Healing the Body through Engaging our Jewish Roots - Opening Plenary Text from ACT International Conference 2011

Ecumenical Relations: Opening Plenary

Facilitator: Jackie Sitte

[Note: We are offering the opportunity for you to bring comments, thoughts and/or questions to this website. You may submit your comments at the bottom of this page using the "Post a Comment" link. ]

 

Good morning! Welcome to this IC and welcome to this presentation, “Healing the Body through Engaging our Jewish Roots”  The panel before you are ACT’s  Spiritual Life Committee and Ecumenical Relations Committee.

      The Scripture for this conference is in 1 Cor. 3:16&17b.  “Are you not aware that you are the temple of God, & that the Spirit of God dwells in you? For the temple of God is holy, and you are that temple.”

Jewish philosopher, Philo Judaeus, says: The body is the Soul’s House. Shouldn’t we therefore take care of our house so that it doesn’t fall to ruin?.”

      As Christians you might be asking yourself why are we talking about Judaism.  We follow Jesus; that is our faith.

      In recent years we have had other plenarys.  As we gathered this past year God seemed to have another plan for us. As we came together for this year’s presentation, gradually the Holy Spirit seemed to come as we prayed together and our hearts and minds were opened.

      It came clear to us that the Lord was prompting us to fully explore our Jewish Roots.  At the beginning, little did we realize how important this was for us. God stretched us and cracked us open to see what it was that He wanted to share with us so that we could impart to you.

      We dove deeply into this calling.

You will be amazed as you hear about the connection we as Christians come forth with our newly found Jewish legacy.  You will hear about how we as Christians are called to build the foundation that completes our Christian heritage.

      From “Sacred Therapy” by Jewish teacher and psychotherapist Estelle Frankel, I was reminded how many of us say “If only I had known then what I know now.”  Finding the courage to mourn the past frees us up to move on and change.  For many people this means relinquishing the defensive fantasy that the past can somehow be undone. Paradoxically, it is only when we accept the painful reality that the past is over and cannot be undone that we are free to reclaim our lives. 

      She explains that the Torah is about having an open heart & humbly embracing the fact that we are never truly separate or apart from anything or anyone. It is another way of saying that we are part of the essential oneness of all being. Everything that is out there is also  within us. Let your soul dissolve into the Divine Presence like a raindrop falling into the sea or a wave breaking at the shore; allow yourself some rest. 

      As faithful Christians we are familiar with the Old Testament. To many of us it speaks of the history of Judaism before Christ.  As I explored more deeply, I realized that the Old Testament is not just history, it is a foundation which the Lord left for us to prepare the wholeness of Christianity. We have been richly blessed as we reflect on our Jewish roots and begin to see the depth of all that God has given us this day.

      Today is Yom Kippur or Day of Atonement.  It serves as sacred & communal, geared @ restoring harmony for the individual within himself, in relation to God, loved ones and community.

      We are about to begin our panel.  At the end of the presentations, we will have Q&A from the floor.  I recommend that you write down your question and note which presenter is the person to which you want to inquire.  At this moment, I would like to introduce our Panel.

Dr. Ben Keyes, Renee Lavitt, M.Theology , Rev. Austin Joyce, D.Min, and Fr. Bob Sears, SJ., Ph.D

      Keep in mind that we will be presenting a follow-up of this morning’s Plenary in a workshop, “Integrating our Jewish Roots with our Christian Ecumenism.”Attendees will be able to hear more personal stories on this subject from the panel, and where we can continue to respond to your questions.  Please join us for this segment as well.

Messianic Roots -- By Benjamin B. Keyes PhD., Ed.D

When I think of messianic roots I am immediately drawn to the founders of the faith, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  As a family and at separate times in their lives they all learned that to follow God, the one true God, they must be willing to give up everything (See Genesis 12-37).  I am also reminded of the watch word of the faith, which is listed in Deuteronomy 6:4, which states;  Here o Israel , the Lord our God, the Lord is one.  It is  the belief in the divine oneness of God that is the essential root of messianic Judaism. 

Throughout the Old Testament the foretelling and prophecies indicated the coming of a promised messiah.  From a messianic standpoint we have found him.  Because when Jesus came he fulfilled prediction after prediction made by Israel’s ancient prophets.  He told those waiting for the Messiah that he came to carry out God’s purpose for our world and make good on God's promises to his people.  That is, his mission was to fulfill what had been set in the Old Testament (Matthew 5:17).  In essence, he came to complete the Scriptures and to bring to us the depths and riches of our heritage.  He came to show us the significance and meaning of our beliefs and practices.

Everywhere he went he touched people and transformed their lives as he does today.  Many writers over the centuries have talked about the love that he has inspired, the hope and joy that he has brought to the downtrodden and weary, and the good engendered in the lives of those who followed.   Of course history has come to know him as Jesus of Nazareth.  Those who knew him and ate with him called him Yeshua (Yeshua means salvation, See Isaiah 62:11).  At the time of his earthly life he brought and even now he brings a message of love, life, hope, and joy, but in an unexpected way.  He injected peace and purpose, meaning and significance and has brought about a true spiritual transformation in those who have followed his ways.

It surprises me even to this day when people refer to Jesus as Christian for he was born into a Judaic tradition.  He and his followers celebrated holidays, followed Jewish traditions (Acts 2:44; 3: 1; 20: 5-6; 16:21; 24-26; 27:9).  Those who traveled with him experienced the fullness of their traditions and in many cases a completion of them.  Even the apostle Paul with his outspoken ministry to the Gentiles remained a consistent and observant Jew (Acts 25:8; 28:17).  In fact, Paul claims that he continued to live as a Pharisee (Acts 23:6) who were among the most orthodox in the first century.  So what does this tell us?  That our roots are embedded in Judaic history, culture, and tradition.  That Jesus and the apostles continued to follow in this tradition despite the number of Gentiles being drawn into the faith.  As a Jew, Jesus fully accepted the Law. The community he founded saw itself as a movement of reform within Judaism not as a secession from it.
 

As a messianic Jew I have accepted Yeshua as the Messiah and have accepted God’s provision of atonement through him.   He has fulfilled the prophecies and predictions of our prophets and has risen from the dead.  Is Yeshua to be exclusively for the Jewish race? Of course not.  All who respond to the Messiah, Jew and Gentile alike, are heirs to a rich Jewish spiritual heritage and have deep Jewish roots (Roman 11:17).  In fact it is important for Gentile followers to recapture that first century sense of common faith, the background of the Bible, and the culture of the times, as they embrace their modern day Christian faith.  The walls between Jewish people and Gentiles have been broken down as they have become united in worship and in life.  After all, this also was prophesized and envisioned by the prophets (Isaiah 2:3; Zachariah 2:11; 8:23; 14:17).  The reality of Yeshua’ s message is a two edge sword in that it encourages Gentiles to discover and enjoy their Jewish roots but it also challenges Jews to pursue their full Jewish identity. The preservation of the Jewish tradition is important in our knowledge of who we are as Christians.  The traditions are those that God has given to us in that they demonstrate to the world God’s faithfulness to his promises. It is to remember that God has worked in bringing people to himself and that his wordsmay serve as pictures of the Messiah and life in him (Exodus 19:5-6; Deuteronomy 4:5-8; Isaiah 9:3-13).
 

It is therefore imperative that we preserve our messianic roots as a service to all who follow Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth.  It is important that as believers we connect with the one true God as we attempt to live out the principles of love and service that should follow from true faith.  We must continue to build one another up and to spread the good news of the Messiah’s covenant to all.  We all await his second return to both judge and to  bring in the age of peace.

Messianic Roots -- By Austin Joyce, DDiv

“Behold God’s love for you”.  With these words the Temple priest would hold up the Bread of Presence (manna) reminding the sojourning Jews making their tri- annual visits to Jerusalem of how God had provided for them when they had been wandering in the wilderness after being set free from 400 years of slavery.  This Bread of Presence was kept along with the Ark of the Covenant, and the Golden Menorah in the Temple and was made visible three times a year.  According to the religious practice  all Jews were required to come to the Temple to present  their sacrificial offerings.  Only the priest of the Temple could perform the duty. Blood sacrifices were a sign of their covenant relationship with God.  At that time, no Jew would have missed the importance of this Bread. It embodied their freedom and their confirmation as God’s chosen people.  This physical presence of the “ Showbread” invited the people to fulfill their obligation to “ … look on the face of God….” and to remind them that this “miracle of the manna” which had sustain them every day for 40 years in the wilderness  was provide by God who would continue to be present with them. The Exodus was not simply setting a people free from slavery but literally creating “… a sacred family relationship between God and the people by means of a covenant.” (29) The ritual of offering thrice yearly sacrifices in the temple of Jerusalem was not only to remind people of what God had done but what God continued to do . It was a foreshadowing of what the ancient Jew hoped would be the coming of the Messiah. Unfortunately, they like us, settled into the practice of obligation without the miracle of transformation.  The danger of religious ritual is the tendency to separate the personal meaning it holds and its corporate connection to the community of believers . In our worship and Eucharist, as was true of our ancient sojourners, there is a danger of practicing the obligation and losing connection with the reality: the living relationship with God.

Embodiment (incarnation) is a sign of God’s ongoing presence with God’s creation. It began in the first act of creation and continues to this very moment. Our God is continually incarnating the eternal kingdom in each breath we take. Its literal fulfillment is in the body and blood of Jesus. Is it any wonder that the scripture proclaims , “ taste and see that the Lord is good.”  Healing the whole earth and the people (Body of Christ on earth) is an invitation to reclaim our ancient past so that through the Holy Spirit “the Body of Christ” can be transformed into the new covenant, the new Eucharist each breath we take. The point of being “set free”  as an ancient Jew and as a modern day Christian is to freely worship the Lord our God with all our life. (1^st Commandment) To worship God is to embody (incarnate) the very life of the Spirit. The bread of Presence becomes for us the body and blood of Jesus, the ongoing  miracle of God’s supernatural provision for us. Jesus taught us this prayer, “… Our Father who art in heaven hallow be Thy name, Thy kingdom come Thy will be done on earth (embodiment) as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily supernatural bread…” Our Jewish brothers and sister knew , if not always trusted , that God would provide. Is it a surprise that the one prayer Jesus taught embodied the body of God’s provision? Before the destruction of the 1^st Temple in 70AD God had commanded that Israel have one central place of worship. It contain three divisions; “… the Outer Court where on a Bronze altar the animal sacrifices were offered by the priest. (Only the priest could make this offering.) The second room was the Holy Place which contained the golden Lampstand (the menorah); the golden Altar of Incense, and the golden table of the 12 Cakes of bread, known as the Bread of Presence. In this room the priest of Israel would worship God through the unbloody offering of incense, bread and wine.”(33) The third room, was the Holy of Holies , the inner most sanctum that house the golden Ark of the Covenant… containing the Ten Commandments, an urn of the manna, and the staff of Aaron. ….the importance to the ancient Israelites of this place was they saw it as the dwelling place of God on earth.(34) In Israel, belief in body and Spirit could not be separated. The sacrificial presentation was not complete until the slaughtered lamb was taken back by the family , roasted and eaten. Many Christians today miss the connection between the Temple sacrifice and Jesus words, eat and drink this is My body and blood …the bold offering of Jesus on the cross invites us to consume His presence.
 
 Embodiment points a way for us to integrate the ancient ache we have carried in our communal  mind, physical body and spiritual legacy  that can be understood only by faith, literally a miracle. This embodiment is a slowly developing awareness in which we are being drawn into a unity of the Trinity and Its expression in the legacy of our  Jewish, Catholic and Protestant tributaries of grace.  We can learn that our Jewish roots call us to remember; our Catholic roots call us  to receive; our Protestant roots call us to proclaim the mystery of the supernatural bread and wine we call Eucharist. Brant Petri, a Catholic scholar at Notre Dame Seminary in N.O. states in his book, Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist, “When we look at the mystery of the Last Supper through ancient Jewish eyes… we discover there is much more in common between ancient Judaism and early Christianity.” (18) Behold ,” for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten…”  ONE to all of us.  See how much God loves us.

Jewish Roots in Christianity in the Seder Supper and Eucharist

As I married into a Jewish family, I have attended Seder suppers and have always been moved by the historical and spiritual dimensions it represents to the Jewish people and to me as a Christian.
The sharing of meals has been a common way of forming or strengthening relationships This custom is especially prevalent in Middle Eastern countries.  Rev. 3:19-20 says that God through His divine Son Jesus, desires to initiate a relationship with us; He wishes to dine with us, and all it takes is for us to repent of our sins.
   Jesus was Jewish and so the Christian faith is rooted in Judaism.  Before the Exodus,
God directed Moses to instruct each family to obtain an unblemished lamb.  The lamb was to be slaughtered; breaking no bones, and then its blood was to be smeared on the doorpost. This marker spared them from the scourge of death; they would be “passed over.”  The story of the Exodus pertains to all persons, since it proclaims of the right of all persons to be free. The early Christian Church retained some of this religious culture with the commemoration of Christ’s death, referred to as “Pesach” (Passover). Jesus is the spotless lamb with no broken bones, whose blood was poured out in his crucifixion for the forgiveness of sins and will have triumph over death. He is the link to the early Church and is the one who transformed the Seder meal to a remembrance of His death and resurrection.
This important Jewish feast is a feast of redemption and liberation, the memorial of the Israelites deliverance from their bondage in Egypt.  The word “Passover” means deliverance. It is a feast of great rejoicing which reveals how God “leads us from captivity to freedom, from sadness to joy, from mourning to feasting, from servitude to redemption, from darkness to brilliant light.”  Jesus fulfilled all of this through His death and resurrection. 
The Dead Sea scrolls say –“When they gather at the communal table, having set out bread and wine so the communal table is set for eating, and the wine poured for drinking, none may reach for the first portion of bread or the wine before the priest, for he shall recite a blessing over the first portion of the bread and the wine, reaching for the bread first.”  This is the role of the priest in celebrating Eucharist.
The Passover is celebrated with a ritual meal called the “Seder”; a Hebrew word that means “order”.  The meal consists of a prescribed menu of special symbolic food, blessings, and prayers.  The celebration of Eucharist (which means “thanksgiving”) also has a prescribed ritual; prayer, bread and wine.
The Seder gathering fulfilled God’s call for a formal assembly, in which those present bless and consume unleavened bread and wine, just as we do at Eucharist.

The book that describes the procedure and prayers for the Seder is called the “Haggadah,” (“the telling”) and at Eucharist there is also a book of ritual prayer, called the “Roman Missal”. The washing of one’s hands before eating or serving food is a requirement of Orthodox Judaism.  The Priest also washes his hands before consecrating bread and wine. 

At the Seder supper there are 4 cups of wine: Each with symbolic meanings; sanctification, praise, redemption and the fourth cup, the cup of acceptance which completes the new covenant. Eucharist incorporates all these cups into one with the death and resurrection of Christ and assurance of our  salvation.

The flat unleavened bread used for the meal is “Matzah,” The absence of leaven symbolizes the removal of sin.  At Eucharist, the unleavened bread, “the host”, represents that Christ had no sin in his life.

The unleavened bread is divided into three separate pieces separated by cloths. Like the Trinity, representing God, the Messiah, and the Holy Spirit. The middle layer is referred to as the “Afikomen.” It is a Greek word meaning, “I have arrived; I am coming again” or (he who comes after). It is taken out, broken in half, wrapped in a white cloth, (the royal color), and set aside, removed, and hidden from view and represents the Messiah who was broken for our transgressions, hidden and then returns. 

The Afikomen is hidden as a symbol of (death, burial and resurrection), a visible reminder of the hidden Messiah whose appearance is expectantly awaited. The greatest reward goes to the child who finds the Afikomen, but the child must wait for the reward which comes 50 days later, Pentecost; the time of the descent of. Holy Spirit, after the crucifixion and resurrection.
      The Matzah had stripes and holes, pierced into it. Christ received 39 lashes.  His hands and feet were pierced through, “His body broken for us.  “He was wounded for our transgressions; bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was on Him and by His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:4 the lamb that was sacrificed to save us.”

The Passover lambs had to be unblemished.  The blood from these animals was collected in cups by the priests and poured onto the Temple altar. Lev. 17:11, the Jews believed that blood held special meaning when poured out on the altar; it was offered in atonement for their sins.
At the Seder supper there 3 Roles are played –
1) The Parent –In Eucharist, this is the priest
      2) Server of the food- the altar servers
      3) Commentator- the telling of the story; the lectors at Eucharist
In Eucharist, the key elements are: bread “the bread from heaven” and wine-“the cup of salvation”, the gift of God's love, a free gift to anyone who receives Jesus
At the Last Supper, Jesus told the apostles that the blessed and broken bread was his body. They were to eat it, and the blessed wine was his blood. They were to drink it. The cup was the cup of redemption, setting up a-new covenant, representing His blood shed for us, which procures our salvation. This was Jesus’ last will and testament “Do this in memory of Me.”

Every time this mystery is celebrated, “the work of our redemption is carried on” and we “break the one bread that provides the medicine of immortality, the antidote for death, and the food that makes us live for ever in Jesus Christ.” (St. Ignatius of Antioch)
The Eucharist is the memorial of Christ’s Passover, that is, of the work of salvation accomplished by His life, death, and resurrection. It is a work made present by the liturgical action. The Christian observance of this ritual meal celebrates not only our tradition of Christ’s last supper, but our own Jewish heritage which provided the context for Jesus’ institution as the last supper. We personally come out of bondage and are asked to bear witness to God’s redeeming action in the past, to act in conformity with His will in the present, and to renew our hope in further redemption.

The correct attitude of Christians toward the Passover Seder consists in sharing the history of the Jewish people, discovering the links that bind the Church to this people and giving thanks for their faithfulness to the Sinai covenant. 

The Importance of Body in Our Jewish Roots - Panel - By Fr. Bob Sears, SJ

After experiencing the impact of the Jewish Christian service in Albuquerque, I was moved to reflection myself.  My personal initiation to Messianic Judaism began in Jerusalem, at Christ Episcopal Church where I attended a messianic Jewish service.  During it I felt God’s joy.  It was as though God were saying “at last those I have chosen are entering into the blessing I have prepared for them for 2000 years!”  I felt the blessing of those 2000 years of preparation, knowing the depth of spirituality of mystics like Teresa of Avila who had Jewish ancestors.   
      Pope Paul VI, expressed the Church’s relation to Judaism this way: “The Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets….To the Jews ‘belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ,” (Rom 9:4-5) “for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” (Rom 11:29)  (See Paul VI, Nostra Aetate, 4)  We can only be whole by embracing our Jewish roots. 
      A conversation I had at lunch with a Jesuit who had attended a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem brought home to me the gift of reconnecting with Jewish roots.  He experienced that a poor person came into the gathering and asked for help.  People most naturally contributed to his need.  Afterwards his host explained that Jewish people took it as a matter of fact that they would help a fellow Jew in difficulties.  After all, they were one people and all brothers and sisters.  I could glimpse St. Paul’s image of “being one body” with Christ as something he had learned to take for granted.  Our experience of being separate people brought together in an external union of belief would have been foreign to him.  The body was real, and the community of Jews were one body. 
      It is this sense of corporate identity, fostered over thousands of years, that was weakened when Christianity went over to the Gentiles who had no such history.  Many Jewish structures and practices were continued and transformed by the early Christians but in separating, and under Hellenistic influence, they also tended to emphasize the spiritual more than the bodily connection.  Family ties were an obstacle for early believers because they needed to separate from their tradition to become Christians.  Baptism moved from the home to the church.  The environment and land, which was reverenced by Jewish tradition as belonging to God and God’s gift to those who faithfully obeyed God, tended to be neglected in Western Christianity as focus was more on future, spiritual fulfillment. The organic unity of humans with nature that God originally intended was not then fully experienced.   
      Jewish thought does not separate spirit and body as the Greek speaking Gentiles tended to do, but refers to the whole person as both body and spirit. The body is what unites us with one another, not what separates us from each other. Jews take seriously God’s word that husband and wife are “one body” and have a God-given call to “be fruitful and multiply.” Sexuality is integrated with spirituality, and becomes a part of their Sabbath celebration, whereas the Gentile Christian tradition as tended to be suspicious of sexuality till very recently.

      Writing the article on “The Trauma of the Broken Church,” I discovered further aspects that we lost.  There I quoted Jurgen Moltmann [The Way of Jesus Christ]: “We need to open in gratitude to the gift of Judaism, even to their present “No” to accepting Jesus as Messiah… The Christian church’s treatment of Jews as “those who rejected Jesus” must be changed to Paul’s view that God’s providence is at the root of their inability to believe. Paul wrote in Romans 11:11-15, “Through their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make them jealous …. If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?” In 1933 Martin Buber explained that the Jewish “No” to Jesus as Messiah was not a question of unwillingness or hard-hearted defiance. It was an “inability to accept.” He wrote, “We know more deeply, more truly, that world history has not been turned upside down to its very foundations - that the world is not yet redeemed. We sense its unredeemedness. …The redemption of the world is for us indivisibly one with the perfecting of creation, with the establishment of the unity which nothing more prevents, the unity which is no longer controverted, and which is realized in all the protean variety of the world. Redemption is one with the kingdom of God in its fulfillment.”( Quoted in Moltmann, The way of Jesus Christ, p. 28) Moltmann explained, “Israel will be delivered because it sees glory…[Paul’s] practical answer to the Jewish “No” is not anti-Judaism but the evangelization of the nations.” ( Ibid. , pp. 35-36.) We need to embody our faith in deeds (Jms 2:14-17), for the sign that we are Jesus’ disciples is our love for one another. This is a call also to evangelization to all the world for the Jewish “No” will last, as Romans 11:25 says, “until the full number of Gentiles comes in,” as a visible sign of God’s love.  
      In other words, Judaism looks for the kingdom of God to be manifested in reality, bodily, not just in spirit, and it is this realism of full bodily union that has been weakened by our separation from that root.  Christ came to reconcile through the blood of the cross (Eph 2:14-16) not to further divide.  Reunion with Judaism brings with it a deep rootedness in history as well as a full sense of bodily union.  I see it as a special gift to experience further the new healing and wholeness that messianic Judaism could bring us in a conference focused on healing of the body.  For “body” is not just individual but corporate, including relationship to the environment, and it is this corporate sense of oneness that was weakened by separation from Judaism.

Ecumenism and Engaging Our Jewish Roots - Workshop - By Fr. Bob Sears, SJ

I have a Jewish friend I have directed for some 25 years, who is now more and more devoted to Jesus.  When I told him about our topic he said “Of course, Jews see creation as “good” and sexuality as a gift from God, not as a temptation as Christians historically have viewed it as.”  Jewish thought does not separate spirit and body as the Greek speaking Gentiles tended to do, but refers both to the whole person.  Where we Gentile Christians tend to see body as belonging to us and what separates us from one another, for “my body is not your body,” Jews see body as what unites embodied persons.  We share bodiliness.  Marriage itself was a new embodiment.  It was because Eve was formed from the one body (a rib) of Adam, that succeeding humans were told that they were to leave father and mother and cling to each other and become “one body.”  They were to became an embodied unity.   
      Similarly, since creation is good, the earth is not something to manipulate, as our scientific viewpoint tends to see it.  It is a gift from God, a “garden” given to humans to “have dominion over” (that is, tend for God) while walking with God in the garden.  The earth is a partner, given to humans to “rule” on God’s behalf, not to manipulate for humans’ self-centered goals.  For nature expresses human attitudes even though the “land is the Lord’s.” (Lev 25:23) It was the land that cried out because of Abel’s blood that was shed.(Gn 4:10)  By praying to heal the land, we have learned how the land is affected by the misuse of humans or by wars.  The land reveals how it has been treated.  The land needs healing when humans have sinned. 
      Individually, the human person is seen by Jewish thought as embodied and in community, not simply as individual and spiritual.  The unique hope of NT faith, from its Jewish roots, is the resurrection of the body, not just the soul entering into immortality.  This is Jewish, for it was bodily resurrection that they awaited along with a bodily manifestation of the transformed world that the Messiah was to bring.  It is largely the failure of the world to embody this transformation that makes Jews conclude that the Messiah has not yet come.  

      The fact of fulfillment as embodied is further witnessed to by Jesus in giving us his body to eat and his blood to drink.  That this is not simply symbolic is indicated by John 6 where the word Jesus uses is “chew” or “gnaw” as animals eat (Jn 6:54-58), not just eat in general as be nourished symbolically, as when Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of my Father.”)  This assimilation into Jesus’ body needs also to be expressed bodily, by “washing each others feet,” by self-sacrificial love which is embodied for one another.  For all believers form “one body” just as man and wife, so believers are one body in Christ (Eph 5:25-33).  It is an embodied unity that is fully expressed by Jesus dying on the cross for us and reuniting with us in his Spirit which is “handed over” in his dying (Jn 19:30) and forms his followers into “one family,” his “brothers and sisters” (Jn 20:17 “tell my brothers”). 
      In reading about our Jewish roots, I also learned that our Catholic devotion to Mary, “the mother of my Lord” (Lk 1:43) and to the Pope is also rooted in the Hebrew Davidic Covenant.  Alongside the Davidic king in the messianic court of Jerusalem sat two of the most important people of the Kingdom, the gebirah, the mother of the King, whom Solomon seated at his right (1 Kgs 2:12-19), and the Royal Steward (prime minister of the kingdom).  Solomon bowed to the queen mother, for she signified that he was the legitimate heir of King David. Jeremiah signaled the end of the Davidic Kingdom when he wrote: “Say to the king and to the queen mother: Come down from your throne” (Jer 13:18).  The Royal Steward was not the King, but by appointment he cared for the realm and carried the authority of the King, the “key of the house of David with which ‘he shall open and none shall shut; and he shall shut and none shall open.’” (Is 22:22).  Mt 16:18-22 indicates that Jesus appointed Peter to this position of “Royal Steward” in His Church, and Elizabeth’s greeting to Mary showed how the early church looked on her as Queen Mother. To lose those roots in Jewish tradition is to miss the full meaning of those positions.  (See The Crucified Rabbi, by Taylor R. Marshall (Dallas, TX: St. John Press, 2009) 42-47.)

      Where we, who are from Gentile origin and influenced by the Greek tradition, tend to spiritualize all these truths or miss their ancient roots, our Jewish heritage sees them very concretely, and sees the resurrection as bringing about a new embodiment already in this world. Many Hassidic masters honored the need to embody the spirit which they saw as capable of the same degree of enlightenment as the soul when the body was in a state of purity.  Rabbi Nachman cited Job 19:26, “from my flesh shall I behold God.’  “Through the very flesh of the body one can behold God…(for) the human sees and perceives spirit by way of the body.” (quoted in Estelle Frankel, Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing and Inner Wholeness (Boston: Shambhala, 2005) 267)  It is not enough to talk about love; we must embody it.  
      It is in really by living the unity of body and spirit in this world, by our [lived] love, that Jesus’ death and resurrection has brought about, that all will know we are his disciples. (Jn 13:35)  Our Jewish heritage calls us to that embodied fulfillment.