This isn’t what people who are heavily invested in seeing themselves as exclusively favored by God and seeing their enemies judged want to hear.
THE INSIDE-OUTSIDE REVERSAL
Second, Jesus went on to remind his audience of the story of Elijah feeding and healing the son of the pagan widow in Sidon as well as the remarkable story of Elijah healing the leprous military captain of the Syrian army—at a time when Israel and Syria were at war with each other.
Why did Jesus bring up these stories at this point? It’s because both stories provide examples of God’s prophets bypassing Israelites to minister to outsiders and “enemies.” In telling these stories Jesus was suggesting that the Good News he’s bringing would tend to bypass those who consider themselves insiders and would instead be brought to those whom these people considered outsiders and enemies. In other words, those who consider themselves exclusive insiders will tend to become outsiders, while those who have always been judged as outsiders will tend to become insiders.
The only people excluded from the blessedness of this all-inclusive epoch of divine favor are those who insist that their enemies must be excluded.
The theme of an inside-outside reversal brought about by the year of Jubilee runs throughout Jesus’ ministry. As the Kingdom is manifested in the world, Jesus repeatedly taught, the first will be last and the last will be first. The exalted will be brought low, and the lowly will be exalted. The blessed will mourn, and those who mourn will be blessed. The outcasts will feast at the banquet, while the originally invited guests will become outcasts. The sinful tax collector who won’t even lift his head to heaven will be justified while the righteous Pharisee who prays and fasts will not. The socially disdained prostitutes and tax collectors will get into heaven before the socially respectable religious leaders. And many who thought they did great things for Jesus will find themselves cast out, while many who didn’t know they were doing great things for Jesus will be brought in.
It’s important for us to notice that these reversal-teachings are not primarily about what will happen at the end of the age when God judges all humans. Too often Christians have inoculated themselves from the radical implications of Jesus’ teachings by making them about what God will do in the future instead of how we’re to live in the present. The truth is that Jesus’ teachings and example are primarily about bringing God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven” in the lives of his followers here and now. We’re now living in the year of Jubilee, so all class distinctions are to be abolished in the community of God’s people now.
True, human society won’t be completely free of its fallen ways of class-ifying people until the end of the age when Christ returns and the Powers are fully defeated. But our job is to revolt against these oppressive categories now and to put on display ahead of time the beauty of God’s coming Kingdom.
RELIGIOUS CLASS AND THE CLASSLESS TRIBE
Let’s begin to bring this home by asking: To what extent is the Western church today living out the year of Jubilee inaugurated by Jesus Christ? To what extent are we manifesting the truth that “in Christ” there is no longer any male or female, Jew or Gentile, free person or slave? To what extent is the Church an all-inclusive, classless tribe of Kingdom people?
We should first celebrate the fact that there are an increasing number of beautiful Jubilee communities springing up in Western countries, including America. If you attend the Dream Center in Los Angeles, for example, you’ll find a marvelous countercultural mix of people. You’ll see people who would by normal social standards be seen as “upper class” in community with people who by these same standards would be considered “lower class.” You’ll find wealthy people fellowshipping (and sharing) with poor people. You’ll find a community in which people with disabilities are not only being accommodated but also embraced and set free in ministry. You’ll find a ministry in which criminals are being visited in prison and then cared for and transformed once they’re released. You’ll find an environment where struggling prostitutes, drug addicts, sex addicts, and others are considered no different from struggling greedy people, gossipers, gluttons, and self-righteous religious people.
There are, thankfully, many such Jubilee-looking ministries springing up around the world.
At the same time, if we’re honest, we have to admit that the Western church as a whole still has a long way to go. It’s my impression, at least, that we Christians in America tend to class-ify people at least as much as the broader American culture.
The majority of American churches are as segregated along socioeconomic lines as much as they are along racial lines. Relatively few churches make any effort to welcome, embrace, and equip for ministry people with disabilities. So too, comparatively few Western Christians treat their finances with the reckless abandon required by Jubilee living. We don’t generally live as though all debts and obligations owed us have been erased.
Not only this, but in many churches the elderly and prisoners tend to be neglected, despite specific biblical commands to care for them. Many churches continue to restrict the role of women in ministry, as though it was God’s timeless will that women remain within the patriarchal constraints of the first century. The majority of evangelical churches continue to rank people with certain types of sins as further from the Kingdom than people with “more acceptable sins” (like the good, all-American sins of greed, gluttony, and judgmentalism). And a good percentage of American Christians seem to hate their enemies, especially their national and religious enemies, at least as much as other Americans tend to hate them.
So, it’s certainly no overstatement to say we have a long way to go. We need to hear, again and again, that in the revolution Jesus unleashed on the world, the insider-outsider way of class-ifying people has been completely abolished. The Kingdom has a center—Jesus Christ—but no clearly defined parameters. With reckless abandon, therefore, we are to manifest God’s unconditional love by ascribing unsurpassable worth to all people at all times in all conditions.
Whether they are by “normal” social standards upper class or lower class, intelligent or cognitively challenged, educated or uneducated, attractive or unattractive, decent or indecent, able-bodied or disabled, male or female, talented or untalented, famous or infamous, young or old—our primary job, following Jesus’ example, is to manifest the truth that each and every one of these people has unsurpassable worth, as evidenced by the fact that Jesus died for them just as he died for us. And we manifest this truth by how we welcome and embrace them, just as they are.
As we do this, we will manifest the beauty of God’s classless Kingdom and revolt against the ugly oppression of all social classifications and the Powers that fuel this oppression.
Viva la revolution!
CHAPTER 10
THE REVOLT
AGAINST RACISM
His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity…
thus making peace…
EPHESIANS 2:15
Several years ago i was listening to a christian radio talk show that was discussing the issue of “racial profiling.” It was in response to a recent study that determined that in Minnesota (the “liberal” North) black men were much more likely to be stopped in their cars by police than white men. The white host of the show expressed his opinion (citing no evidence) that the study was flawed and that racial profiling was “in fact” very rare. He then took calls from the audience.
The arrogance of the talk show host amused me. But the next half hour of call-ins left me dumbfounded.
One caller early on identified himself as black. He gave two examples from his own life of being pulled over and questioned by police for no legitimate reason. He also mentioned that a number of his black friends had similar experiences. Not surprisingly, while he said he believed most white police officers tried to be fair and that few were consciously racist, he nevertheless felt that racial profiling was a significant problem in the Minnesota police force.
All the remainin
g callers identified themselves as white, and without exception, each denied racial profiling was a problem. Some even expressed anger toward the black caller for suggesting otherwise. Several said they were sick and tired of nonwhite people “playing the race card.”
Now suppose, for the sake of argument, that the study was accurate and that racial profiling is in fact a real problem in Minnesota. How would any of the white callers know about it? By definition, it wouldn’t be happening to them. The only way white people could learn about racial profiling would be to learn about it from those who actually get profiled. Yet this was the very thing the white callers on the station were unwilling to do. Instead, because racial profiling never happened to them, they insisted it doesn’t happen to anyone.
In this chapter we’re going to see that racial reconciliation lies at the heart of what the Church is supposed to be about. It’s arguably the aspect of the Kingdom the Church in America fails at the most. And one of the reasons why, we’ll see, has to do with the sort of racial arrogance illustrated on this radio program.
THIS IS AS CENTRAL AS IT GETS
According to the Bible, God created only one race—the human race. The idea that there are different races of humans is a myth created by white Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to justify oppressing and enslaving nonwhites. 1 God’s goal has always been that the one human race would be united in a way that reflects the perfect loving union of the Trinity. Unfortunately, our sin caused us to be divided into different factions that are now identified as different races. But as we saw in chapter 7, throughout the Bible God spoke of a time when every tribe and every nation would be reunited under his loving Lordship.
Jesus perfectly embodied God’s heart for racial reconciliation. For example, most Jews of Jesus’ day despised Samaritans as racially impure and as heretics. They avoided physical or social contact with them if at all possible. Yet Jesus went out of his way to have contact with them, even touching some who were lepers. Moreover, he consistently treated them with respect, even making them the heroes in some of his stories. 2
Similarly, most Jews of Jesus’ day looked down on Gentiles and had a particular disdain for the Romans, the group who ruled Palestine. Yet Jesus treated them as equals. Most remarkably, Jesus was willing to interact with and serve Roman centurions. These were high-ranking officials in the oppressive Roman military and were thus despised by Jews. Jesus went so far as to praise the faith of a Roman centurion as being greater than the faith of any Jew (Matthew 8:5 – 11)!
This sort of behavior was absolutely scandalous and revolutionary. It reveals that where God reigns, the Powers that fuel racism will be confronted and racial walls will be torn down. Where God reigns, God’s vision for a united human race will be in the process of being reconciled.
We see this even more profoundly in Jesus’ death. The most fundamental ethnic divide in the ancient world, at least from a Jewish perspective, was the divide between Jews and Gentiles. But by his work on the cross, Paul says, Jesus destroyed the “dividing wall of hostility” between these two groups—and by extension, between all ethnic groups.
Not only has Jesus brought peace to all previously hostile groups; he himself is the peace between these groups. For through his death Jesus created “one new humanity.”
He himself is our peace, who has made the two [Jew and Gentile] one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility…. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. (Ephesians 2:14 – 16)
This means that revolting against racism is not a nice addendum to the Gospel, as many contemporary white Christians seem to think. It’s one of the reasons Jesus came and died on the cross. It’s as central to the Gospel as anything could possibly be. We can no more refrain from proclaiming and demonstrating the reunification of humanity in Christ than we can refrain from preaching forgiveness of sin in Christ!
THE FAILURE OF THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CHURCH
But let’s get honest. How many churches in America are as passionate about proclaiming that Jesus died for racial reconciliation as they are about proclaiming that Jesus died for the forgiveness of sins? The answer, tragically, is relatively few.
What makes this even more tragic is that, as is often pointed out, Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America. Fifty years after the Civil Rights Movement, the Church remains the least racially integrated institution in the country. In other words, the broader secular culture generally does a better job of reflecting the coming Kingdom than we Christians do.
Some try to minimize this travesty by claiming that it’s just “natural” for people from different races and cultures to worship with “their own people.” In fact, some leading church-growth experts have taught what’s called the “homogeneous church growth” principle. The most effective way of building a church, they say, is to aim at building it around a single homogenous people-group. They point out that it’s generally harder to get people to join a church if it’s racially and culturally diverse.
I don’t doubt that this is true. But when did Jesus ever call us to be comfortable or encourage us to make nonbelievers comfortable in order to get them to accept the Gospel? And when did Jesus ever call us to be focused on growing large churches?
The answer is, never.
To the contrary, Jesus was perfectly willing to make people profoundly uncomfortable and to let people walk away when they understood the high cost of following him. His one and only concern was to be obedient to his Father’s will, not to be efficient at acquiring a large following. And since we are called to imitate him in all things, this must be our one concern as well.
We are called to manifest the “one new humanity” Jesus died to create—whether it makes people comfortable or not, and whether it increases or decreases the size of our congregations.
THE CHALLENGE OF RACIAL RECONCILIATION
Getting people to relinquish their racist attitudes is profoundly difficult—especially because most aren’t even aware they have any. This isn’t just a modern problem. It existed in the early church.
For example, despite Jesus’ command to take the Gospel to all nations, we find his disciples in the book of Acts still hanging around Jerusalem in the nice Jewish environment in which they were most comfortable years after his ascension. It took an explicit vision from God and coaching by some pagans for Peter to finally realize that “God does not show favoritism” and that God wanted to incorporate Gentiles into the “one new humanity” Jesus died to create (Acts 10).
Not surprisingly, the first major conflict the early church had to work through centered on race relations (Acts 15). The issue concerned how Gentile and Jewish Christians could get along with each other. But even after this was worked out, racist attitudes persisted. For example, Paul had to rebuke Peter for succumbing to the segregationist eating practices of some fellow Jews (Galatians 2:12 – 14).
Tearing down racial walls was difficult for early Christians and it’s difficult today. Yet if our commitment to Christ is genuine, we have no choice but to passionately embrace this challenge.
THE MAIN OBSTACLE
(ACCORDING TO THIS AMERICAN WHITE GUY)
I now need to confront what is, I believe, the biggest obstacle to manifesting the “one new humanity” in America today. 3 In confronting this I have to acknowledge up front that I’m a white guy (of a Scottish-Irish-wee-bit-French variety). This colors my perspective on this (and every other) issue. Whenever we enter into discussions about race it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of our own cultural perspective and life experience. When we fail to do this, we easily end up canonizing our limited perspective as the norm and thus dismissing differing perspectives as defective. And this, we’ll now see, only serves to keep us divided from those whose perspectives differ from our own.
The most difficult challenge I’ve
found as I’ve tried to lead a congregation that aspires to manifest the “one new humanity” of the Kingdom is that many white people honestly don’t see racial reconciliation as that big of an issue. They seem to think it’s a problem America has largely overcome.
Of course they know about racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation, and they’re naturally opposed to them. And once in a while they hear about the overtly racist behavior of a police officer or the stupid racist comments made by some radio talk show host, and they object to this. The trouble is, this is all that many white people think racism amounts to.
The truth is, racism in America is far more subtle and sinister than this. America was conquered by white Europeans, was structured by and for white Europeans, and it continues to privilege white Europeans. Racism has been woven into the very fabric of our culture from the start.
This racism was obvious when many of our white founding fathers proclaimed the “manifest destiny” doctrine, asserting that it was God’s will for them to conquer and rule nonwhite people. It was obvious when white Europeans acquired America’s land by cheating and slaughtering its indigenous population while accumulating incredible wealth by the forced labor of millions of African slaves. It continued to be obvious even after the Civil War when whites imposed “Jim Crow” laws that blocked blacks and other nonwhites from acquiring significant power, privilege, and opportunities.
The Myth of a Christian Religion Page 11