Around the time Jesus was born, Judaism was a lot like Christianity in the sense that there were a lot of different denominations or sects of Judaism. The larger sects were known as the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Essenes and the Zealots. I want to tell you a little bit about each of them because, to understand the religious environment into which Jesus was born, you have to understand what these different sects believed and represented. Let’s begin with the Sadducees.

The Sadducees were a sect of Jews comprised mostly of the upper social and economic class of Judean society. The most important aspect of the Sadducees is that they were the priests who maintained the Temple in Jerusalem, which was at the center of worship in the Jewish religion. The Temple is where you would go to sacrifice animals to God. The sacrifices were necessary because the laws of the Old Testament dictated that you had to kill an animal for God to forgive you. This was the job of the priests.

So this morning we read from Luke about Zechariah, a priest in the Temple. He would have been associated with the Sadducees. He also would have been seen as a traitor because the priests had to be loyal to King Herod and his interests to keep their positions. The Temple plays a big role in Jesus’ birth narrative in Luke because the Temple was seen as being corrupted by the influence of Roman politics.

As a result of this corrupting influence, many religious Jews believed the Temple needed to be cleansed of this foreign influence. This is why in the story, Zechariah, the priest, is silenced. Part of the metaphor of the story is that Jesus is going to bring purity back to the Jewish faith and remove the need for priests altogether. Indeed, unlike the Sadducees, Jesus will actually care about the plight of the common Jew.

This leads us to the next group of Jews known as the Pharisees. These are people who did care a lot about the average Jew. If you’ve read the gospels, you are probably aware that the Pharisees are mentioned often. What’s interesting about the Pharisees is they were very concerned with education. They wanted to make sure that the average Jew was as educated as possible about their faith (like what I’m doing here). To this end, they would offer to tutor and train anyone who wanted to take their faith seriously. So the Pharisees set about making themselves a presence in local synagogues.

The word synagogue simply means “house of prayer” and synagogues were constructed in villages and cities where Jews were unable to travel to the Temple in Jerusalem to worship God. It’s kind of like how local churches work in Catholicism. The local church is where you go because you can’t make it to the Vatican in Rome every Sunday. So the local synagogue acted as a substitute for the Jerusalem Temple.

You may remember that Jesus is often depicted as debating the Pharisees in the synagogues. The reason why Jesus debates them is because they had a very specific way of interpreting the laws of the Old Testament. There are 613 laws in the first five books of the Bible. These laws regulate everything from your actions, to what you are allowed to eat and drink, to what you’re allowed to wear, to treating illness and disease.

The Pharisees were very concerned with making sure that they didn’t break any of these laws. For example, the Old Testament says that people are supposed to rest on the Sabbath (which is Saturday). In fact, if you perform work on the Sabbath, then according to Exodus 31:14, you are supposed to be put to death (now that’s an incentive to go to church!). To ensure you didn’t break that law, the Pharisees created extra rules, known as gezeriahs.

They would say things like, “You are allowed to take 40 steps to go to your well to draw water on the Sabbath, but more than 40 steps is considered to be work.” The gezeirah is like a fence that has been placed around the law. By observing the gezeirah, by staying behind the fence, then you know that you are not going to break God’s law.

Jesus would debate with the Pharisees because he felt they were more focused on following the rules than the spirit of the law. The spirit of the sabbath is to rest and spend time with God. From Jesus’ perspective, getting into the minutia of how many steps a person can take before they break the law kind of misses the point of why God tells humans to observe the sabbath.

But if you think the Pharisees are sticklers for the rules, they’re nothing compared to the Essenes. The Essenes were a much smaller group of Jews who lived in small communities that were dedicated to asceticism, which is a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from pleasures through celibacy and voluntary poverty. They lived in the desert under very difficult conditions (sounds like a ton of fun!).

The rules they followed were super strict and most of the people who joined their community quit because they simply couldn’t handle all of the restrictions. The Essenes were also known for their practice of daily immersion, which is a cleansing ritual in Judaism where you purify yourself with water (this is likely where the idea of baptism in Christianity came from). They engaged in these practices because they wanted to be ready for the coming of the messiah.

This last point is actually super important. What are we celebrating on Christmas? We are celebrating the coming of the messiah in Jesus. What you have to realize is that around time Jesus was born, there was a lot of talk about the coming of the messiah. So before we can go any further, we have to talk about what exactly is a messiah?

The popular understanding of the word messiah is that of a savior. So a messiah is someone who has come to save you. But to understand what it meant in Jesus’ day in time, it’s important to know the Hebrew root of the word mesiach. The word mesiach in Hebrew simply means anointed one and it refers to a Middle Eastern custom of kings having oil poured on their heads during their coronation ceremony. The oil was a symbol that this new king had assumed power. So put very simply, a messiah is a king. That fact is extraordinarily important because what does a king do? A king rules over a nation.

With the rise of the Roman Empire, the Jewish people were not ruling themselves. They were ruled by a foreign entity. So the messiah the Jews were looking for was a man sent by God, who was going to form an army, defeat the foreign oppressors (in this instance Rome), and form an independent nation of Israel that could rule and govern itself with the messiah as it’s king.

It’s very important to understand that the messiah was a person who was going to lead the charge against Rome, which brings us to the Zealots who were a group of people whose express purpose was to rebel against the Roman Empire and expel it from the Holy Land by force. The Zealots were most active in the area where Jesus was born, the area of Galilee.

People in Galilee were very expectant of the messiah. Galilee was a hotbed of resistance. The people were considered volatile and hard to control. It was like the wild west of Judea, where the people wanted to live according to their own rules and, as a result, rebellion and revolt were always right beneath the surface. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that.

Five miles away from Nazareth, the little village where Jesus grew up, was a city called Sepphoris. Sepphoris was home to some of the wealthiest citizens of Galilee and, in 4 B.C., after Herod died, Sepphoris was attacked by a group of peasants led by a man named Judas.

Judas and the other peasants (who were aligned with the Zealots) were tired of being ruled by Herod and felt that his death was an opportunity to take back control of the land and remove the shackles of Rome’s authority. Judas and his army raided Herod’s royal armory and, using these weapons, Judas ransacked the homes of the wealthy, slaughtering members of the Jewish aristocracy in the process.

In response, Rome sent soldiers who captured Judas. Not only did they execute him, but they crucified some 2,000 of Judas’ followers and sympathizers. The Roman army then turned their sights on the citizens of Sepphoris and punished them for not better guarding their arsenal of weapons. The soldiers captured the inhabitants and auctioned them off as slaves before burning the city to the ground.

The villagers in Nazareth would have been able to see Sepphoris burning at night. During the day, if one travelled out of Nazareth, the roads would have been lined with persons hanging from crosses; hundreds of them, with no end in sight. Some were dead, rotting and being picked apart by birds and insects; some were alive waiting to die. All of them had endured horrible suffering.

This was the world into which Jesus was born. It was harsh and violent. I think in many ways we underestimate just how brutal the world could be back then. Jesus grew up around people who were talking about how they needed to fight back. He would have heard all the time about how violent revolution was the only way to make any kind of real difference in the world.

It’s for this reason that there’s a segment of scholars who believe Jesus would have identified as a Zealot. There’s certainly some evidence for that in the gospels. But then there are other scholars who think Jesus may have been more closely aligned with the Pharisees, which is why he’s portrayed debating them all the time. And still others believe he might have spent time in the Essene community.

The truth is we don’t know. We weren’t there. We’re all guessing. From my perspective, I believe Jesus forged his own path. One that borrowed bits and pieces from all of these different traditions. When Jesus took on the mantle of being the messiah, he did not live up to the Zealots expectations that he would raise an army, defeat Rome, and form an independent nation where he would rule as its king.

In fact, a lot of what Jesus did was anti-logical. He told his disciples that they shouldn’t be angry; that they must forgive their brothers and sisters; that they should be non-violent; that they should never strike a person who has struck them. Indeed, Jesus tells his followers, you must love the people who hate you, pray for them and always show them kindness. None of those sects were promoting that kind of thinking and most people laughed at Jesus, including his own disciples.

But that kind of thinking, that kind of Zeal for the Lord, is revolutionary. That kind of love truly can change the world. I want to end this morning with a short story that illustrates the transformative beauty of this kind of love. Many of you, I am sure are familiar with George Wallace. In 1963, George Wallace, won the governorship of Alabama with 96% of the vote. During his inauguration speech, he became famous for saying these words: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Let’s take a look at the clip where he makes this statement.

These words were the catalyst that sparked much of the violence that would define the civil rights movement in Alabama. Following this speech, Birmingham police would use dogs and firehoses to attack protestors, a skirmish that would become immortalized in this photo. Later that year, the KKK would bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four teenage girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. As people around the country watched the violence in Alabama intensify, many people blamed George Wallace because the words of his inauguration address were at the center of the conflict. Wallace was despised by the black community.

In 1972, Wallace ran for president in primaries on the democratic ticket. His opponents were George McGovern, who would ultimately win the nomination, and Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from New York. While Wallace was out on the campaign trail, he was shot 5 times by Arthur Bremer. Although he survived assassination attempt, Wallace was permanently paralyzed.

While he was recovering in the hospital, Shirley Chisholm made the decision to visit George Wallace. Before she left, Barbara Lee, a volunteer on her campaign approached Chisholm and said, “How could you do that? I mean this man, first of all, he’s running against you. Secondly, he’s running for president. Thirdly, he’s a segregationist who wants to maintain the status quo that you’re trying to change.”

Chisholm said, “Sometimes we have to remember we’re all human beings, and I may be able to teach him something, to help him regain his humanity, to maybe make him open his eyes to make him see something that he has not seen. You always have to be optimistic that people can change, and that you can change and that one act of kindness may make all the difference in the world. So yes, I know people are angry [at me], but you have to rise to the occasion if you’re a leader, and you have to try to break through and you have to try and open and enlighten other people who may hate you.”

As a result of that one visit from Shirley Chisholm, where she showed her enemy love and grace and forgiveness, George Wallace, the king of segregation, renounced his racist past. Wallace spent the rest of his career going from black church to black church in the South repenting, asking for forgiveness and working to restore the relationships he had destroyed. That, my friends, is the power of Jesus’ teachings. That is the power of Jesus’ revolution and that is why he is the messiah who has truly changed the world and it is why we celebrate his birth every year on December 25^th. Amen.