What follows is an argument from Dr. Mary Luti, visiting professor and director of Wilson Chapel at Andover Newton Theological School. I thought Dr. Luti had written so lucidly on this important issue that I asked if I could post here, and she generously agreed. Even if you don't agree with everything she has written, this ought to serve to spark conversation among Christians.
Holding a "Christian seder" is a widespread (and growing?) practice, but I agree with Dr. Luti that it is not a helpful one. As always, interested to hear your thoughts...
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With Holy Week on the horizon, many Christian congregations have started
announcing Seder dinners to observe Maundy Thursday. People of good will
recognize this as a devout and well-intentioned attempt to honor the Jewishness
of Jesus, and the Jewish roots of the Christian communion meal which was,
Christians say, “instituted” by Jesus on the night he was handed over--a night
that fell, according to the gospel accounts, during the annual Passover
observance. It is understandable, therefore, that Christians would desire to
commemorate this institution with a nod to its original context.
There are many difficulties with the practice of a Seder
meal by Christians, however (the biggest being that a Seder is simply not for
Christians, but we’ll get to that later). The other biggie is that we really do
not know for sure what the “original context” of Jesus’ ‘last supper’ was. We think we do: since Sunday School we’ve
been taught it was a Passover meal, or Seder; but scholars continue to debate
the precise character of the meal Jesus shared with his disciples that night.
One thing we know for sure, however, is that, although it may have been a
Passover meal of some sort, it was not a Seder. We know this because the
introduction of the Seder into Jewish ritual life came after the time of Jesus.
Modern day Jewish celebrations of the Passover are a melding
of traditions that arose shortly after the destruction of the Temple (70 CE),
through Late Antiquity and into Middle Ages. It is a developing tradition, too,
with additions being made to the Haggadah even to this day. Ironically, some
scholars believe that the Seder developed in part at least as a reaction and
resistance to the growing influence of the Christian church and its sacred
meal. If that is true, Christians celebrating a Seder are celebrating, at least
in part, a meal that was meant to criticize them and establish the
distinctiveness of Jewish rites over against Christian ones. This
anti-Christian critique is no longer prominent in contemporary Seders, but this
curious history of the Seder still makes for a polemical mish-mash that, if
known by the organizers of "Christian Seders," might take away some
of the romance of the night!
So… to hold a Seder as a way to commemorate the “background”
meal Jesus shared with his disciples and which he “turned into” a Communion
meal (as I have heard some Christians say) is anachronistic—it is a tradition
Jesus did not know. More precisely and significantly, however (as I said
above), it is a tradition that developed into its present forms after Jews and
Christians had taken separate religious paths—a tradition, therefore, that Jews
and those who became Christian never shared in the first place. It belongs to
Jews only and distinguishes them as Jews in ways that make any Christian usage
of it seem presumptuous, especially given the fraught and violent history of
Christian usurpation and replacement of all things Jewish that we call
“supersessionism.” Given this history
and this ongoing supplanting of the Jewish covenant, I wonder if we would do
better to spend our time reflecting on what often befell Jews in Holy Week in
many places in medieval Western and Eastern Europe—the pogrom—than to spend
time appropriating one of their characteristic rituals and making it our own.
Holding a Seder in a Christian church as a Christian event
during Christian Holy Week is dicey, then. Dicier still is celebrating a
Eucharist in the course of the Seder or finishing the Seder with Communion.
This sends an unintentional but real message that the important thing about
this Seder is what (we suppose erroneously) Jesus did to transform it and make
it into something else. In other words, what we imply is that the Seder's real
value is to point towards or usher in communion-- that communion is really what
it’s all about, when all else is said and done. This is to write Jews out of
their own story. We have already succeeded in writing them out by the way we
often use Old Testament texts in preaching and teaching—let’s not turn their
meal into our meal for our devotional agendas, just because it feels more
authentic or rootsy for us to do so.
Ritual is, after all, lodged in/ arises from a community’s
corporate experience; and in this case, it is the experience of suffering and
liberation, slavery and salvation that Christian share with Jews in a kind of
mythical and mystical sense, but not in fact: we are not Jews (the vast
majority of us, anyway) and we cannot and do not celebrate a Seder out of
anything remotely resembling the lived experience of Jews, or with the
theological and spiritual worldview such experience generates. We can
appreciate it, revere it, admire it, learn about it, even participate in it
(for example, when invited into a Jewish home during Passover), but it is and
never will be ours, and we ought not treat it as if it were. Just because we
are a "successor tradition" doesn’t mean that everything that
"they” have is or should also be ours.
There is a danger that in a well-intentioned attempt to
honor the church’s Jewish origins, and (we think) do what Jesus did that night,
we may end up caricaturing the Jewish ritual we claim to honor. It can be a
kind of pious play-acting that is a very far cry from the profound communal
anamnesis that is proper to “this night unlike any other night.” Only Jews can
experience Passover in such a way that those who ate in haste and fled the
Egyptians through the Sea have no spiritual advantage over those who sit at the
Seder table today.
Beyond all this is the basic question of why some of us feel
we need to hold a Seder in Holy Week in our Christian congregations in the
first place. The treasure chest of Christian liturgical ritual that pertains to
the Paschal season is so enormously rich that one wonders why we would turn to
someone else’s. Perhaps it is because so few of our churches celebrate this
range and depth of options that we cast around looking for something meaningful
and rich like we imagine a Seder to be.
What could Christian do instead during Holy Week if we take
seriously the objection that a “Christian Seder” is anachronistic, a
contradiction in terms, and a potential offense to Jews today for whom the
Passover rituals are a living tradition, and not a sort of curious
antiquarianism?
If we really want to understand the mysteries of Jesus' last
days, we might consider participating in the classic liturgies of the Great
Three Days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. It is there,
in the experience of the powerful liturgical traditions of those three days,
that we encounter the meaning, depth, and power of our salvation. In the ritual
of the Passover, the Jewish people recount their story of redemption. In the
liturgies of the Great Three Days - and especially the Easter Vigil - the
Christian community recounts and relives our story of redemption.
In the end, congregations that hold “Christian Seders” may
simply desire to learn about Judaism, better understand their Jewish neighbors,
and grapple with the Jewish roots of Christianity—all of which is commendable,
even urgent. They should go ahead and do so, not with a Christian Seder, but
with a visit to their local synagogue for a talk with the Rabbi about how they
can facilitate that understanding with respect. Perhaps the Rabbi would come
and talk to a group in that congregation about what a Seder entails and what it
means to Jews. Or perhaps a Jewish friend might have an extra place at their
Seder table for some folks from the Christian congregation this year.
And if Maundy Thursday still cries out for a meal, hold a potluck,
an agape meal, a love feast, an elaborated communion service—choose from the
Christian repertoire of feasts to celebrate with— but let the Jews have their
feast. No Christian Seders, please!
Dr. Luti adds this P.S.:
At the risk of overdoing it (I am not in fact persuaded that we
can ever overdo this), I want to add to my previous Note about "Christian
Seders" the following precision:
On Maundy Thursday, many “mainline” Protestant congregations
hold “Christian Seders” in conjunction with Tenebrae, Holy Communion, and other
liturgical commemorations of the night Jesus was handed over. They give
various reasons for doing so, but in general they use the Seder as a way to
recall and explore the Jewish roots of our faith, to honor the Jewishness of
Jesus, to lend historical context to the institution of the Christian
Eucharist, and to learn about Jewish ritual practices (i. e.., “teaching Seders”)
in an open, interfaith spirit.
In some cases, these Seders are led by Jews—a local rabbi, or
Jewish friends of the congregation—but the majority are not. They are a wholly
“in-house” affair, for Christians by Christians. My objections are directed
primarily at these in-house kinds of “Christian Seder” celebrations.
Congregations that borrow or adapt the Jewish Seder for their
own devotional purposes on Maundy Thursday during Holy Week need to understand
that what they are doing is not a neutral act. Apart from other significant
theological and historical objections that should be made to a “Christian
Seder,” [see my previous "Note”] the long, violent and painful story
of Christian appropriation of Judaism itself—replacement theology or ‘supersessionism’—should
be enough to make us think twice about doing it.
It is no accident that many a medieval pogrom erupted during
Holy Week. It was a time rife with anti-Jewish preaching that placed the blame
for Jesus’ death on Jews—not just on the ancient Jews, but on all Jews— and, in
some cases, directly called for unsparing violence against them. Whenever
Christians celebrate a “Christian Seder” that includes or culminates in Holy
Communion, it is also chillingly instructive to recall that one of the great
medieval slanders against the Jews is that they routinely committed sacrilege
against the communion wafer in all kinds of horrific and bloodthirsty ways.
This is the history we ineluctably carry with us whenever we do something like
celebrate a “Christian Seder.”
My objection to the “Christian Seder” is not about the potential
it has for offending Jews. It has that potential, and it does offend many Jews,
and avoiding this offense is a good thing to want to do, and I do want us
to avoid giving it! But the bigger issue for me is the insidious impact it can
have on us Christians.
Let’s face it, despite years of interfaith efforts, many
Christians continue to assume reflexively that Christianity has supplanted
Judaism in God’s plan and affections. We might not say it that way, but it
shows in the way we use certain biblical texts, talk about a God of Love
(Christian) and a God of Wrath (the “Old Testament God”), and juxtapose Law and
Grace—in these cases and others, the clear implication is that Christianity has
not only succeeded Judaism, it has superseded it.
In their everyday dealings with Jews (if they have such
connections), most mainline Christians probably don’t regard the religion of
their neighbors, friends and coworkers as inferior to their own; but in church,
in the course of hearing scripture and sermons on scripture, during certain
liturgical seasons, and in devotional conversations, an old reflex asserts
itself. Our inner Marcionite emerges, and as long as no one corrects us, we
continue to operate in the universe of stereotype and slander that for
centuries made it possible for Christians to see it as a religious duty to
defame and slaughter Jews. And the fact that we do so often unwitting makes it
all the worse.
This is my point: not only because we have a long history of
appropriating Judaism for Christian ends, making of it a mere preparation
for the true faith and regarding its characteristic practices as mere
foreshadowings and symbols of the real things, we are still doing it today. The
practice of a “Christian Seder” is a prime example of just how unexamined this
fraught relationship remains, and thus how easily its consequences could be
visited on our neighbors again, even in our enlightened, interfaith, tolerant
and inclusive age.
That it could never happen here, that it could never happen
again, that we would never do that—these are the lazy assumptions that allow us
to meander through Holy Week up to our necks in the dangerous waters of
supersessionism, plating out again and again the old patterns of reflex
disdain.
Contempt takes many forms: I think the celebration of a Seder
meal by Christians and for Christians is one of them. It may seem devout and
altogether benign, even constructive, on the surface; but it is just one more
in a long sad line of things we have tried to steal from Jesus’ people in his
name, as we have systematically written Jews out of their own story because, we
say (not without truth), it is also in a deep sense our story too. And if it is
also our story (and here we go wrong)we can do with it whatever we please.
Although holding a Seder (for Christians by Christians) may seem
like a devout and constructive thing to do, and no doubt for many Christians it
lends meaning to the Holy Week journey, it is an unavoidably fraught activity.
Our anti-Jewish history has “earned” us a particular responsibility to make
sure that our embrace of the Jewish heritage is serious, respectful,
self-conscious and well-considered. We may not borrow, play-act, adapt, or otherwise
appropriate anything Jewish like a Seder without carrying with us into that
activity this whole history.
Remembering and telling the Jewish story is one of the Seder’s
most characteristic features. Maybe instead of holding a Seder we should make
time in Holy Week remembering and telling our own story, lamenting and
repenting the sad history that haunts us still, and looking to Christ for the
grace to change it, once and for all.