Jesus and the Judaic environment
To eat and to drink in the life of Jesus
Jesus and the Jewish culture of his time
The rabbi of Galilee and the parties of his time
Jesus and the liturgy and the Jewish cult
To eat and to drink in the life of Jesus
In the reading of the Gospel there are some moments in which Jesus is invited to have lunch in the house of friends, relatives, or other persons, and even sinners. It doesn't refuse any invitation, so much to also be come accused to be "glutton and guzzler" (Mt 11,19 - Lc 7,34). But Jesus often uses these moments to formulate important teachings on the salvation.
Some times Jesus himself to feels the need to feed the people that have left
the houses and the towns to listen to his teaching.
Finally, with words and miracles, Jesus shows solidarity toward those people who are in the need, announcing that it's very important to share the bread with the hungry one.
In other moments him "sentence the excessive worry for the food and to the
tempter that asks him to change the stones in bread, he answers that not "of
only bread the man will live , but of every word that gushes from the mouth of
Dio"(Mt 4,4 - Lk. 4,4).
Jesus recommends to
his disciples not to be worried for what they will eat or drink, because God
knows the things of which they have need and is arranged to give them they
provided that they first of all try the reign of God and its justice (Cfr Mt. 6,
25 sses.).
To Marta of Betania, worried about to serve the food and to prepare the table to
serve him, Jesus openly says to prefer Maria, her sister that, crouched to his
feet, she is in listening of his Word.
The food, in the life of Jesus, it assumes a rather marginal role.
The evangelist Luca says, in
his Gospel,
this important aspect of the teaching of the Rabbi of Galilee (Lc 16,19-31).
Besides, to eat together with the sinners furnishes the moment, to Jesus, to reconcile them with God. To Zaccheo that appears reformed of
his
robberies, He proclaims: "The Son of the man has come to look for and to save
what was lost"(Lc 19, 1-10).
When a situation of conflict is created among the religious norms and the
fundamental needs of the man, Jesus always chooses these last, showing that, in
his heart, the man first of all comes.
The Saturday for the Hebrews is a holy day, and when during one Saturday the
apostles, hungry, they pick up the ears of wheat to eat it, they incur in the
accusations of the fariseis. Then Jesus intervenes justifying his disciples
with the appeal to a biblical episode that narrates like King Davide that, being
hungry, he had eaten the breads of the offer reserved to the Temple (Mc
2,23-28).
Jesus also reports the empty ritual ablutions that the fariseis do before the
meals, declaring that all the foods are pure and "there is not anything out of
the man that, entering him, can contaminate him; they are instead the things
that go out of the man to contaminate him"(Mc 7,15).
"To the wedding of Cana
Jesus changes the water in wine, showing so, through a
gesture of love and solidarity, by now that final salvation is available to all
the men (Gv 2,1-11).
Before the passion Jesus receives, during a banquet at Betania, the unction that prefigures his death and burial (Mc 14,3-9; Mt 26,6-13; Gv 12,1-11)
After his resurrection He appears to his friends, in a place in shore to the lake of Tiberias and, after having himself roasted some fish for them, he invites them to eat. And it's really in the context of this banquet that happens one of the most beautiful and touching dialogues of the evangelical message:
"When they had eaten, Jesus said to Simon Peter: << Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?>>. he answered Him: <<Yes, Lord, you know that I love you >>. He said to Him: <<Feed my lambs>>.
A second time he said to him: <<Simon, son of John, do you love me?>>. He answered Him: <<Yes Lord, you know that I love you>>. He said to Him: <<Tend my sheep>>.
He said to him the third time: <<Simon, son of John, do you love me?>>. Peter was grieved because he said to him the tird time <<Do dyou love me?>> and he said to him: <<Lord you know everything; you know that I love you>>.
Jesus said to him: <<Feed
my sheep>> (Gv 21,15-17). And like in the most
important meal of his life, the last supper, also knowing that he
would have met the betrayal of Giuda, the denial of Pietro and the escape of his
friends, Jesus had given all itself same, now, at the end of his terrestrial
mission, in the lunch consumed to Tabga, on the shores of the lake of Tiberias,
Jesus Risen again offers, through the communion of the food, the deep one,
total, reconciliation with God, manifested sublimely in that broken bread for
love the preceding evening its passion and cross.
Now Jesus is in sky, where
he prepares us that place that, in the image
of the "celestial banquet, intends to prefigure the deepest communion among the
humanity, redeemed by Him and recreated in the perennial food of his Body and his Blood, and the Celestial Father, that
he has created us for first and
he calls us to the eternal happiness.
Jesus and the Jewish culture of his time
Jesus fully lives inserted in the Jewish culture of his time and even if he brings, with the unusual teaching and his life's style, a renewal in the Jewish world, doesn't certainly refuse the message transmitted by the Torah, God's Law so felt in Israel. That same law in which he has been polite and moulded from his parents and from the school of the synagogue, he has come to complete it, as we reads in the Gospel of Matthew:
"I have not come to repeal, but to complete" (Mt 5,17).
Also when he is invited to pronounce himself on the first and greater commandment of the Law, Jesus it doesn't do anything else other than to report to the letter how much it is brought in the Pentateuco, the harvest of the first five rolls of the Bible, and included in the Shema' Israel, "Listen! Israel", profession of faith of the Jewish people: "You will love your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul and with all of your strengths". As second commandment he adds the love of the neighbor drawing, once more, to the Pentateuco and precisely to the book of the Levitico: "you will love your neighbor as you same"(Lv 19,18).
Jesus, therefore, "he shows to hold valid for itself and, indirectly for his disciples, the sacred writings of the Jewish people. Also the sentence that we often find on his lips, "As writing it is", (Crf. Mark 7,6; 9,13; 11,17 and other anchor) it doesn't do what the first and only written source to quote to which the Rabbi of Israel continually makes reference: the Writing, or: the Law and the Prophets. Also Jesus is son of his time and his people. Therefore the parties and the rites of the religiousness and the Jewish culture of the time he lives, as it frequents the synagogue and the temple. He prays alone, a lot of times set apart in solitary and solitary places, or in community. He pray the "Shema' ", the "Benedictions" or "Tefillah", the hymns that of the religious community of Qumran, the "Qaddish" to which, perhaps, Jesus is partly inspired when he has taught the prayer of our Father.
In the last Supper Jesus he maintains faithful to the ritual of the Jewish Easter supper, grafting in the old rite, his words of salvation and communion. And to the memorial of the
Pesach he has wanted to replace the new memorial of the presence of his Body "gives" for us and of his blood "versed" for our salvation.
The type of community, teacher-disciples, that Jesus has founded and driven up to his death,
it has in common many factors with the type and the teaching of the rabbinic schools of the time, outdistancing
itself from them for the novelty sprung by his message.
Clearly denying attends him some Hebrews of a "God's Kingdom" still away from to come, Jesus affirms that it is already partly realized and present in the scene of the world. The prodigies and the recoveries attest him/it from him you operate.
But there are other substantial divergences of the thought of Jesus in comparison to the contemporary Jewish culture. Some of these refer to the "title of "the man's Child", to Jesus's polemic on the pure and impure one: "there is not anything out of the man that, entering him, can contaminate him; they are instead the things that go out of the man to
contaminate him"(Mk 7,15); to the originality and the technique of his parables, to his discourses and said. And to his original takings of position, to some commandments that Jesus completes conferring so, to his message, a breath and an universal course. This way, while to Qumran, one of the lighthouses of the Jewish religiousness, the hate is preached toward the enemies, Jesus on the mountain that overhangs the lake of Tiberiade, almost repeating the solemn gesture of Mosé on the Sinai, setting rather himself on a superior plan in comparison to Mosé,
teachs the commandment of the love for the enemies:
"but I tell you: love your enemies and
pray for your persecutoris, because you are sons of your celestial Father, that it makes to rise his sun above the wicked ones and above the good ones, and
he makes to rain above the correct ones and above the unfair ones. In fact if you love those that
you love, which worth do you have of it? Don't they so also make the publicans? And if you give only the regard to your brothers, what fairies of extraordinary? Don't they so also make the pagans?
Be therefore perfect as your celestial Father it is perfect (Mt 5,44-48).
The rabbi of Galilee and the parties of his time
For us that we live in a
Society where the politics ago too often to less than God and of the religious phenomenon, it is not easy to understand the political and religious culture of the Jewish world of the first century. In fact the cultural life and politics of the people of Israel, and particularly of that inhabitant in Judea,
of the time of Jesus, because of his sincere vocation that has God to the center of the social life and politics, is identified in the same cultural and religious life that, as a concentric spiral, concerns around the Temple in Jerusalem. In this historical context the cultural life, politics and religious it is animated from some parties or current of thought: the
Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots.
The Gospel describes the pharisees as "hypocrites", the term with which Jesus often identifies them, formalists up to the excess, and since they show a great respect for the Torah, the Law of God, they
are kept in great consideration from the people. But this respect, this excessive attachment to the letter, and not to the spirit of the Law, it often sets them in contrast with Jesus that accuses them of tiing "heavy and unbearable burdens and they put them on the shoulders of the others
men, but they refuses to shift them with a finger"(Mt 23,24).
A behavior, therefore, that brings them to "a degeneration in the observance of the Law, reducing
it to a mere formality". For this, Jesus will oppose himself to them.
The party of the sadducees has a great power in the Temple of Jerusalem and in the whole Judea. And this, thanks to the temple and
to the person of the highest priest, head of the nation and of the Sanhedrin, the religious court where the
sadducees enjoy of great authority in comparison to the other important party of the
pharisees. They almost exclusively represent the priestly aristocracy, but it is not said that
they were all priests, all aristocrats and residents in Jerusalem. And since they have with the Roman dominator a relationship of mutual collaboration, they are well careful to intervene
where the risk of political nervousness and new religious movements can upset the establishment. Also from the religious point of view the
sadducees are deeply conservative recognizing only of the Bible the Pentateuch, the first five books, and concerning only
to a literal interpretation of the Torah. Contrarily to the pharisees that believe in the resurrection of the
men, they refuses such idea. Also the sadducees, even though for different motives, they have to do with Jesus
Christ. He chases the sellers of the temple upsetting the precarious equilibrium of the relationships established inside the temple. Jesus is welcomed by the
people by demonstrations of exultation and hailed as Messiah of Israel. And this irritates the
the sadducees, always interested to "to protect" the Jewish nation, maintaining
themselves in relationship of friendship with the Roman Power. And one of the principal concauses, of the arrest and the crucifixion of Christ, are to seek in their worry for the calm of the nation upset by this "Teacher" coming from the Galilea.
To the tide of the Zealots they belong, instead, those uneasy and extremist binges of the Jewish people, totally rebellious to Rome and champions of a theocracy in Israel that means the elimination of every pagan presence. The 66th rebellion after Christ and the Jewish resistance
at Masada, near the Dead sea, they will be the last actions of a movement that it will definitely disappear with the Jewish Diaspora. Also among the disciples of Jesus there is one who has been Zelote: Simone the
Zealot (Lk. 6,15).
We close, finally, with what is perhaps the more movement next to Jesus of Nazareth:
the Essenes. They lives rather to the borders of the Jewish official religiousness and they reside in places solitary, small or great communities, as for example that
of Qumran, where is a particular religious organization and where have been
found, in 1948, the famous rolls of the Dead sea.
Also having some points of contact with the tide of the pharisees as the acceptance of the traditional Judaism, they however they take the distances from the same pharisees, intending the religious life in purer way and detached by the religious hierarchy and by the dominant Jewish class. And it is for this that they go to live in the desert, waiting an extraordinary intervention of God. Theessenes are creators of the word: "Sons of the light" in which are identified, and sons of the darkness, in which they identify the world around them. ideas that we see in the Gospel to, to testimony that John Baptist and the same Jesus perhaps, they have known the essenes personally. But the thought and the teaching of Jesus it's different in comparison to them. In fact while the Rule of the essenis sentences: "You will love your neighbor and you will hate your enemy", Jesus proclaims:
"You have heard that it was said,
<<Love your neighbor and hate your enemy>>. But I tell you: Love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven"(Matthew 5,43-45).
The essenes are convinced of the proximity of the end of the world and they are waited for a paradisiacal future on this earth.
Plinio the Old describes so the essenes:"To west (of the Dead Sea) the essenes are held afar by the shores for how much harmful are.
They are an unusual people in his kind and admirable in the whole world more than all the others:
they don't have women, they have abdicated in front of the love, they are without money
and friend of the palms. Every day they revive in equal number, thanks to the crowd of the new
persons arrived".
Jesus's apparition in the Jewish society manifests him as an unusual and upsetting event. The conscience to be the
Son of the man confers him an authority unprecedented. In front of the Torah, the Law of God to which all the political and religious tides of Israel make reference, He assumes, of time in time, diversified attitudes, also interpreting at times her in revolutionary and scandalous sense for
his audiences.
In full tuning with the prophets of Israel, Jesus establishes a hold hierarchy among the commandments, spiritualizing the Jewish ethics. Beyond the actions
he scrutinizes the intentions and it holds in greater account the rectitude of the mind that not the external correctness of a formal legalism
.
In a Jewish world in perennial fibrillation of ideas and movements, Jesus of Nazareth follows
a personal religious thought . His teaching, his preaching, also inspiring himself, for some verses, to the rabbinic teaching, it clearly outdistances for the content and the substance, tracing, in the whirling vortex of the Jewish society of the first century, a
fundamental way in which the stately and solemn God of the Bible accomplishedly reveals him, disclosing his face and next to the man of every time.
Jesus in front of the liturgy and to the Jewish cult
Jesus in front of the liturgy and to the Jewish cult
Jesus of Nazareth feels him really inserted in the culture, in the thought, in the Jewish cult of
his time, but his fidelity involves, at the same time, a liberty that postulates the conscience to feel
himself superior to the Torah, God's Law picked up in the first five rolls of the Bible.
Jesus frequents the synagogue and the temple; he goes to Jerusalem for the
religious parties, but, in the Gospel, some testimony of his share is not had to the sacrifices cultuali. Rather, on the wake of the spiritual movement aroused by the prophets of Israel,
he declares to prefer the mercy (Mt 9,13; 12,7).
Also in respect to the real actions of cult in the temple, the Gospel are stingy of news, for which we are right to believe that, otherwise from the religious tradition of the temple, hinged on the sacrifice and on the donation reduced by now to empty and formal practices to which it doesn't make comparison the fidelity to God and the observance of the commandments, the cult of the Rabbi of Galilea is deeply spiritualized in the love and contemplation of his Father:
"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (Gv 4.23-24).
Á. this verification also needs to add another of it: Jesus shows to have the awareness to be on a superior plan, not only in comparison to every pious Hebrew, but also to the priests, to the scribes, to the doctors of the Law, to the Teachers of Israel. He has the intimate conviction to identify him in the " true space of the meeting [between God and the man] and of the salvation of the man himself. That's why it independently grants the pardon of the sins from any penitential liturgy and from any sacrifice to the temple
. And, if on one side it appears careful to make to comply the hebrew norms as the payment of the tribute of the time, not to scandalize the Jews in case of one hypothetical refusal of his, from the other one it often appears in polemic with the temple (Mc 11,15ss; Gv 2,13ss), or with those people as the priests, the scribes, the doctors of the law, the
pharisees, the Sanhedrin, that the religious power of the center of the Jewish religiousness holds.
We have said that Jesus frequents the Synagogue and the temple in Jerusalem and participates in the great religious parties of his people as the Party of the new year, the Day of the expiations, the party of the Tabernacles or the Huts, the party of the Dedication of the temple (Cfr. Gv 16,22), that of the Unleavened ones, that is the Easter and the party of the weeks or Pentecoste, that fifty days Easter is celebrated later.
TO THE DISCOVERY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH
