Holy Week

 We are in Holy Week, the week of the Christian liturgical Kalendar that leads up to the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is Pascha or Easter depending upon where you live and what language you speak.  The celebration of Pascha/Easter goes back to the very beginning of Christian history.  In the early centuries of persecution before the legalization of Christianity there were disputes as to when and how the Christian Passover – Pascha is the Latinization of Πάσχα which is the Greek transliteration of פֶסַח (Pesach), the Hebrew Passover – was to be celebrated.  The majority regarded the Christian Passover as a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and held it on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.  Some, primarily among the churches of Asia Minor to which the book of Revelation was addressed, thought that it should be a commemoration of His death to be held on the date according to the Hebrew calendar on which He died.  Since that date was the fourteenth of Nisan these were called Quartodecimans from the Latin for fourteen. A variation of this, held by a much smaller number of Christians located mostly in Gaul, celebrated on the date He died according to the Roman calendar, which was the twenty-fifth of March.[1]  Settling this controversy was the main non-doctrinal accomplishment of the First Council of Nicaea in 325.[2]  The earliest extent mention of the observance of the entire Holy Week dates to the last half of the century prior to that.[3]  Towards the end of the fourth century, just prior to the second ecumenical Council (the First Council of Constantinople, 383), the Spanish nun Egeria made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in what is actually a long letter but which also reads as an early example of a travel journal[4] provided a detailed account of the Holy Week services held by the Christians in Jerusalem whose bishop at the time was the important Church Father St. Cyril.  This was the most elaborate celebration of the Holy Week at the time and through accounts such Egeria’s Jerusalem’s practice came to influence other Churches throughout the Christian world.

 

The observation of Holy Week seems like an inevitable development.  The four Evangelists present a much clearer picture of what Jesus said and did in the week of the Crucifixion than of any other period in His earthly ministry.  The week begins with Palm Sunday, remembering Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in fulfilment of Zechariah 9:9-12.  We might begin it with the eve of Palm Sunday, when the anointing of Jesus by Mary at the supper in Bethany took place.  SS Matthew and Mark tell of this event in the middle of their account of Judas’ pact with Jesus’ enemies to betray Him for thirty-pieces of silver.  By doing so they indicate not when the supper occurred but that Judas’ decision to betray Jesus began with this event.  It is from St. John that we learn that the anointing had taken place a few days earlier than Judas’ deal with the high priests, which took place on the Wednesday of the week of the Passion.  St. John connects the two events in a different way by identifying Judas as the one who had voiced the objection to Mary’s act.

 

St. John also tells us that Jesus had arrived at Bethany six days prior to the Passover.  This was the Saturday before Palm Sunday, six days before the Passover on the Friday on which Jesus was crucified.  Some see a conflict between St. John and the other Evangelists on the day of the Passover but the conflict disappears upon closer examination.  When St. Mark tells us that “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (Mk. 14:12) this does not mean that the Passover lambs were killed on the Thursday before the Crucifixion.  St. Mark, like St. Matthew and even the Gentile doctor St. Luke, used the Jewish method of counting days as starting with the previous evening.  This is rooted in the creation account of the book of Genesis, where of the days of creation it is repeatedly stated “And the evening and morning were the X day.”  We also use this method of reckoning days when it comes to holy days in our sacred Kalendar.  That is why the twenty-fourth of December is called “Christmas Eve” and the thirty-first of October is called “Halloween” (short for All Hallows Eve).  Clement Clark Moore was wrong.  “Christmas Eve” is not “the night before Christmas” but rather the part of Christmas that falls on the evening of the twenty-fourth.  When the Synoptic Evangelists tell us that the disciples prepared the Last Supper on the day when the Passover lambs were killed they are counting the evening of the first Maundy Thursday as part of Good Friday.  In the Hebrew calendar it was already the fourteenth of Nisan.  Jesus died at the ninth hour of daylight - three pm - on the fourteenth of Nisan.  This was the hour the sacrificial Passover lamb was slain.  By the method of reckoning days used by the Synoptic Gospels this was still the same day on which the Last Supper had taken place. 

 

This raises the question of what was going on with the Last Supper. It took place, as the Synoptic Gospels say, on the day the Passover lamb was slain, at the beginning of that day, the evening prior to the slaying.  This would seem to rule out it being a Passover meal proper, since this was eaten on the evening following the slaying of the lamb, the evening that begins the fifteenth of Nisan.  St. Luke, however, seems to clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal.  He calls it such himself (Lk. 22:13).  He records Jesus’ calling it such “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15).  He includes details indicative of a Passover meal such as the first cup (the Kiddush) at the beginning of the meal (Lk. 22:17), before the institution of the Eucharist with the breaking of the bread (Lk. 22:19) and the cup after supper which if this was a Passover meal would have been the third of the cups signifying redemption and blessing.  .

 

The answer to the question is present in the Scriptural texts.  Yes, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and yes, it was eaten before the Passover lamb was slain, a day before the Jews in general ate the Passover that year.  For the only lamb mentioned as being present at that meal was the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”  He offered Himself to be eaten at meal in the bread and the cup.  “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” He said after breaking the bread while giving it to His disciples (Lk. 22:19) “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” He said over the cup after supper (Lk. 22:20).  Chronologically, it would not be until the following afternoon that His blood would be shed and His body given, but He offered His disciples His body and blood in the first Eucharist the evening before, just as they were eating a Passover meal the evening before the Passover was slain. 

 

There is an important lesson in this.  Although the events in which the salvation of mankind was accomplished, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, are historical events, events which occurred at a specific place and specific time in the history of the world, at the centre of these events is a Person Who is not bound or limited by space or time.  This Eternal Person Who entered the world of space and time in order to redeem and save, is declared by the Scriptures to be “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

 

The Law of Moses specified that the Paschal lamb was to be selected and separated from the rest of the flock on the tenth of Aviv (“Spring”, the original name for the month re-named Nisan in the Babylonian Captivity).  Note how St. Mark concludes his account of the Triumphal Entry: “And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.” (Mk. 11:11)  The impression that this verse gives, that after the Triumphal Entry, Jesus had a quick look around and then went back to Bethany is reinforced by His promise to the donkey colt’s owners that “straightway he will send him hither”, (Mk. 11:3) i.e., that He would return the animal immediately, which only St. Mark records. This is the only indicator in any of the Gospels of the time of day of the Triumphal Entry.  It was late on Palm Sunday, as the afternoon was turning into evening, at which time the ninth of Aviv/Nisan was ending and the tenth was beginning. 

 

In sermons the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday are often contrasted.  The crowds that welcomed Jesus with “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” on Palm Sunday became the mob that screamed “Crucify Him!  Give us Barabbas” on Good Friday.  The contrasts are important but the underlying harmony between the two events should not be overlooked.

 

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that Sunday He publicly presented Himself to Jerusalem, King David’s city, the capital of national Israel, as the Messiah they had been awaiting, the Christ.  He had not hidden His identify before this.  That He is the Christ was the import of His remark in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His public ministry about the prophecy of Isaiah being fulfilled.  What He said about Himself in His sermons and parables and in His controversies with the Pharisees and scribes would be very strange, to say the least, if He did not claim to be the Christ.  He had identified Himself as Christ to individuals such as the Samaritan woman at the well from before His public ministry even started (the encounter with the woman took place prior to the arrest of John the Baptist and hence prior to His public ministry) and when St. Peter, speaking for the Apostles, confessed Him to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:15) He praised this as having been divinely revealed (Matt. 16:17).  The Triumphal Entry, however, was His official presentation of Himself to the nation as their Messiah or Christ.  The crowds who met Him with palm branches and shouted Hosanna recognized this, of course.  What they didn’t recognize was that by presenting Himself as the Christ, He was presenting Himself as the true Paschal Lamb.  Neither did His disciples recognize this even though He had begun explaining it to them following St. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:21) and at His anointing at Bethany, intrinsically connected with His official presentation of Himself as the Christ the following day in that it was a literal anointing of the “Anointed One”, He had again made the connection by saying that “against the day of my burying hath she kept this” (Jn. 12:7). 

 

The disciples, like the rest of Israel, were familiar with the prophecies of the Messiah, the Anointed Son of David, Who would deliver Israel, restore David’s throne, and establish it and rule it forever.  Their Scriptures also predicted that He would suffer and die and be raised from the dead.  Isaiah’s account of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,[5] Daniel’s prophecy of the Messiah being “cut off, but not for himself”[6], the 21^st/22^nd Psalm[7], prophecies of this nature are found throughout the Old Testament, including in the words spoken to the serpent “and thou shalt bruise his heel” in God’s very first promise that He would send a Saviour.[8]  Prior to their fulfilment, of course, it was difficult to see the connection between these prophecies and those of the triumphant Son of David.  The Genesis prophecy was the key connection.  There were no nations when that promise was made.  The promised Saviour was for all mankind.  Israel, in the Messianic prophecies, is the kingdom of priests Exodus 19:6 declares her to be, performing the priestly function of representing the entire world of mankind.  The promised deliverance, is not mere deliverance of the nation from political subjection to empires such as Assyria, Babylon or Rome, but deliverance of mankind from bondage to the enemies that took mankind captive in the Garden of Eden – Satan, sin, and death.

 

The way the Messiah would defeat these enemies was by meekly submitting to their killing Him.  For the only claims Satan, sin, and death have over mankind arise out of mankind’s voluntary entrance into bondage by sinning in the Garden.  The Messiah is the eternal Son of God, Who when He took human nature to His Own eternal Person in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, became Man but without sin.[9]  He bore the sins of mankind on the Cross, because His death was the true Day of Atonement as well as the true Passover, but He had no sin of His own.  Satan and death, therefore, had no claim on Him, and when He allowed them to take Him anyway they found that they had captured Him over Whom they had no claim and could not hold.  The final day of Holy Week, Holy Saturday, remembers the day when Jesus’ body lay in the grave, the one kingdom of death, while He entered Hell[10], death’s other kingdom, not as captive but as Conqueror.  Note His promise to the repentant thief on the Cross “Today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”[11]  While Paradise and Hell are ordinarily thought of as opposite places far removed from each other – think of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus[12] - at the ninth hour on that fourteenth of Nisan that was the first Good Friday, Paradise invaded Hell.  When on Easter Sunday He rose again from the dead, He left behind Him a Hell the gates of which He had smashed to pieces, and whose captives He had set free.  As Conqueror, He claimed as His spoils, all those that Satan and death had taken captive in the Garden, i.e., mankind.

 

Therefore, while the difference between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the demands for crucifixion on Good Friday may illustrate the fickle nature of the whims of the mob, ultimately there is a unity between the two.  By joyously receiving their Messiah on Palm Sunday, the crowds of Jerusalem had selected and separated the true Paschal Lamb, and by demanding His death on Good Friday, they sent Him to the death for which He hand come into the world, by which He accomplished the salvation to which the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt on the original Passover pointed.

 

Have a blessed Holy Week!

 

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[1] The Crucifixion was one of several events – the first day of Creation and the testing of Abraham with regards to the sacrifice of Isaac are among the others – which ancient Christians, going back to at least the second century, believed to have taken place on the twenty-fifth of March by the Julian calendar.  That the early Christians also regarded this as the date of the Annunciation – and therefore the conception of Jesus Christ, nine months before Christmas, His birth – is believed to be derived from its having been the date of the Crucifixion.  While you won’t find the “integral age” theory spelled out in any Patristic source, that the early Christians were thinking in such terms seems to be a reasonable deduction from the coinciding of the date set for the Annunciation and the date of the Crucifixion.  That the figure through whom God established the Old Covenant, Moses, died on his 120^th birthday, seems to be the implication of Deuteronomy 31:2, and was certainly held to be the meaning of this verse by the ancient rabbis (see Sotah 12b in the Talmud) who held this to be also true of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and King David (see Rosh Hashana 11a in the Talmud) on the basis of a general principle extrapolated from Exodus 23:26 and the example of Moses.  While a direct application of the rabbinic concept to Jesus would have placed Christmas rather than the Annunciation on the twenty-fifth of March, the reason the early Christians would have been thinking in terms of the conception rather than the birth in Jesus’ case is fairly obvious.  The Annunciation and not Christmas was the date the Incarnation took place.  In the early centuries, the Church was challenged by heretics who taught that the union of the divine and human in Jesus took place at some later time.  The most common form of this heresy was to say that it took place at the baptism of Jesus.  The orthodox doctrine, however, is that Jesus’ human nature was united to His Person from the moment of conception, that it was never the human nature of anyone but the Eternal Son of God, that the Incarnation was not the fusion of a human person with a divine person or the possession of a human person by a divine person, but a Divine Person taking a complete human nature that was formed to be His own to His own Person.  Therefore it made more sense to the ancient Christians that the Son of God would die on the day He became Man rather than on His birthday like Moses.  This also lined up better with the Biblical evidence as to the time of His birth.  From the fact that when Gabriel visited Zechariah in the Temple all of Israel was assembled there (that is the significance of “and all the multitude of the people” in Luke 1:10) this had to have been Yom Kippur for no other day in the course of Abihan’s two weeks of duty involved a national assembly (its first week of duty earlier in the year fell on the week after Shavuot, the Hebrew Pentecost) therefore the Annunciation had to have taken place around Passover in March.

[2] The council ruled that Pascha or Easter was to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the twenty-first of March.  This was a translation into the solar calendar of the day when the Resurrection occurred which was the Sunday following the Jewish Passover.  The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar – a calendar in which the month’s following the lunar cycle takes precedence over the year’s following the solar cycle and so each month begins on the new moon – and Passover occurs in the middle (on what would be called the Ides of the month on the old Roman lunar calendar) of the first month, which is the spring month, ergo the full moon of the month when spring starts.  By the council’s ruling, spring is considered to start on the twenty-first of March, although astronomically the vernal equinox can occur anywhere between the nineteenth and the twenty-first (this year it fell on the twentieth).  

[3] Apostolic Constitutions, 5.13-19.

[4] Peregrinatio Egeriae. There are numerous variations of the title both in Latin and in translation. In some of these there is a “th” instead of a “g” in the nun’s name.  The 1919 SPCK translation by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, is an example of this.  It can be read here: The Pilgrimage of Egeria

[5] Is. 53.

[6] Dan. 9:26.

[7] 22^nd by the Hebrew numbering, which our Authorized Bible uses, 21^st by the numbering of the LXX and Latin Vulgate.

[8] Gen. 3:15.

[9] Heb. 4:15.

[10] Hell, when used in this way, should be thought of as “the depository of the souls of the dead” rather than “the place to which the incurably unrepentant will ultimately be consigned” although there is a great deal of overlap between the two concepts.  This is the original meaning attached to the word, although today it is more commonly used of eternal punishment. The Bible brings the two together in Rev. 20:14 when it speaks of Hell, in the original sense of the word, being cast into the Lake of Fire which is Hell in today’s sense of the word, at the Last Judgement.

[11] Lk. 23:43.

[12] Lk. 16:19-31.

Christ is Still Victorious

J. Brandon Magoo, the decrepit old geezer who a few years ago under suspicious circumstances highly indicative of chicanery and perhaps a deal with Lucy the gender-confused devil, became the occupant of the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington DC that has surprisingly not been renamed in one of the fits of anti-white hysteria that have marked the acceleration of Western Civilization’s descent into the final stages of Spenglerian winter, declared 31 March to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.”  Exactly why he thought this segment of the alphabet soup gang the visibility of which proportionate to its representation in the public has become comically excessive in recent years, needed such a day, escapes me.   Perhaps it is indicative of his eyesight having become so bad with age that he cannot see what is right before his nose.   Lest anyone think I am unfairly picking upon our neighbours to the south who are twice unfortunate, first in being saddled with an ungodly republican form of government, and second in having Magoo as their president, I will point out that the twit who has led His Majesty’s government as prime minister for the last nine years is just as bad and doesn’t have the excuse of extreme old age.  At any rate, Magoo’s choice of date looks very much like it was intended as a kick at his country’s Christians.   For this year, the most important festival of celebration in the Christian Kalendar fell on 31 March.   That is the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is the Christian Passover.   In most countries it is called Pascha or some similar word derived from the Greek and Latin words for Passover.  In some countries, not all, with Germanic based languages – English developed out of Anglo-Saxon a dialect of German – it called Easter, Ostern, or some other such cognate, for which reason countries with Germanic languages are infested with the type of Hyper-Protestant who likes to spread the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Church is not really celebrating the Resurrection on this day but rather worshipping some pagan goddess.   Twits like this would have a harder go at selling such tripe in countries that speak Greek or a Romance language.

 

It is rather amusing that these Hyper-Protestants are able to spin an elaborate conspiracy theory from what they think they know about the name of the festival.   In the lands where a variation of Eastern/Ostern became the popular name of the festival the Church had been celebrating as Pascha for centuries prior the name was taken from the month in which it often fell.   This is the month that we call April.   The Anglo-Saxons called it Eosturmonaþ. (1)   The Venerable Bede may or may not be right about that name having come originally from a Germanic goddess.  He is the sole source attesting to there having been such a goddess.  Whether or not the pagan Anglo-Saxons worshipped such a deity is immaterial.  She was supposedly the goddess of spring and the rising sun – the term east for the direction in which the sun rises has the same derivation – and this is the basis of her association with the month of April.  Eosturmonaþ was the Anglo-Saxon “month of spring.”   This is the association that was undoubtedly foremost in the minds of the Anglo-Saxons after they converted to Christianity and began calling the Christian festival that often falls in that month by its name.  

 

Far from being a paganization of Christianity the borrowing of this name for the Christian Passover was very apt.   While the Son Whose rising we celebrate on Easter is the Son, spelled with an o, of God, He is also according to the Messianic prophecy of Malachi “the Sun of righteousness”.  That is the prophecy that reads “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.” (Mal. 4:2)   As for spring, into this season in which after months of winter, trees put forth leaves, grass begins to grow, flowers start to appear, animals come out of hibernation and the birds return, God has placed within nature a depiction of resurrection.   Perhaps this is also the reason why the Jewish Passover which prefigures the events that culminated in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ celebrated in the Christian Passover occurred when it did.   The Jewish Passover falls on the 14^th, the Ides, of the month in the Hebrew calendar that since the Babylonian Captivity has been called Nisan.  The original name of this month, the one used in the Pentateuch where the account of the Exodus out of Egypt and the instructions for celebrating Passover are laid out, is Aviv or Abib. (2)   This word means spring.  The name of the city of Tel Aviv in modern Israel means “Hill of Spring.”

 

This is why the Christian Passover is celebrated when it is.   In the early centuries of the Church different regions had different practices with regards to the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection.  Some thought it should be celebrated on the date on which it occurred in the secular calendar regardless of what day of the week it fell upon.  Others thought it should always be celebrated on the day of the week in which it occurred, Sunday.   Some thought it should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover.   Others thought that the dispensational change needed to be signified by a different date.  In the first ecumenical Council of the Church – a council, to which all the bishops from every region are invited and the rulings of which are subsequently received as binding by the universal Church – which was convened at Nicaea in 325 AD to address the heresy of Arius of Alexandria, who denied that the Son was co-eternal, co-substantial, and co-equal with the Father, it was ruled that the Church would celebrate the Christian Passover on the first Sunday – the day of the week on which the Resurrection took place – after the first full moon – a month in a lunar calendar begins with the new moon and the Ides fall on the full moon so Jesus was crucified on the full moon – on or after the spring equinox, an approximation of the anniversary of the Resurrection.

 

For those for whom all this talk of spring, the moon, etc. smacks of paganism, I strongly recommend, a) reading your Bible more thoroughly – that God gave the lights in the heavens for “signs, and for seasons, and for days and for years” is stated in the Creation account (Gen. 1:14), and the calendar the Israelites used was a lunar calendar in which each month was the length of a moon cycle, and b) reading C. S. Lewis’ God In the Dock.   This is a collection of essays compiled by William Hooper and published after Lewis’ death.  It is largely apologetic in theme and the essays that deal with Christianity and paganism are particularly relevant.  Lewis, in rebuttal of the school of skeptical anthropology that drew inspiration from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and wrote off Christianity as presenting simply another version of themes that appear throughout pagan mythology, pointed out that by contrast with the figures in these myths, Jesus lived, died, and rose again in history, not in some otherworld and othertime, but in a known place and time in this our world.   He also pointed out that by contrast with mythology, in which a dying and rising again god may be understood as symbolizing such things as nature and fertility and the life cycle, with the events of the Gospel, it is the things in nature that the myths signify that themselves signify Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.    If you are averse to this sort of argument that Jesus is the reality to which myths imperfectly and indirectly point, understand it in terms of the New Testament’s theology of revelation.  God has revealed Himself to all in His Creation, St. Paul explains in the first chapter of Romans.  This is called natural revelation.   It is insufficient to bring anybody to a saving faith but it provides enough light that the ideas that natural man derives from this revelation, whether philosophical or mythological, while they will be marked by numerous errors, will not be entirely devoid of truth.   The ancient Israelites were given a different type of revelation on top of this.  It is called special revelation.  The true God in establishing His Covenant with the Patriarchs and later the nation of Israel gave them a revelation of Himself and His will that no man could come to from natural revelation alone.   That revelation too, however, paled in comparison to God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in the Incarnation.   When St. Paul brings up natural revelation in the first chapter of Romans it is at the beginning of an argument in which he shows that the nations of the world, despite this revelation, fell into the apostasy of idolatry and gross sin, and then shows that the Jews who had been given God’s Law fared no better, but that the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike, are sinful, lacking the righteousness that God requires of them, which righteousness God gives to Jew and Gentile alike freely by His grace in Jesus Christ, through His Death and Resurrection.   This is something to which those who stick up their nose at Easter, the Christian Passover, and insist that we should stick to the Old Testament feast, really ought to give consideration.

 

As important as the delivery of the ancient Israelites from Egyptian bondage, to which the Jewish Passover looks back, was, unless it is regarded as a type, foreshadowing the greater deliverance that Jesus Christ would accomplish it is merely the story of one nation, one people.   The Hebrew people, enslaved in an Egypt that had forgotten Joseph, was delivered by the God Who had made a Covenant with their distant ancestors, by sending a series of plagues upon Egypt culminating in the death of the firstborn from which only the Hebrews were spared on that first Passover, prompting Pharaoh to finally give in to God’s message through Moses, and let the people go, or rather drive them out.   Thus a nation was born and to that nation these events will always be specially sacred.   The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, however, was not some tribal deity, but the True and Living God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and God had promised the Patriarchs that through them He would bless all the nations of the world.   The Hebrews in the Exodus account represent all the people of the world, their physical bondage in Egypt represents the spiritual bondage to sin that has been the plight of the world since Adam, their deliverance from that slavery on that first Passover represents the redemption from slavery to sin, death, and devil that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the Promised Christ or Messiah, would purchase not just for Israel but for the entire world by dying and rising again from the dead.   There were many facets to this redemption.   The Church Fathers in the first millennium stressed that because the Incarnate Son of God was sinless, death had no claim on Him, and so by dying He entered death’s kingdom not as captive but Conqueror, and liberated those over whom death had lost his claim by taking Jesus.   In the West in the second millennium the vicarious aspect of Christ’s death, that He bore our sins so as to settle our account and make us righteous before God, came to be stressed.   These are two aspects of the same truth which cannot be comprehended in any one single theory.   However we understand the mechanics of His Death for us the story is not complete without His Resurrection.   In His Resurrection the enemy that comes for us all in the end is himself overthrown and destroyed.   This is a victory that ultimately we are to share in.  As John Donne put it: One short sleep past/We wake eternally/And death shall be no more/Death thou shalt die.   In another very real sense our sharing in the victory of Christ’s Resurrection does not await that final day.  St. Paul explains in the sixth chapter of Romans that in out baptism into Christ’s Church we are baptized into Christ’s Death.   Being so joined to Him in His Death, we remain united with Him in His Resurrection and our sharing in His Resurrection life is the new spiritual life into which we are regenerated and in which the Apostle enjoins us to live to God in righteousness.   This is the substance of which the first Passover was the shadow.

 

In discussing Christ’s victory we often speak of the enemy that He defeated, death, as a person.   This is not just a device like the Grim Reaper of folklore that helps us to make tangible the concept of death.   The Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us exactly who death personified is: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil”. (Heb. 2:14)   It should not surprise us therefore, when agents of the devil act out his impotent rage against all that Easter represents by doing things like declaring a day for something stupid, silly, and nonsensical and making it fall on the same day as Easter.   Nor should we allow it to disturb our peace of mind.   These are the last desperate measures of an already defeated foe and should be regarded as such and as nothing more.

 

Happy Easter!

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen indeed! 

Alleluia!

(1) The letter þ is called a thorn and is pronounced like th.  It is a runic letter.  When printing was invented, rather than make a distinct type form for it, printers often made y do double duty, for itself and for thorn.  In the 1611 edition of the Authorized Bible you will often find "the" and "then" printed as ys for thorns with the other letters in small superscript above them.   For the most part obsolete, this runic addition to the Latin characters that otherwise make up our alphabet, survives in the signs of businesses that have deliberately archaic names like "ye olde shoppe".   The "ye" is not the second person plural pronoun, which would not make sense as the first word in the name of a store, but the definite article spelled with the y version of thorn.

(2) The second letter of the Hebrew alphabet can be pronounced either like a b or a v.  In modern print Hebrew, the pronunciation is indicated by the presence of a dagesh, a dot in the middle of the letter.  If the dagesh is present bet is pronounced like b, if it is absent it is pronounced like v.  The dagesh like all Hebrew diacritical marks including the vowel indicators, is a relatively modern invention absent from ancient Hebrew writings.   This is why some words are transliterated into English both ways.

Maundy Musings

 

Today is Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Great Paschal Triduum.    The name Maundy refers to the ritual footwashing that traditionally takes place on this day.   St. John, who provides the longest account of the evening remembered today of any of the Evangelists, even though he begins his account after the Last Supper, highlighted in all the other Gospels, has ended, tells us that after the Last Supper, Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, then told them:

 

Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well: for so I am.  If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.   For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. (Jn. 13:13-15)

 

Later in the same chapter St. John records Jesus giving the New Commandment: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another”.   The Latin word for commandment is mandatum, the source of the word “mandate” that public health officers have made so odious by their abuse of such over the last two years.   It is also the source of the word Maundy as the word for ritual foot-washing.   

 

Footwashing was not the only ritual instituted by Jesus that evening.   The other Evangelists all record the institution of the Eucharist which took place immediately prior to this during the Last Supper.   As St. John begins his account of this evening at the end of the Last Supper he does not record the institution, although earlier in his Gospel as part of his account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand – the only miracle other than the Resurrection found in all four Gospels - he recorded Jesus’ discourse about Himself as the Bread of Life in which the meaning of the Eucharist is expounded at length.  

 

That St. John begins his account of this evening after the Last Supper, so emphasized in the other Gospels, has ended is not surprising.   Eusebius of Caeserea, the Church’s Herodotus, in his Ecclesiastical History records an account by Clement of Alexandria of how copies of the other three Gospels had come into St. John’s hands and he, having proclaimed them faithful and true, wrote his own Gospel with an eye to including material that they had left out.   (Book III, chapter 24).   The Patristic writers specify that St. John included the events that took place between Jesus’ baptism and John the Baptist’s imprisonment – this covers all of the first three chapters of his Gospel and at least part of the fourth.   Other material that St. John includes that the other Evangelists omit are Jesus’ words and deeds in Jerusalem on His visits there prior to the Triumphal Entry, and His lengthy private discourses.   The latter is what we find in his account of the evening of the Last Supper.   After the account of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet, commanding them to do likewise, and the subsequent account of Judas’ departure, the New Commandment comes at the beginning of a lengthy discourse that extends through to the end of the seventeenth chapter.   It is generally called the Upper Room Discourse although Jesus and the disciples begin moving from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane at the end of the fourteenth chapter.   In this discourse Jesus speaks of His coming departure back to the Father, comforts His disciples with the assurance that He will return to take them to the place He is preparing for them in His Father’s house, promises that when He returns to the Father He will send another Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to them, commands them to abide in Him (“I am the true vine”) and expands on the New Commandment.   He warns them of the persecution they will face in the world for His sake, but assures them that He has overcome the world.   He concludes the discourse with a prayer in which He asks the Father to glorify the Son, to keep His disciples from the evil in the world, and that they might be one as the Father and Son are one.

 

One interesting difference between St. John’s account of this evening and those of the other Evangelists cannot be explained by the Fourth Evangelist’s consciously choosing material that had not already been covered.   This is the difference which F. F. Bruce called “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”, namely that St. John seems to date the events of this evening one day earlier than the other Evangelists do.   In the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper seems to be the Passover Seder.   In St. John’s Gospel, however, Jesus’ accusers when they bring Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate, refrain from entering the Roman judgment hall themselves “lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the Passover.” (18:28).   There is a theological implication to St. John’s timing.   At the beginning of his Gospel he tells of how John the Baptist pointed Jesus out to his followers saying “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. (1:29)   By St. John’s dating Jesus’ death on the Cross would have taken place at precisely the moment on the Ides of Nisan when the Passover lamb was slain.

 

The other Evangelists, however, seem to be quite clear on the Last Supper having been the Passover.   St. Mark, for example, begins his account of the Last Supper by saying “And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (14:12) and a few verses later says “And his disciples went forth, and came into the city, and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the Passover”.   St. Luke tells us that at the Supper Jesus said “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (22:15) and includes details (e.g. “the cup after supper”, 22:20) that belong specifically to a Passover Seder.

 

So how do we account for this?   Let us begin by taking the liberal explanation, the kind that the Jesus Seminar and similar types, would suggest, i.e., that one or more of the Gospels is unreliable, off the table.   This leaves us with a number of possibilities. 

 

One of these is that either the Synoptic Evangelists or St. John do not actual say what they appear to be saying at first glance.   It is not difficult to make the case that St. John does not actually date the death of Jesus to the slaying of the Paschal lamb as he appears to do.    Passover begins on the Ides of Nisan but it lasts a week.   Therefore, St. John in 18:28 could have been talking about a meal later in the week of Passover than the initial Seder.    

 

Another possibility is that Jesus arranged to eat the Passover a day early.   “The day of unleavened bread” that the other Evangelists talk about could possibly refer to the day before Passover when the bedikat chametz, the thorough going over of the home to find and eliminate any leaven, took place, and “when the Passover must be killed” could possibly refer to the time of day rather than the specific date.   While this is a far less plausible explanation of the words of the Synoptic Evangelists than the explanation in the previous paragraph is of St. John’s, it arguably finds support within the Synoptic Gospels themselves in that these record that the chief priests who conspired to take Jesus “by craft, and put him to death” had said “Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people” (Mk. 14:1-2).  The chief priests would have had to sign off on any request to have an early Passover and this would have provided them with a reason to do so.   If they allowed Jesus to have an early Passover, that would have gotten Him away from the crowd, enabling Judas to bring their posse to arrest Him, all before the Passover actually began.   As it stands, the words of the conspirators just quoted are difficult to reconcile with their actions if the Last Supper took place on the actual Passover as SS Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to indicate, because that would mean they did precisely what they had agreed not to do. 

 

Interestingly enough, another explanation could be that both the Synoptic Evangelists and St. John mean exactly what they appear to mean and that both are right because there was more than one Ides of Nisan.  Even though that explanation sounds at first like it might come from a movie by Harold Ramis featuring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell we know that at least one sect of Second Temple Judaism, the Essenes, the ascetic mystic sect that left behind the famous scrolls of the Qumran Cave, followed a different calendar from that of other Jews.   They used what they called a Jubilee Calendar, a solar-based pentecontad calendar that placed the Passover on the same day of the week every year.   By the ordinary Jewish lunar calendar, in which each month begins with the new moon, the Passover falls on different days of the week depending upon the year.    While Jesus was not likely to have used the Essenes’ calendar – and it would have put the Passover on a date that fits none of the Gospels if He had - the point is that there were differences among first century Jews about these matters.   The beginning of the month was set by the Sanhedrin which ruled on the basis of witnesses attesting to having seen the new moon.   Discrepancies were not unknown. Rosh Hashanah 22b in the Talmud discusses an incident in which the Boethusians – a sect similar if not identical to the Sadducees – bribed a couple of witnesses to falsify their testimony about the new moon.   Although the Talmud depicts the scheme as failing and the Sanhedrin becoming stricter as to whose testimony they would accept – Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein, a Messianic Rabbi (1) of the nineteenth century, argued in his New Testament Commentary that the Sadducees had pulled this same stunt the year of the Crucifixion in order to get their way in their famous controversy with the Pharisees over the timing of the Feast of Weeks which would have had the effect of moving Passover by a day as well.   The Pharisees would not have taken this well and with their large popular following would have been able to get away with keeping the Passover the day before where it would have been without the shenanigans.  Since He was to die the next day on the official Passover, Lichtenstein reasoned, Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples on the day the Pharisees kept it that year.

 

While this third explanation involves more conjecture than the other two, it is hardly baseless conjecture.   Jesus Christ is the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world” as John the Baptist said, and our Passover sacrificed for us as St. Paul wrote (1 Cor. 5:7), making it appropriate that His death occur when St. John implies it did at the time of the slaying of the Paschal lamb.   Through this Sacrifice He established the long promised New Covenant as He announced in advance at the Last Supper, as He instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, making it appropriate that this take place at the Passover of the Old Covenant, as the Synoptic Gospels say.   The third explanation, which allows for both, seems the best to me.

 

Have a blessed Maundy Thursday.

(1) That is a Rabbi who believed in Jesus as Messiah.

The Bible and Vegetarianism

 

Too much salad can drive people mad, especially young women. – Auberon Waugh

 

In this essay we shall be shining the light of Scriptural truth on the error known as vegetarianism.   It will be weighed in the balances and like the kingdom of Belshazzar shall be found to be wanting.   Let the Medes and the Persians have it, I say, at the risk of stretching the analogy to the point of being ludicrous.   Note that it is vegetarianism that is being scrutinized here not veganism.   Veganism is the contemporary fad, popular with the sort of empty-headed celebrities who like to signal all the wrong virtues, which takes vegetarianism to the extreme of rejecting not just the flesh of animals but any other food that is derived from animal sources such as milk and derived products and eggs as well.   Veganism we shall simply take as being self-evidently crazy.

 

Proponents of vegetarianism, by which I mean proselytizers, those who want you and I to become vegetarians as well rather than those who merely hurt themselves, in allusion to Sir Winston Churchill’s expression of his understanding of the difference between prohibitionism and teetotaling as the Right Honourable John Diefenbaker had explained it to him, rely upon several different sorts of arguments ranging from those based upon assertions about health to those that essentially raise animals to the level of human beings.   Few of these arguments purport to rest upon Scriptural authority.   For vegetarians who purport to be Christians and/or Christians who purport to be vegetarians, whatever the case might be, there are basically four passages to which they can point to claim some sort of Scriptural basis for their position.   Two of these are in the Old Testament and two in the New.   We shall look at the Old Testament first, then the New.

 

The first passage in the Old Testament that some might read as supporting vegetarianism is the account of primordial man in the first three chapters of Genesis.   The antelapsarian existence of our first parents seems clearly to have been an herbivore one.    In the general account of the Creation of the world in the first chapter, God, after creating man on the sixth day, says to him “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat” (v. 29).   In the second chapter in which a more focused account of the creation of man is presented we find God forming Adam out of the dust of the earth (v. 7), and then placing him in the Garden of Eden (v. 8) in which it is said “out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (v. 9).   God tells Adam “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat” (v. 16) with one single exception, that being the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.   The chapter concludes with the creation of Eve and the chapter following tells of the temptation of Eve and the Fall of man, which occurs when Adam and Eve eat of the fruit that had been forbidden them.

 

The first thing to be observed about this passage is how Adam and Eve became herbivores in the Garden of Eden.   They became herbivores by being given the herbs of the earth and the fruit of the trees for food not by being forbidden to eat meat.   Indeed, the only food prohibition they were given pertained to a specific fruit.    Now, while it is probably accurate to say that a ban on eating animal flesh would have been unnecessary to limit man’s diet to the plant-based at this point in time as the thought of killing animals and eating them would not likely have popped into Adam and Eve’s heads out of nowhere, this does not mean that this distinction is trivial or irrelevant.   Remember that the Genesis account of Creation and the Fall is only the first part of the introductory section of the Book of Genesis which presents a pre-history of mankind as a whole before the book’s focus narrows onto Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs of Israel.   Also included in this section is the account of God’s judgement in the form of the Great Flood, and His postdiluvian recreation of the world from Noah and his line.   One of the very first things God does in this re-creation of the world is to give the animals for food to mankind.    Here is the account of this:

 

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.  And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.   Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. (Gen. 9:1-3) 

 

As with the giving of the herbs and fruits in the Garden of Eden, so with this addition of animal flesh to man’s diet, one simple restriction is given:

 

But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

 

We will have more to say about this restriction at a later point when we look at the New Testament.    The most important point to be made here is that before Moses moves into the account of the Covenant People upon whom further restrictions, distinct to themselves, are placed, God has given both plants and animals to mankind as food, the former in the original Creation, the latter in the postdiluvian recreation.   The only argument this leaves our vegetarian friends with in regards to this passage is that what we are seeing here is something similar to what Jesus said about the provisions for divorce in the Mosaic Law, that is that it is something added even though it goes against the intentions of God in His order of Creation because of the sinfulness – “hardness” was the word Jesus used – of the human heart.   

 

While this interpretation is necessary for vegetarians to acknowledge what happened in Genesis 9 while continuing to pat themselves on the back and thank God that they are superior to all of us meat-eating sinners and tax collectors it is not an interpretation required by the book of Genesis itself and is not the best interpretation.     It is an interpretation that requires that on one level or another the interpreter assume that God created all things perfect and not just good.   Perfection, in this sense, speaks not merely of goodness but of full maturity, a state that requires no further development and admits of no possibility of improvement.   The implications of assuming that God created all things perfect in this sense are that a) any change in any direction from things as they were in Creation is a move away from perfection which must be attributed to sin and b) that the end of God’s work in redeeming fallen mankind through Jesus Christ is to restore man to the perfection he lost in the Fall.   This second implication reveals why the assumption is borne out by neither Scripture nor sound reasoning.

 

If God’s purpose in redemption is to restore mankind to the state from which he fell then redeemed man would be forever in danger of falling again.   Therefore, God’s purpose in redemption must be not just to restore mankind to his original unmarred goodness but to a superior state of goodness to that from which he fell.   This means that there is a difference between the goodness from which man fell in the Garden of Eden and the goodness which will be his final state in the Paradise described in the last chapters of Revelation.   Indeed, in theology we distinguish between these two states of goodness by use of the words innocence and perfection.   Innocence was the state of mankind in the Garden.   Perfection is the state of mankind in Paradise Future.   Innocence is an immature form of goodness, perfection is goodness in its mature, competed, form.   Regardless of how we understand the complex issue of how human freedom and the Fall and Redemption of man fit into God’s eternal design it should be apparent that God’s intention for man was not that he remain in a state of innocence forever but that he mature into perfection.   We have no good reason to think that this observation is true only of man’s moral condition.   Indeed, it would be extremely strange if that were the case.  

 

One could argue that God’s giving mankind animal flesh to eat in Genesis 9 is best interpreted not as His advancing mankind from a more immature to a more mature state but as His accommodating the fallen estate of man because it follows immediately after the Flood, a judgement upon human wickedness.   The problem with that reasoning is that the animals are given as food, not to the antediluvian wicked – these perished in the Flood – but to Noah, who had found grace in the eyes of the Lord and as a consequence was saved with his family from this judgement.   Immediately after giving them the animals for food He also gives them the responsibility of civil government (9:5-6).   While human sinfulness obviously created the need for the latter, God’s giving man that responsibility is equally obviously an advancing man to a state of greater maturity, even if the behaviour of the politicians, bureaucrats, and other bums, creeps and lowlifes who are currently abusing the responsibility they have been given to exercise the powers of Her Majesty’s civil government in the Dominion of Canada might suggest otherwise.   Since this bestowing of responsibility is itself followed by the establishing of a covenant in which God promises never to destroy the world by flood again (9:8-17) the advancement to maturity is the stronger of these themes in the passage.

 

The second of the Old Testament passages to which vegetarians might point is found in the first chapter of the book of Daniel.    The chapter and the book begin with Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim of Judah, the defeat of the latter, the spoiling of the Temple, and the carrying away to Babylon of the brightest and best of the children of the Jewish nobility.   The latter were to be given a Chaldean education and to be fed “with a daily provision of the king’s meat, and of the wine which he drank” (v. 5).   Among those taken were Daniel and his three friends Hananiah, Mischael, and Azariah, who are given the new Babylonian names Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego.   Daniel, we are told “purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank” and so requested of the chief eunuch who is in charge of them that they be excused from this diet.  When the chief eunuch protests that Nebuchadnezzar would be displeased if they ended up looking ill-nourished compared to the other children Daniel proposes a test.   “Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink.”  (v. 12).   Pulse is the food you get from the seeds of legumes.   Daniel was asking to be placed on a diet of beans.   Perhaps he intended to stink up Nebuchadnezzar’s palace.   At any rate, Melzar, as the chief of the eunuchs was named, agrees to this, and after the ten days, Daniel and friends appear “fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat” (v. 15).   Therefore “Melzar took away the portion of their meat, and the wine that they should drink; and gave them pulse”. (v. 16)

 

While it is easy to see why vegetarians would love this passage there are a few things that need to be noted.   First, the problem Daniel had with the diet he had been assigned was not that it was meat qua meat.    This is evident in the language used.   He “purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat”.   His concern was with being defiled by the terms of the Mosaic Law.   There were a number of ways in which eating Nebuchadnezzar’s meat could have defiled him.   The first was if the meat came from an animal that the Law forbade the Israelites to eat.   The rules for this are found in the eleventh chapter of Leviticus and the fourteenth chapter of Deuteronomy.   Of land animals, the Israelites could only eat cloven-hoofed ruminants.  A ruminant without a cloven hoof, like a camel or a hare, was ritually unclean, so was a cloven-hoofed non-ruminant, like the pig.    Seafood could only be eaten if it had both fins and scales.   Lobsters, shrimp, and the like were out.   Since the entire purpose of the Ceremonial Law was to set Israel apart, to make her distinct from her idolatrous neighbours, it was highly unlikely that Nebuchadnezzar kept a kosher table.   Then there was the possibility that the meat, even if from an animal permitted by the Mosaic Law, would not have been drained of its blood in accordance with what Noah was told in Genesis.  There was also the likelihood of the meat having been sacrificed to a Babylonian idol, making the meal a part of the idolatrous sacrificial ritual.   This, and not some self-righteous, “I’m better than the Baylonians because I’m not going to cost some animal its life in order to eat” attitude is what was on Daniel’s mind here.  

Second, this chapter occurs at the beginning of a book in which Daniel’s three friends are delivered from being cast into fiery furnace (the third chapter), and in which Daniel himself is thrown into a lion’s den and survives.   Is there any good reason for attributing the success of Daniel’s test in the first chapter to some inherent superiority of a diet of beans than to the agency – the divine power of God – so clearly at work in these other instances?   The seventeenth verse of the chapter says of Daniel and his friends that “God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom: and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams”.

 

Third, Daniel did not remain on a diet of musical fruit and dihydrogen monoxide for his entire life.   Perhaps one of the Chaldeans had informed him of the dangers associated with the latter, the cause of soil erosion and metal corrosion which causes severe burns in its gaseous state and death when inhaled.   In the tenth chapter, speaking in the first person, he says that in the third year of Cyrus of Persia, he had a mourning period of three weeks that involved the following “I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth, neither did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled” (v. 3).  This was a fast, not a description of his regular lifestyle.   It indicates that outside of the three weeks in question he ate bread and meat and drank wine.   Incidentally, while the “Daniel Fast” is a popular diet fad in certain Christian circles, have you ever noticed nobody seems to be very keen on a “John the Baptist Fast”?

 

Fourth, the very thing which kept Daniel from partaking of Nebuchadnezzar’s meat, his pious adherence to the Mosaic Law, would have prevented him from being a vegetarian even for the three years before his presentation to the king (1:5, 18-20) had he not been taken away to Babylon.   The Mosaic Law required all faithful Israelites to eat meat at least once a year.   On the tenth day of the spring month of Aviv – renamed Nisan during the Babylonian Captivity – they were to take one young unblemished male lamb of the first year per household – or two neighbouring households if they were small – separate it from the rest of the flock, and keep it until the fourteenth day – the Ides – of the same month, upon which it was to be killed before the entire assembly of Israel, its blood taken and struck on the side posts and upper posts of the house(s) in which it was to be eaten, and then it was to be eaten, roasted in fire, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, with none of the lamb remaining until morning, anything left uneaten was to be burned.  (Ex. 12:1-14).   This was a divine commandment that did not come with a beans option.   This did not apply to Daniel, however, because he was in Babylon.  The Passover lamb is a sacrifice which, after the Israelites entered the Promised Land, could only be offered in Jerusalem.     Indeed, the offering of sacrifices elsewhere than the Temple in Jerusalem led to the apostasy that brought down first the Northern Kingdom, then Judah, bringing about the very Babylonian Captivity in which Daniel found himself. 

 

Someone might object to the previous paragraph by pointing out that there are plenty of Jewish vegetarians today – and Jewish vegans for that matter.   Now, in many cases this is because the Jews in question are trendy progressives who would follow the latest fad regardless of what they thought their religion said.   There are plenty of progressive “Christians” who do the same.   Think of the kind of “Jews” and “Christians” who get all of their religious teaching from a “rabbi” or “priest” who is a woman with an oddly-coloured buzzcut and the kind of tattoos that would put a biker to shame. Others, however, maintain that their vegetarianism – or veganism – is not only consistent with their Judaism, but that their religion is inclined towards vegetarianism.   I have heard some even go so far as to claim that their religion is uniquely inclined towards vegetarianism, which suggests that these individuals are not very familiar with Hinduism or Buddhism, let alone Jainism which actually requires it.  It is true, of course, as well as obvious, that it is much easier to keep kosher by avoiding meat altogether.   It is also the case that rabbinic Judaism permits vegetarianism (and veganism) as First and Second Temple Judaism could not.  Note, however, that the rabbinic texts relied upon to authorize vegetarianism among present day Jews base this on the absence of the Temple.   Consider, for example, the baraita of Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira that can be found in the fifth paragraph of 109a of Pesachim, the third tractacte of Moed, the second order of the Mishnah in the Talmud.   First the Rabbi observes that “When the Temple is standing, rejoicing is only through the eating of sacrificial meat” and backs this up by quoting Deut.27:7.   Second he adds “And now that the Temple is not standing and one cannot eat sacrificial meat, he can fulfil the mitzvah of rejoicing on a Festival only by drinking wine”, quoting Psalm 104:15 as his Scriptural authority.

 

The final passages that vegetarians might point to in order to claim Scriptural backing for their position are found the New Testament.   In the fourteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans we read the following:

 

For meat destroy not the work of God.  All things indeed are pure; but it is evil for that man who eateth with offence.   It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.  (vv. 20-21)

 

In the eighth chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians we find the following:

 

Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.  (v. 13)

 

These passages are very similar.    It is worth noting that the two epistles belong to the same subsection of Pauline literature, the epistles written during the Apostle’s third missionary journey which began in the eighteenth chapter of Acts and ended with his fateful arrival in Jerusalem in the twenty-first chapter.    The Corinthian epistles date to the earlier part of this journey, the first having been written during his two to three year stay in Ephesus, the second was written from Philippi shortly thereafter.  The epistle to the Romans was written in the last part of the journey after he had already determined to go to Jerusalem.   Both passages, and the larger context in which they are found in each epistle, address the same issue, demonstrating that it was a problem common to both of these churches and most likely to all of churches in Gentile cities.   In 1 Corinthians which was written first, St. Paul provides the most detailed account of the controversy.

 

The controversy is similar but not identical to one that had arisen earlier during St. Paul’s first missionary journey.   The tenth chapter of the book of Acts records how St. Peter was sent to Cornelius, a Roman centurion stationed in Caeserea Maritima.   Cornelius was a Gentile who worshipped the God of Israel but had not converted to Judaism.   St. Peter preaches the Gospel to him and his household, they believe and the Holy Spirit comes upon them, then St. Peter orders them to be baptized.   The precedent for Gentiles being baptized and brought into the church having been set by St. Peter, in the thirteenth chapter St. Paul is commissioned and sent on his first missionary journey with St. Barnabas by the church in Antioch.   While they begin their ministry in each city they visit in the synagogues, they find the Gentiles more receptive to the Gospel and large numbers of Gentile converts begin to join the churches.   By the end of the fourteenth chapter they have returned to Antioch and are rejoicing in how God “had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles”.  Then at the beginning of the fifteenth chapter the controversy begins when men from Judaea arrive who maintain that the Gentile converts must “be circumcised after the manner of Moses” in order to be saved.   They did not mean that they thought that circumcision was, out of all the requirements of the Mosaic Code, uniquely essential to salvation.   They meant that the Gentile converts would have to become Jews – be circumcised, keep the Jewish feasts and fasts, observe the dietary restrictions and the rest of the ceremonial and ritual commandments – in order to be Christians.  

 

The controversy grew so extreme that the church of Antioch sent a delegation led by SS Paul and Barnabas to the mother church in Jerusalem, which convened a council of the Apostles and presbyters to hear and decide on the matter.   St. Peter spoke up and testified against requiring Gentile converts to become Jews in order to join the church.   He described the Mosaic Law as a “yoke…which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?” and declared his belief that they, the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, were saved by the grace – freely given favour – of God, in the same way as the Gentiles.   In other words, the Mosaic rituals were not necessary for the salvation even of Jewish Christians.   It is no wonder that St. Peter was of this mind.   Earlier, when God had send him to Cornelius, it was by means of a vision in which three times a great sheet containing all animals, including those forbidden by the kosher restrictions, had descended from heaven with the commandment “Rise, Peter, kill and eat”, to which he had replied by protesting that he had never eaten that which is common or unclean and received the response “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”     Now that St. Peter was finally free to enjoy a breakfast of ham and eggs before going down to Ben-Donalds and ordering a bacon double cheeseburger with a side order of shrimp for lunch he was not about to surrender to legalists who wished to take this liberty away from those who had always enjoyed it!

 

In the end, the Jerusalem Council, presided over by the first bishop of Jerusalem, St. James the Just, ruled that the burden of the Mosaic Law NOT be placed upon the Gentile converts.   Letters were to be sent to the Gentile Christians of Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia, telling them that the commandment to be circumcised and keep the law came not from them, and that they would lay no greater burden on them than that they “abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication”.

 

The first and last of these four items are representative of what is often called the Moral Law, that is to say, the parts of the Mosaic Law that God would be displeased with anyone, anywhere at any time breaking as opposed to the parts that He imposed only upon the ancient Israelites and which helped establish their national identity.   Eating the offering is the final part of a sacrifice, the part in which the deity and worshippers enjoy the communion or fellowship of partaking of a meal together.   This was true of idolatrous pagan sacrifices.   It was true of Old Testament sacrifices.   It is true of the One True Christian sacrifice, the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ upon the Cross, which are offered as a meal to the faithful in the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Eucharist.   Telling the Gentile converts to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, therefore, is the same thing as telling them not to partake of idolatry, not to worship any God but the True and Living God.   Fornication is representative of the sort of thing prohibited in the second half of the Ten Commandments – murder, adultery, theft – things that are always wrong in all places, by all people, in all times, and was probably made the representative of these things because it is more common than the others.   The inclusion of these two items in the list was to show that while the Mosaic Law was not being imposed on the converts, this was not to be interpreted as license to do things proscribed by that Law which are mala in se.

 

The other two items are in fact the same item stated differently.   Abstaining from blood points back to the Noachic Covenant of Genesis 9 which predated the Mosaic Covenant and, unlike the latter which was made with only one nation Israel, was made with postdiluvian mankind as a whole.     An animal that killed by strangling has not had the blood drained from its meat so abstaining from “things strangled” is the same thing as abstaining from blood.   What the inclusion of these items tells us is that the Apostles saw the Noachic Covenant as still being binding upon all mankind.

 

The theology behind this ruling is fully explained by St. Paul over the course of his entire epistolary corpus.   The Mosaic Law – the Covenant established with Israel at Mt. Sinai – separated Israel from the nations and made her distinct.   In the New Covenant, promised by God in the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, and established by the events of the Gospel – the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ – this separation is abolished and Jew and Gentile are brought together as one in the church.   Salvation is not by law at all, but by grace through faith.   As Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness long before the Mosaic Law was given, so Jewish and Gentile believers today are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, the Seed of Abraham.   The believers, Jewish and Gentile, united in the faith through which they are justified, are in a state of liberty.   This liberty is not permission to sin, however.   If something was forbidden in the Law because it was sinful in itself, like murder and adultery, rather than sinful for the Israelites because it was forbidden in the Law, like eating pork, it remains forbidden under the New Covenant, because that which is sinful in itself, is universally sinful.   The Noachic obligations are classified with the commandments against idolatry and fornication in the Apostolic ruling because they too were universal.

 

What St. Paul addresses in the Corinthian and Roman churches is a secondary controversy that arose out of the one settled by the Jerusalem Council.   Believers were not to eat meat sacrificed to idols.   What are they to do in a situation where they do not know if it has been sacrificed to idols or not?

 

In I Corinthians, St. Paul addresses this over the course of three chapters, beginning with the eighth chapter.   To consciously and deliberately partake of meat sacrificed to idols is to have fellowship with devils, he says, and this is forbidden them because “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils” (10:21).   However, an idol, being “nothing”, i.e., an inanimate object made by man rather than the deity that an idolater supposes it to be, it has no power to permanently taint the meat offered to it (8;4-6, 10:19).   The sin in the act of eating meat sacrificed to idols prohibited by the Jerusalem Council is in the act of consciously participating in idolatry not in the meat and since the meat does not pass on the guilt of devil worship to those who partake of it unknowingly therefore the Christians should not ask questions of those who sell them meat in the market or put it on the table before them (10:25).   If, however, someone volunteers the information that it is offered in sacrifice to idols, the Christian is to abstain (10:28).  

 

St. Paul’s real point in this entire discussion, however, is not about devils, idols, or meat.   In elaborating on why Christians should abstain from meat that they have been told is sacrificed to idols he explains that it is for “conscience sake” but not their own conscience but that of the other person (10:28-29).   Not everybody has the knowledge (I Corinthians) or faith (Romans) to exercise his Christian liberty in eating meat, confident that the question of whether it has been sacrificed or not is rendered moot by the nothingness of the idol.   Someone lacking that knowledge or faith, who eats meat sacrificed to idols conscious that it has been so sacrificed, defiles his own conscience (8:7), for “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23).   It is for his sake that those who do have the knowledge and faith to exercise their Christian liberty in this way should abstain when told that the meat has been sacrificed. 

 

 It is important to understand that the Apostle is not concerned here with giving this brother “offence” as that word is understood in our own day.  He is not telling the Corinthians and the Romans to refrain from eating meat that their brother has told them is sacrificed to idols because if they do he will get offended in the sense of resenting their action, judging them for it, and seeking to get them “cancelled”.   He is rather concerned that their actions might cause their brother to offend in the sense of doing something that he does not have the faith to believe he is at liberty to do.   In other words, when Joe Corinthian is sitting down at the table and is about to dig in to a big slab of roast, and Bob Roman points out to him “Hey Joe, you know that meat was offered in the temple of Apollo earlier today right” the reason that Joe should listen to the guy in white, strumming the harp, and reminding him of St. Paul’s words, rather than the guy in red pajamas with a pitchfork telling him to dig in, is not because Bob might get all disgusted with him, unfriend him on social media, and tell everyone he knows to avoid Joe, but rather because Bob might be led by him into following his example and eating the meat, thinking that he is being bad and a rebel and indulging his dark side by doing so.

 

It is in only in this kind of situation, where you eating meat which is not wrong in itself might lead someone else who should not be eating it to eat it, that the Apostle’s instruction to voluntarily curtail one’s Christian liberty out of love and refrain from eating meat for one’s brother’s sake applies.   These verses have nothing to do with vegetarianism as we know it today.    Nor, although this has nothing to do with our topic, do they tell us that we need to allow petty tyrants and bullies to boss us around about wearing masks, taking injections the safety of which they are unable to persuade us, and sacrificing all of our and our neighbour’s civil liberties in the name of fighting a respiratory virus, as the nincompoop element of church leadership, which, sadly, is almost all of it these days, have been twisting these passages to mean for the last two years. Christian liberty, of course, allows for believers to be vegetarians or even, perish the thought, vegans, but the verses instructing us to allow love to control how we use our liberty do not require us to be those things and the larger contexts in which they are found certainly do not lend support to the idea that vegetarianism is a morally superior stance.

 

So the next time someone sticks his nose in the air, pats himself on the back, and calls you a murderer for eating meat, remember these arguments.   Christian liberty may permit vegetarianism, and in certain very limited circumstances voluntarily abstaining from meat may be an expression of Christian love, but if someone tries to impose vegetarianism on you he is teaching the “doctrine of devils” (I Tim. 4:1-4).