The Five Pillars Of Ancient Judaism

The Jews were founded by God as a nation set apart so that God would have a people through whom He could save the whole human race.

In setting themselves apart by their way of life and their customs, The Jews were only doing what every nation did and does. They had a way of life that was meant to make them different and special.

With the coming of Jesus, they basis of being the people of God had to fundamentally change. A nation that had prided itself on being set apart had to expant to include all people. It has to be destroyed and reformed. That is what Jesus did.

So by redefining the people of God, Jesus redefined us.

by Laura Weston, Deacon Michael's widow

IF YOU LIKE, READ ALONG AS YOU LISTEN:

For those of you who have been coming to this communion service for a long time, I give you a small apology. I'm going to back to a topic that we used to talk about, the five pillars of ancient Judaism: one God, one Land, one Law, one People and one Temple. That was the coalescing aspect of Judaism at the time of Jesus.

We see in the first reading, an aspect of it. We have seen relationship between God and Abraham. The one God.

We have God bringing Abraham to the Land.

And now we have the promise to Abraham to be the father of many descendants that will follow God. Abraham says, "I don't have any children. How is that going to happen?"

And so what we see here in this reading is, he is getting a child through his wife's servant. Now one thing important about Hagar is she is from Egypt.

Remember that in the Jewish tradition your Judaism runs through the mother. So he is automatically from the tradition that they would be reading this, Ishmael is outside of the line of Judaism. He is also irregular both in the sense of how old Abram is, but also irregular because they are not married.

We will then have the story of Isaac who is in the line of Judaism because of Sarah, or Sarai, and is coming from a regular relationship.

So you see a definition of the people, the children of Abraham. We have a definition of the line where they can say they are of the line of Abraham, because it is through Isaac that you end up with David and then through David you end up with the Messiah, Our Lord Jesus Christ. That is the line of Abraham.

It is not the line of Ishmael. There are traditions that talk about Ishmael being within that line, but from the context of establishing the one People, he is not within it.

We see in the reading that we have in the gospel today, which is also very important, from the perspective of looking at Judaism from the five pillars of ancient Judaism, they become very significant because the course of the career of Jesus replaces every single one of them.

And in this we have an example, which is why these two readings are linked. Jesus has redefined the people of God. He does it throughout the gospel but this is an example.

No longer are you a people of God if you are through the line from David, Isaac and Abraham. That is not the defining characteristic. The defining of the people of God includes everyone else, including the line of Ishmael.

It includes everybody because the definition is not based on genealogy, it is based on our reaction and our response individually to Our Lord Jesus Christ and His teachings, His sufferings, His death on the cross, and His resurrection.

That is the people of God at this point by the redefinition by Jesus of who are the people of God.

We see, similarly, that, the significance in Passion Week when Jesus says, "I am." He has just redefined God.

When Jesus goes outside of the confines of Israel, think of the Good Samaritan, and the Samaritan woman at the well particularly, as examples, the Centurion with the ill child, all of these are examples of redefining the line because they are outside of Israel.

Jesus encompasses everybody no matter where they are.

And then here we have the redefinition of who the People are, that has a profound effect on what Christianity means. And it has a profound effect on, again, on us, because the very root of that is the commandment of loving your neighbor.

If we were the chosen people in the line of David, Isaac, and Abraham, the love of neighbor has a different meaning because it would mean that from my exalted position in being in the line chosen by God, I am going to deign to love you. But if the people of God is redefined as being everyone, that changes the way that you deal with someone.

If I love Michael from a position of superiority, I deign to love him because I am special and he is not, except for the fact that I am supposed to love him, it is a very different way of dealing with someone if that someone, if Michael, is in the same position that I am because by the definition of Our Lord Jesus Christ, he is a member of the people of God.

Loving someone who is a member of the people of God in itself is special. Loving someone who is poor because they are poor, because they are different, because they are outside the line, becomes a hierarchical relationship given to love.

But if everybody is the people of God, which is exactly how Jesus defines it, and everybody is my neighbor, it changes the way that you act in love. It is no longer a relationship that is hierarchical, it is a relationship that is horizontal. Everybody is in the people of God.

That's what Jesus does to redefine the world. That's how you see, for example, when we pray the Our Father. That redefinition of God to "our father", that redefinition of God in the form of Jesus as being our brother, our friend, our support, redefines God.

Because in a very essential way it places God in a horizontal relationship with us. Because we are going to Him, "O Mighty God, let me give you all these sacrifices!", we saw it with Abraham that he gave, is very different from going, "Hey dad, can you help me." Our father.

So what we see here in these two readings today, is what, and I don't know the name of the scholar but he was a scholar out of Germany, has termed in the five pillars of Ancient Judaism, as a means to understand the totality, or better understand the teachings of Christ because by replacing them, He redefines the relationship between the divine and the human.

He blurs the line. He makes it so that our hierarchical relationships among ourselves don't mean anything. And it is through this process that He changes us so that by combining our humanity with the divinity of Christ, which is what, every time I put water into the wine, is there is a prayer that I do exactly that, because the ultimate blurring, or the ultimate change of the relationship of the people of God is that by belief in Christ we come to the point that we can spend all eternity with God in Heaven.

The total, complete redefinition of who we are. Because we are part of where He is. We are part of the Garden of Eden. We are there with Him. We are part of the divine nature described in the book of Revelation. We are part of what God is, when we become the people of God. When we change ourselves in this way, we become participants in the divine.

June 27, 2019