Jesus was Not a Rabbi

Sermon. 4 August 2019. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Gospel: Luke 12:13-21

Jesus was not a rabbi.

One thing that today’s gospel reading shows us is that Jesus was not a rabbi.

You may say that is wrong. Jesus was a Jew, and in the gospels, Jesus is explicitly called “rabbi” (or variations of the word) quite a few times.

Yet I say that Jesus is not a rabbi.

There are different reasons for saying this.

Firstly, of course it is true that Jesus is called rabbi. But in Jesus’ day, the term meant something much more like “sir”. There was no office of rabbi, no one was ordained to be a rabbi in Jesus’ day, so the historians tell us. It wasn’t a job or a profession. Rabbi meant “sir”.

The New Testament itself seems to disagree with this, when it says that “rabbi” means “teacher”. Well, it doesn’t. That’s not a bad interpretation of “rabbi” since those who come to be called “rabbi” do teach. But it’s an interpretation, not a translation. Actually, in terms of literal translation, “sir” is a better term. The root word [resh-bet-bet] means “greatness”; something like that.

In later Judaism, there does develop the office of rabbi. People are ordained as rabbis; a person may be “a rabbi”. But it’s later than Jesus, later than the New Testament.

And there is this: when the office of rabbi develops, the rabbi has a clear role. It’s not actually that of teacher, quite. It is more like judge or magistrate. The rabbi is the person who has the training to give rulings on the Jewish pattern of living. He can say how things should be, or how they should not be. This is true to this day. You do not need a rabbi to lead services in Judaism. You do not need a rabbi to lead even a marriage or a funeral, a circumcision or a bar mitzvah. You certainly do not need to be a rabbi to say the prayers over bread and wine that have been so important in Judaism for centuries. What's more, a rabbi is also not necessarily the person you turn to for pastoral matters. Rowan Williams once said: the question you bring to a rabbi is not so much: “Can you save my marriage?” as “Is this chicken kosher?” Regulating, ordering, giving consistency to the Jewish pattern of living; that is what a rabbi does.

So, you see, it follows that if a Jewish person went to a rabbi to ask about the laws of inheritance, you can expect a rabbi would have an answer to give. They may be bold and give a ruling; they may be cautious and set out some of the arguments; they would have something to say. In today’s gospel, a Jewish person goes to ask Jesus about the rules of inheritance, and Jesus refuses to give an answer. He refuses to play the judge. He is not a rabbi. You can call him “rabbi” as a term of honour, but Jesus is not a rabbi.

It is difficult, this. I am not pretending it is an easy thing to get your head around. It is a problem we face again and again (not just with today’s gospel). The underlying point is this: what we know as “Christianity” and “Judaism” developed in the centuries after Jesus, and (for that matter) after the New Testament. Things, over time, became fixed and clear. There was no Temple, for either religion, but there were Jewish rabbis and Christian priests; there were synagogues and there were churches; there were rival calendars. But! That was not the case in the days of Jesus or the New Testament. Then, things were more fluid, were messier.

This means it is hard for us to know quite what is going on, when we read or hear how Jesus-the-Jew interacts with the Jews of his day. We are in danger of misreading it, or of reading into the text, time after time. Because our picture of Judaism is of a Judaism which is either earlier than Jesus (the religion of the Old Testament as we picture it), or later than Jesus (the religion of the rabbis, again, as we imagine it). So  we have to work at it, listening to historians and biblical scholars, among others.

But we can turn this around.  What this also means is that we can take all gospel texts as inviting, exciting, intriguing. We can read with minds as open as possible. It is not the case that Jesus was simply against the religion of his day. It is not the case that Jesus was simply an uncomplicated part of the religion of his day. Where he fits in is to be decided by looking at the details. It’s a task in its own right.  

Not entirely accidentally, Jesus tells us this (in one of those details) when he tells us to “be on our guard” when it comes to money and wealth. We are to be “on our guard” in all kinds of ways, with money and wealth and poverty, surely... and also whenever we read the gospels.

Of course, over and above the details of Judaism, Christianity, inheritance and other matters of law and patterning, there is this: we ourselves may want to come to Jesus, asking him to sort things out for us, to make things fair, to make things right for us. It is not a bad impulse; it can be a good impulse; it is a natural impulse. Here, today’s gospel is a warning for us to be on our guard in another way. I mean: can we really face it, if Jesus says to us: “It is simply not my job to make things fair; my job is to ask you what is going on for you, when you ask for things to be fair. Maybe your demand that things be fair is more complicated than you think, maybe your motivations are mixed more than you'd like. Maybe that needs to be the focus of your intention.” It’s hard to hear, isn’t it?

It is the gospel for all that. May Jesus go comforting us - and discomforting us. 

Amen.