline Odysseus, plagued by an introspective conscience like Paul had in Romans 7, admitting the fact of the evil that he had done at Troy but wishing now that he had not done it. The law of Zeus has become the law of Odysseus' mind, the sacking of Troy evidence of the principle of the evil inclination operating in his flesh.

This is more pathetic than funny if you have actually read the sources. Aristotle after all epitomized in his Politics the old Greek understanding that men who behave like Odysseus aren't normal, aren't part of the polis. They must be either gods or wild beasts. Nolan gives us neither a god nor a beast, just another ordinary man.   

What will never not be funny, however, is a Jesuit who offers us a Jesus who is also neither a god nor a beast, just a convert to the Pharisaism of a Paul who compasseth sea and land to make one proselyte.

Some of the finest casuistry in the business.  

So Jesus' hate-filled threat to wipe out his entire generation for the blood of Abel on down, which his generation had nothing to do with, trivializes genocide and is outside the bounds of justice, according to Christianity Today

Threatening Profound Evil Trivializes That Evil 

Justin R. Hawkins, Christianity Today

... You don’t need an exhaustive knowledge of just war theory to know that genocide is well outside its bounds. This threat merits the most strident and serious moral condemnation, for the very act of threatening such profound evil trivializes that evil. ...

 

You can always count on CT to give you the Jesus whom they wish they had, not the one we've got.

 

Unlike Ezekiel, Jesus was a spiritual determinist "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." And none of what he predicted happened, either:

 

There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

 

 -- Luke 13:1ff. 

 

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

 

 -- Matthew 23:33ff. 

 

Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres. Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation. 

 

-- Luke 11:47ff. 

Thomas Paine grasped that Christianity implied the suicide of God long before the God is Dead theologians of the 1960s came along

Somewhere in Texas, out of which nothing good comes

... A man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the Jews for doing it. ...   So many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable ...

-- Thomas Paine, Age of Reason

The blood curse in Matthew indicates Jesus' Jewish opponents didn't get the Ezekiel memo, either

 

Nothing could be more Jewish than the blood curse, except maybe Judaism arguing with itself about it.

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

-- Matthew 27:24f.

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. 

-- Ezekiel 18:20

Jesus certainly didn't get the memo:

... the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechari'ah ... shall be required of this generation.

-- Luke 11:51

The Torah was divided on the subject:

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. 

-- Deuteronomy 24:16

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

-- Deuteronomy 5:9

Beauty's bloodless conquest

 War brings ruin where it should amend;

But beauty, with a bloodless conquest, finds

A welcome sov'reignty in rudest minds.

 

-- Edmund Waller 

How do you cleanse the land of the blood of the innocent Jesus when it is God himself who defiled it?

 

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

-- Numbers 35:33

 

New Testament "theology" is pretty clear that it is the Jewish god who is ultimately responsible for shedding Jesus' blood:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ...

-- John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all ...

-- Romans 8:32 

God sent his Son to be our sin offering ...

-- I John 4:10

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-- Romans 5:8. 

The penalty for Jesus' murder is death according to the Law of Moses, but who could possibly kill God, the murderer, except God himself?

 

The Christian atheist Thomas J. J. Altizer, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wrote in 1966 that the transcendent God of the Bible had truly died when he immanentized himself and entered human history through the Incarnation and was crucified. As a leading representative of The God Is Dead movement, the highly animated Altizer instantly became a pariah in America, which at the time literally wanted to kill him over it, as his obituary remembered:

 He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

But logically one should really go a step farther than Altizer and say that the Jewish god actually committed suicide according to this God Is Dead "theology" because God did all this on purpose.

After all, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified according to the wide evidence of the gospels and the New Testament, which insists that Jesus went to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth (Acts 8:32). This is exactly what one should have expected of a truly Divine Man bent on death.

This problem again illustrates the limits of "theology", Aquinas' queen of the sciences.

Her rational talk about God goes only so far, which Tertullian recognized when he said that the resurrection is certain because it is impossible (certum est, quia impossibile).

There are more things than the resurrection which are impossible.