The St. Paul Interfaith Network, of which I am a member, sponsors a Midday Series. This year the focus has been Core Stories of various faith traditions. The one that piqued my imagination the most during the series was the tradition of Buddhism.
Many of us have read about Siddhartha Gautama who became the Buddha and are familiar with his mission to alleviate suffering and his discovery of the path to Enlightenment, but I was fascinated when I actually read the” Core Story” of Buddhism to realize that there were so many similarities to our own Jesus story.
Soon after Prince Siddhartha was born, there were wise men who predicted that he would become a Buddha. There was a nervous king, but in this instance it was not Herod but his father, who wanted to make his life so pleasant that he would not venture into the real world and leave the palace. But Siddhartha did leave his idyllic environment, and when he got outside the palace he saw sickness, old age and death. and determined to give up everything he owned to seek an end to suffering. He followed the path of a monk and meditated. He was “tempted” by Mara the evil one, who tried to lure him away from his virtuous path with demonic armies and weapons, but Gautama met the armies and defeated them with his virtue.
He delivered wisdom sayings, “Overdoing things cannot lead to happiness.” He encouraged people to have compassion for each other and develop their own virtue. He said, “ Whoever serves the sick and suffering serves me.” Ultimately, the story concludes, “though he left the world, the spirit of his kindness and compassion remains.”
What was most significant to me about this story was that there was no “other,” or over against per se. The emphasis was not that Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha was doing something right in contrast to someone else doing something wrong. There were no priests or Pharisees who were targeted as posing as righteous and failing to be caring and compassionate because of shallow religious laws. The antagonists were Selfishness and Insensitivity and Greed. The goal was to minister to the sick and suffering, without the additive of doing it better than someone else. “When you do this to the least of these, you do it for me.” The affirming claim was that, ”All living beings have the Buddha nature and can become Buddha. In Christian verbiage, ”May the spirit of Christ be in your mind and in your heart.”
It made me think of the focus emphasized in Rev. Professor Marilyn Salmon’s book, Preaching Without Contempt, reiterated in the book Seeing Judaism Anew-Christianity’s Sacred Obligation Edited by Professor Mary Boys. They both underscore Jesus’ vision of God and the possibilities of humanity, suggesting that Christianity no longer needs to compete with what it presents as a faulty Judaism, thus perpetuating the power of that message to cause pain and suffering for a people. Unfortunately however, emphases that Jesus treated people radically different and better than what the religion of the time taught, and that healing was conditional to purity laws, continues to be reiterated and however unintentional, to cast aspersions on contemporary Judaism.
It became clear to me in my reading that in contrast to the Buddhist story, issues of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism haunt the transmission of the Christian story. Unfortunately, this is the most present during the Easter season, which is why several churches in the St. Paul Interfaith Network have included statements like the following from the Presbyterian study paper in their Good Friday Bulletins.
Bulletin Statement
“Holy Week presents a challenge to Christian communities in its understanding of language. The reference to the “Jews” is especially prevalent in the Gospel of John, and has the power to fuel the impression that Jews as a people are responsible for the death of Jesus. As a congregation of the Presbyterian Church (USA) we recognize that anti-Judaism is a contradiction and an affront to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and affirm the following statement contained in the Presbyterian Study Paper “Christians and Jews: People of God.”
“The relationship between Christian faith and Judaism is unique, foundational, and enduring. The New Testament bears consistent witness to this relationship the mercy of God in Jesus Christ embraces both Jew and Gentile; it does not abandon Jews in favor of Gentiles or forsake Jews in favor of the church. Supersessionism, the belief that God¹s covenant with the church has replaced God¹s covenant with Israel, and that the church has supplanted the Jewish people, is contrary to the core witness of the New Testament and is not supported by the mainstream of the Reformed tradition. Unfavorable New Testament references to “The Jews ”do not refer to all Jews of the first century, and certainly not of the twenty-first. While the New Testament contains numerous references to God¹s “new covenant” in Christ, these cannot be taken to mean that “new “cancels God’s previous covenants.”
This is the statement that has been included in the Good Friday bulletin of my home church. I’m proud of it. I urge other Presbyterian churches to consider making such a statement, making sure that our Christian Core Story is of caring and compassion, for all people.
Ann Lewis is a ruling elder, having served as clerk of session, confirmation teacher and a long time student of Christian origins in a lay capacity. Her most influential teachers have been Professor Salmon of United Theological Seminary and Professor Calvin Roetzel formerly of Macalester College.
